Listening Room is an exhibition where soundworks are presented on an octophonic surround soundsystem. Housed in the beautiful glass pavilion of Zone2Source in Amstelpark, it invites visitors to listen with their whole bodies – to engage with the immersive, relational, and ecological qualities of spatial sound.

Think of the exhibition as cinema for the ears: an inward journey shared with others. Settle into floor cushions and blankets, and listen while gazing out through the windows onto the ever-changing landscape of one of Amsterdam’s largest parks.

Listening Room presents many newly produced works by sound artists from the Sonic Acts Spatial Sound Residency. Since the mid-1990s, Sonic Acts has explored how sound behaves in space, pushing the limits of composition and perception. The residency advances this longstanding commitment to multichannel sound as a medium for artistic research, supporting practices ranging from field recording to experimental digital and analogue techniques. The exhibition also features cornerstone compositions from the Musical Research Group of the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA GRM), alongside historical and archival soundworks.

The featured artists include Chris Watson, BJ Nilsen, François J. Bonnet, KMRU & Aho Ssan, Michèle Bokanowski, Tomoko Sauvage, Maria W Horn, Leslie García, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Pierce Warnecke, C. Lavender, Ji Youn Kang, pantea, Clara de Asís, Marcin Pietruszewski & Lukas De Clerck, and many more. Their diverse and varied works investigate how sound, space, and perception shape one another – how spatial presentation gives rise to embodied experience, and how the body, in listening, reshapes space.

Listening Room runs every Friday to Sunday from 5 February to 15 March, with three sessions daily. The exhibition consists of nine different programmes of sound works. A single purchased ticket is valid for any Listening Room programme – the tickets are not marked by date or time!

The programme is realised by Sonic Acts in close collaboration with INA GRM, and is part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Listening Room artists part of Re-Imagine Europe: New Perspectives for Action: 
Jana Irmert
Hrvoje Pelicarić
C. Lavender
BJ Nilsen
KMRU & Aho Ssan
and more to be announced

Photo credit: Listening Room at Spatial Sound Platform during Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 by Bora Sekerci