Time to Listen
Multispecies Creativity in Music and Sound
26 – 27 Jun 2026

Amidst the planetary crisis, communities are emerging worldwide that are dedicated to nurturing and collectively shaping relational ways of life in which reciprocity, care and respect take centre stage. In doing so, they draw on long-standing indigenous practices whilst experimenting with multi-species justice and forms of non-human governance.

“Time to Listen” examines the role that sound can play in this transformation. Through lectures, discussions and performances, we explore ways of liberating listening and music-making from anthropocentrism and transitioning them into an ecologically and sonically interconnected world. At stake is nothing less than creativity itself: if relationship – and not the autonomous individual – becomes the site of creative action, what new forms of shared power, mutuality and collective creation then become possible? And from a methodological perspective: how can artistic practices, listening and paying attention, rituals, emotions, stories, humour and a “productive singularity” generate those irritations that allow for transformative openings?

The programme comprises presentations by artists from the spreeklänge project, open dialogue formats, and sessions selected through an open call.

With Camilla Bork & Mathias Hinke, Carlos Gutiérrez & Tatiana López, Echo Ho, Masimba Hwati, Liza Lim, Dugal McKinnon, Kate Milligan, Kosmas Phan Ðinh & Michal Mitro, Radio Otherwise, Nardi Simpson, Kristine Tjøgersen, et al.

“Time to Listen” is a series of conferences that the Akademie der Künste and field notes / inm have been co-organising since 2019 to explore current discourses in contemporary music. This year’s edition forms part of the Akademie der Künste’s spreeklänge project, a contemporary music path along the River Spree in Charlottenburg (25–27 June). It is being developed in collaboration with the composer and researcher Liza Lim, who leads the multi-year music-based research project “Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication” (2025–2029) at the University of Sydney.

1 pm, Studio Lobby, Sesselclub

Registration and welcome coffee

1:30–2:45 pm, Outdoor space behind the clubroom

winangaylaylaya
Interactive Workshop with Nardi Simpson

Australian First Nations Yuwaalaraay storyteller, performer and composer Nardi Simpson will conduct an interactive workshop drawing upon stories, language, and melody to explore what it is to listen, to understand, to relate and to share. Guided by the Yuwaalaraay concept of winangaylaylaya, Nardi will explore practices of deep thinking, knowing, understanding, and respect. This workshop introduces Yuwaalaraay relationality as it unfolds among people, the living world, its inhabitants, ancestors, and the stories inherent within them, inviting participants to reflect on their roles, obligations, and responsibilities within the practice of winangaylaylaya.

Nardi Simpson is a multi‑award‑winning Yuwaalaraay novelist, composer, and researcher. Her work spans literature, music, and community practice, with commissions for major ensembles and festivals, and research centred on Yuwaalaraay music and women’s knowledge of waterways, creation, and healing. She is a postdoctoral researcher on Liza Lim’s ARC Laureate project “Resonant Earth: music, ecology & climate justice” (officially: “Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication”).

2:15–2:30 pm, Studio Lobby

Welcome and introduction by Lisa Benjes (Head of the field notes programme at inm), Julia Gerlach (Secretary of the Akademie der Künste's Music Section) and Liza Lim, (Head of the music-based, multi-year research project “Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication’, 2025–2029, at the University of Sydney
 

Parallel Sessions:

2:30–3:15 Uhr, Studio Lobby

Ambient Tremology: on amplifying vibrational ecologies
Sound Lecture with Kosmas Phan Ðinh, Mae Lubetkin and Michal Mitro

Ambient Tremology is a transdisciplinary artistic research initiative by Kosmas Phan Ðinh, Mae Lubetkin, and Michal Mitro that reorients the act of listening from the sonic toward the vibratory, thereby making contact with the trembling matter of amphibious worlds. Through vibration recording and haptic experience, the work unfolds in the soaked and brackish environments of the Ro manian Danube Delta, tracing granular memories, waterways in transition, and forms of other-than-human transmission. In dialogue with researchers from the emerging science of Ecotremology, the artists’ collective employs self-adapted devices for field recording while at the same time foregrounding bodily technologies, such as listening through the bones and sensing with the whole body.

These practices become contact zones with other worlds. The sound lecture presents an audio paper and a listening demonstration using an adapted accelerometer device, alongside reflections on vibrational ecologies and on protocols of listening in the field.

2:30–3:15 pm, Clubroom

CHRRR XH’IXI Q’LNK
Practice of listening-with with Carlos Gutiérrez and Tatiana López

For Time to Listen, Carlos Gutiérrez and Tatiana López present CHRRR XH’IXI Q’LNK as a practice of listening-with rather than listening-to. Developed along the River Spree, the work unfolds as a porous ritual where bodies, clay, wind, and water enter unstable zones of co-resonance. Drawing on Andean epistemologies, sound is approached as animacy: a vibratory force that traverses and entangles human and more-than-human actors. Their session invites a shift from composition to attunement. Ceramic objects breathe, friction murmurs, surfaces tremble; participants become temporary hosts of hybrid sonic presences—animal, vegetal, atmospheric. Listening drifts from control toward exposure, from structure toward situated sensing.

