Participatory Listening Workshop-Performance

Commissioned by Fearnville Festival

Developed for Fearnville Festival in East Leeds, this workshop-performance explored listening as a collective, situated and emergent practice. Working with a mobile multi-channel recording setup, a range of sensing devices were made available to participants, including contact microphones, hydrophones, geophones, directional microphones, binaural and ambisonic microphones, alongside VLF and radio receivers. The system was transmitted live to a set of silent disco headphones, creating a shared yet distributed listening environment.

Guided by approaches to sound walking associated with Jacek Smolicki, a small group navigated Fearnville Fields together, attending to different sonic phenomena through the microphones and their own embodied listening. The composition emerged in real time through the interplay of movement, attention and environment, with participants actively shaping the auditory field.

Conversation formed a central component, operating as a means of orienting within and reflecting on the experience as it unfolded. Through dialogue, participants articulated, negotiated and reconfigured their listening, producing a layered and relational understanding of place.

The work positions listening as both a sensory and social practice, where meaning is co-produced through shared attention, technological mediation and the dynamics of the landscape itself.