A Matter of Listening: sound mapping workshop

Practice listening as a method for sensing multi-species urban life. This workshop focuses on overlooked acoustic niches where birds, insects, bats, infrastructure, and human activity intersect in the neighborhood around Varia.

The workshop combines basic field recording techniques, collective deep listening exercises and mapping. Using sound as the primary input, we’ll map what we hear rather than what we see, producing speculative acoustic maps that register non-human presence, infrastructural hum, and technological interference in Charlois. The workshop treats mapping as a tool for thinking with sound, revealing how knowledge gets produced through listening and how the city gets constructed through what is heard, ignored, or rendered inaudible. Listening becomes an ethical practice: who or what can be heard in the city, and how do our recording tools shape what we perceive? No previous experience needed. Bring wired headphones if you have them.

This workshop is facilitated by Yoana Buzova and Matthias Hurtl, with the support of SocTalk.

Soctalk is a junior staff initiative within the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The collective organizes workshops and courses both inside and outside the university. Soctalk aims to foster a culture of care that critically engages with institutional structures, while redistributing and collectivizing resources to support communities and initiatives in the city of Rotterdam.

Continued: The workshop will be followed by dinner, sound walk and a concert, part of the project where Yoana and Matthias listen with and record Charlois through the last few years. The concert is a collaboration between Lucia Gregov, Matthias Hurtl and Yoana Buzova