Commissioned by East Leeds Project as a response to Moon Palace (Heather and Ivan Morison)

 ‘…if you put an antenna and a receiver, then you can hear them, they are very beautiful. That is all I have done, that is to make it available to people to hear. Very simple.’– Alvin Lucier 

Developed during a residency at Moon Palace, a sculptural observatory by Heather and Ivan Morison, Lightnening Ears explores what it might mean to listen beyond the Earth. The work centres on naturally occurring radio emissions generated by lightning in the ionosphere. Known as sferics, these signals fall partly within the range of human hearing and can be experienced directly using simple antenna and receiver systems.

Working with collaborator Eric Stammers, a custom low-frequency radio setup was developed using a 20-metre wire antenna, amplifier and headphones or loudspeaker. This apparatus enables real-time listening to global lightning activity, effectively extending the listener’s auditory field to the upper atmosphere. What initially registers as static, crackle or distant interference gradually reveals itself as a complex and dynamic field of activity: pops, whistlers and tonal echoes moving at the edge of perception.

Installed during a series of after-dark sessions, the work invited audiences to listen collectively, often outdoors, with the antenna suspended across trees or architectural features. These encounters foregrounded a shifting sense of scale and perspective, situating the listener between local electromagnetic noise and planetary atmospheric processes.

Sferics forms part of an ongoing enquiry into listening as a practice of orientation, asking how attention to remote or imperceptible phenomena might reconfigure one’s sense of position, environment and relation to the wider cosmos.