Listening Room is an exhibition where soundworks are presented on an octophonic surround soundsystem. Housed in the 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.

Please note that the works are not performed live, but exhibited in an 8.2-channel setup. A single purchased ticket is valid for any Listening Room programme – the tickets are not marked by date or time!

Timetable

Hrvoje Pelicarić – … to dear incomprehension, or the pieces of the personal waiting, 2025, 20 min
C. Lavender – Dissipation Traces, 2026, 25 min
Pierce Warnecke – Empathy Exchanges: Archaeophone Transcoding, 2026, 20 min

Developed during his Spatial Sound Residency, … to dear incomprehension, or the pieces of the personal waiting by Hrvoje Pelicarić gathers an archive of prior sonic experiments and sets them loose – fragments that surface, fold back in, then return altered. Nothing moves in a straight line; instead, the piece unfolds through apophenia – the instinct to find pattern in scattered details. Sounds link through recurrence rather than structure, building connection by repetition, drift, and return.

Dissipation Traces is a composition developed during C. Lavender’s residency at Sonic Acts Studio and Willem Twee Studios. The work draws on David Rosenboom’s proposition that dissipation – not balance – generates new complexity, translating it into sound that unsettles equilibrium. Using rare, ageing electronic instruments including an ARP 2500 and mid-century lab equipment, the piece lets tones waver, erode, and recombine, mirroring the body’s own shifting neural states. Listeners are immersed in a field of resonance where perception expands, contracts and slips – as if consciousness were being gently re-tuned in real time.

Pierce Warnecke’s work Empathy Exchanges: Archaeophone Transcodings imagines a future research institute attempting to recover early-21st-century conversations using a device called the Archaeophone, long after societal collapse. The distorted transmissions they retrieve reveal fragments of everyday emotion, intimacy, and communication from a world whose languages, technologies, and lives have otherwise vanished. The signal is unstable, flickering between voices, noise, and mistranslation, like radio contact with a world already gone. Listening becomes speculative archaeology: piecing together a civilisation from feeling alone.