Spatial Listening is an itinerant listening practice that places subjects in explorative dialogues with architectural spaces, and each other, through the acoustic phenomena of echo, resonance, and reverberation. Documented in a collection of text scores and unfolding primarily through workshops, it co-opts architectural sites as spaces of human sounding and listening in order to instil sonic ways of knowing, being, and socially relating in space. The practice extrapolates the moment of shouting to hear an echo — an instinctive sounding communion with the concrete environment — from a singular act, to responsive, contingent cycles of sounding and listening in which groups or individuals think-through acoustic phenomena in pursuit of understanding the spaces that contain them.

Spatial Listening has unfolded through workshops, performances and installation works at Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, DK; Venice Architecture Biennale, IT; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Health Museum, Houston, USA; LEGROOM, Manchester, UK; Hepworth Wakefield, UK, amongst other places.

images by Yannis Katsaris, Jules Lister, Mette Sanggaard Dideriksen and Laura Mark

videos by Mette Sanggaard Dideriksen and Ellie Wildman