EN / FI
Spatial Listening Architectures is an artistic practice in which sound, space, material and human presence are arranged as conditions for listening. The work begins by listening to a place, not by placing finished content into a space.
Speakers, distances, volumes, silence and the listener’s freedom to move form a distributed field in which attention does not collapse around a single source or a single correct listening position.
Multichannel sound is not a technical addition. Its function is not simply to surround the listener, but to distribute orientation across directions and relations. The aim is not to fill space with sound, but to build a situation in which listening can begin to organise differently.
The listener is not the centre of the experience but one presence among others, and is not steered towards a prescribed response. The body of sound also belongs to the architecture: the loudspeaker, its material and its place are part of the relation through which sound enters the world. The work builds the conditions and leaves the experience open.
Writings on practice, 2008–2026
These texts began as a way to defend the work against misreading. They became something else: an attempt to understand, from the inside, what spatial listening installations actually depend on, and what they can make possible when they hold.
Three registers: core texts on the methodological and perceptual foundations; working notes written in the middle of making, beside specific decisions; and a development section tracing how this language formed from 2008 to 2026.
Some texts repeat. In spatial work, returning to the same place from another direction is not redundancy. It is how a field gradually becomes known.
Written during a funded artistic research period supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).
Spatial Listening Architectures (EN), PDF
Tilallisen kuuntelemisen arkkitehtuureja (FI), PDF
Earlier text
Sound Without Fixed Meaning (FI), PDF
Revised 2026 edition of my 2013 MA thesis on presence, Jerzy Grotowski and the inner work of sound design. It documents an earlier stage of the thinking that later developed into Spatial Listening Architectures.
