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

Jules Négrier – An Iris Crackled Like Eyelids, 2025, 16 min
Michèle Bokanowski – Rhapsodia, 2018, 17 min
Daniel M Karlsson – Towards a Music for Large Ensemble, 2024, 25 min

For An Iris Crackled Like Eyelids, Jules Négrier – whose work spans electroacoustic music, French national radio, and spatial-audio projects – composes two internal movements, separated by a brief interval; a transition occurring in the blink of an eye.

Rhapsodia is a key work by French composer Michèle Bokanowski, exemplifying her distinctive approach to electroacoustic composition. Active since the 1970s and widely recognised for her long-term collaborations in sound for film, Bokanowski has developed a practice defined by intricate layering and precise spatial detail. In Rhapsodia, she constructs a sustained, immersive sonic environment shaped by drifting loops, laminal textures, and subtle atmospheric shifts, offering a clear insight into her singular contribution to contemporary electroacoustic music.

An important fixture in Stockholm’s experimental electronic music scene, Daniel M Karlsson is a well-known advocate for the open-source music coding platform SuperCollider. Towards a Music for Large Ensemble explores a virtual group of autonomous agents that listen, respond, and shape sound collectively, despite the entire ensemble existing inside a computer. The work imagines a conductor-less system in which cues arise internally, with no single element leading yet each influencing the whole. Referencing a ‘musical Turing test’, it probes the overlap between intuitive listening and analytical scrutiny. The piece opens multiple interpretive pathways, blurring the line between emergent interaction and coincidence, placing the listener in a productive state of uncertainty about what they are hearing.