Rather than producing a work, the practice cultivates conditions for something to happen: a distributed field where agency flickers, leaks, and recomposes itself. In this unstable ecology, creativity emerges as negotiation, misalignment, and resonance across species, materials, and imaginaries.
 

3:15–3:30 Uhr, Sesselclub

Coffee break
 

Parallel Sessions:

3:30–4:15 pm, Studio Lobby

33 Fingering Methods for Qin
Lecture-Performance with Echo Ho

This lecture-performance is based on the doctoral research project Reimagining Qin Fingering Pedagogy through Embodied Artistic Research (Kunstuniversität Linz). The qin is a Chinese seven-stringed instrument with a history spanning three millennia. Its notation organises fingering choreography that encodes the production of sound, rather than specifying pitch or tempo. The thirty-three hand-posture charts from the 16th-century qin handbook Taiyin Daquanji serve as a pedagogical apparatus that coordinates movement, listening, and attention within a broader cosmic order and ecological correspondence. For example, wind startles the crane to dance, and the calling dove summons the rain. These methods constitute an early pattern language operating across technical, semantic, imagistic, and philosophical registers.

In the lecture-performance, these historically dormant charts are translated into an algorithmic vocabulary for voice, sonic material, musical gesture, and video collage. As a new mode of enactment, the performance critically examines the conditions these charts establish and explores the creative spaces for more-than-human sonic practice and embodied encounters that they enable in contemporary contexts.

3:30–4:15 pm, Clubroom

Joining the Chorus
Session with Dugal McKinnon

Joining the Chorus explores the sonic and embodied world of kihikihi-wawā – chorus cicadas (Amphipsalta zelandica). Blending listening with participatory activity, the session will draw its audience into an acousomatic (acoustic-somatic) encounter with these iconic insects and their summertime ensounding of Aotearoa (NZ), exploring embodied resonance, cross-species perception, and collective sonic formation. Emerging from artistic practice and informed by Māori and Western knowledge systems, Joining the Chorus explores intimate yet asymmetrical relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, highlighting connection and difference, and building from the foundational Māori understanding of whakapapa – all existence as interconnected kin – to enact a productive tension with Western multispecies thought.

The presentation has been developed through consultation with Jerome Kavanagh Poutama and Ruiha Turner, master practitioners of taonga puoro (traditional Māori instruments), entomologist Julia Kasper, Te Papa Museum of New Zealand, and creative technologist Dr Jim Murphy.
 

4:15–4:30 pm, Sesselclub

Coffee break

4:30–5:30 pm, Studio Lobby

Music, Sound Art and Multispecies Justice
Open discussion moderated by Liza Lim

Amid planetary crisis, communities worldwide are nurturing and co‑creating relational forms of life grounded in reciprocity, care, and respect – drawing on longstanding Indigenous practices while experimenting with multispecies justice and more‑than‑human governance. Time to Listen asks what sound can do within this turn. Participants are invited to expand listening and music‑making beyond the human, attuning to animals, plants, rivers, ecosystems, and technologies as sonic partners, and situating sound within ecologically interconnected worlds.

Practices of Deep Listening and Environmental Sound Art have played a key role in reshaping ideas of collective and distributed creativity in Western art music. Established methodologies – ranging from field recording and ecological data sonification to community‑led and participatory art‑making – continue to expand interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of political, social, scientific, and aesthetic inquiry. What might a multispecies justice lens, oriented toward the more‑than‑human, bring to this work? What responsibilities, ethical questions, critiques, joys, and disruptions could become transformative forces within both contemporary artistic practice and collective life?

1 pm, Studio Lobby

Registration and welcome coffee

1:30–2:15 pm, Studio Lobby

Music and Multispecies Justice: Listening, Consent and Continuation
Team keynote by Liza Lim, Kate Milligan, Nardi Simpson and Vic McEwan (in absentia)

This talk examines music‑making and listening practices through the lens of multispecies justice, with particular attention to questions of consent and continuation in more‑than‑human relations. Drawing on sound studies, Indigenous and ecological philosophies, and contemporary artistic practice, it asks how agency, vulnerability, and participation are negotiated when animals, plants, ecosystems, and technologies are engaged as sonic collaborators. Rather than assuming availability or extractability, this discussion proposes consent as an ethical and methodological problem whose responsibilities do not end with participation but extend across time and relation. By reframing listening as a situated and ongoing practice, it explores how music may operate as a site for sustaining responsibility, reciprocity, and justice across species boundaries.

The presentation provides some insights into the work of “Resonant Earth: Music, ecology & climate justice” (officially: “Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication”), a 5-year research project funded by the Australian Research Council led by Liza Lim. An extended team of 12 people includes the presenters: postdoctoral researcher, author, and composer Nardi Simpson; postdoctoral researcher and interdisciplinary artist Vic McEwan, and PhD researcher and composer Kate Milligan.
 

Parallel Sessions:

2:30–3:15 Upm Studio Lobby

Composing with the world of those who sing in the dark and communicate on different frequencies
Compositions by Kristine Tjoegersen

When the sun goes down, a new world comes to life that most of us know little about. Although we share physical space with its inhabitants, we rarely meet them, since evolution has given them senses that we humans do not have – senses that allow them to rule the night just as we rule the day. Kristine Tjøgersen will talk about her compositions Night Lives (2023) and Liminal Beings (2026) and her excursion into this shrouded world of nocturnal creatures, trying to uncover and convey the communication of bats, moths, owls, micro-organisms, and other nighttime dwellers.

The pieces are produced in a multidisciplinary collaboration with scenographer and performer Ellen Jerstad, visual artist and lighting designer Evelina Dembacke, and biologist and writer Hanna Bjørgaas, with the goal of immersing audiences in wonders that are beyond our human eyes and ears.

2:30–3:15 pm, Clubroom

Radio Otherwise: Tuning in to the Acoustic Commons: radio, waterways, and collective listening

In contrast to field recording, live radio and audio streams resist closure: they unfold in real time, remaining bound to the temporalities and material conditions of the places from which they emanate. Listening becomes less about collecting or owning and more about sustaining attention. Collective listening is a premise of radio – even if collectivity is dispersed – rather than the individualised listening of on-demand media. This collectivity also emanates out of an understanding that the sonic environment is shared and collectively produced, inhabited, and perceived by human and more-than-human actors: what is also known as the acoustic commons. If creativity emerges from relation rather than authorship, then live audio streams – porous, durational, unrepeatable – may be one of its more honest forms.

Radio Otherwise will set up multiple microphones, hydrophones, antennas and receivers on the Insola floating platform at Rummelsburg Bay in Berlin, and transmit these signals live to the Akademie der Künste. Our contribution will blend listening to these inputs and infrastructures with reflections on previous durational transmission works that brought together parallels between waterways and electromagnetic transmission as infrastructures of flow – in terms of more-than-human agency, human access to and infiltration of these systems, as well as leakages and disturbances. Radio Otherwise is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the plurality of experiences in radio-making through ecological thinking.
 

3:15–3:30 Uhr, Sesselclub

Coffee break
 

Parallel Sessions:

3:30–4:30 Uhr, Studio Lobby

A Planted Ear: Bio-Legislative Earth and Multispecies Listening in Chidzimbahwe Sonic Philosophies
Session with Masimba Hwati

This presentation introduces Chidzimbahwe Sonic Philosophies as an Indigenous Earth-ical/ethical terra ancestral ontology for multispecies listening, creativity, and ecological jurisprudence. It argues that sound is not merely aesthetic, but a relational force through which humans, non-humans, ancestors, and environments co-create ethical worlds. Within this ontology, the Earth is a bio-legislative and bio-affectionate presence that listens, registers, remembers, and responds. Through integrated practices such as cultivating a “planted ear” (kuisa nzeve pasi), kucherera rukuvhute, and honoring Inkaba, humans are implicated and imbricated into Earth’s living circuitry from birth.

Drawing on proverbs, ritual practices, and liberation-era sonic strategies, the session explores sound as vibration, archive, and ethical medium. It proposes that listening is reciprocal, grounding an ethics of humble and intimate custodianship (kuteerera) where humans act as accountable participants within a shared vibrational ecosystem.

See: Masimba Hwati: Chidzimbahwe Philosophies of Sound: An Ethics of a Humble and Intimate Custodianship, 2026

3:30–4:30 pm, Clubroom

How many times has the world already ended? Musical laments between the simulacrum of nature, destroyed worlds, and collective listening
Listening Session with Camilla Bork and Mathias Hinze

The aim of this conference is to react to planetary crisis by decentering anthropocentric listening and situating sound. In European art discourse, this planetary ecological crisis is often narrated in the singular as the impending end of our world and the loss of a pristine nature that must be protected and represented. The proposed session begins precisely here. It poses questions about the prevailing conceptions of nature in such narratives, the political ramifications they entail, and the shift in perspective which takes place when discussing destroyed worlds instead of endangered nature.

The session is a guided listening session with brief theoretical prompts. Participants will listen to several short excerpts, and after each one, a guiding question will be posed. Which world is being mourned here? Who is mourning? Which order has been destroyed? Which losses are remembered, and which remain inaudible? These works do not illustrate preconceived theories. Rather, listening together becomes the method itself. This method opens up a space in which aesthetic form, political history, and ecological fragility can be related to one another.
 

4:30–4:45 pm, Sesselclub

Coffee break

4:45–5:30 pm, Studio Lobby

What we take forward?
Final Discussion moderated by Martina Seeber

In the closing discussion, we want to compile and evaluate the conference’s findings and identify questions that arise from them and which can be addressed at a future conference. We would also like to revisit the questions from the previous day’s World Café and evaluate the specific field of action which arises through sound. Can contemporary artistic practices and collective ways of life become transformative forces, and what structural conditions must be created to enable this?