Find a quiet space outdoors. Close your eyes.Place your hands near your ears, cupping them slightly, and listen. Focus on how the sounds shift as your hands amplify or shield your hearing. Now, slowly move your hands to the front of your face.
New!
Essay: You See I Write By Ear
in the book "The Drawing and the Space - Reflections on 10 Years of Design Research and Education
Publisher Thymos Books – Series Teaching Interiors.
“You See I Write by Ear” I explore listening as an active, multifaceted practice. Moving through selected modes of listening: object, semantic, causal, expanded, and musical listening. The essay proposes that how we listen shapes how we understand space, sound, and the world around us. These are not fixed categories but temporary lenses, shifting as quickly as our attention does.
The book The Drawing and the Space is edited by Thierry Lagrange, Jo Van den Berghe, Enrico Miglietta and Liselotte Vroman. This book emerges from a shared conviction: that drawing is not merely a representational tool, but the locus where architecture takes shape before it becomes building. This volume gathers nearly a decade of work by the eponymous Research Group, exploring drawing as a situated practice, an epistemic device that cuts, listens, measures, and stitches, rendering perceptible the often-invisible dimensions of space: memory, absence, empathy, rhythm, fragility, ecological entanglement.
The contributions span a constellation of practices, from constructive detail to choreography, Renaissance perspective to emotional topography, ecological grammars to co-drawing processes, positioning drawing as a threshold between thinking and building, subject and context, space and place.
To draw, in these pages, is to inhabit the world critically and attentively: to slow down, observe, attune, and care.
To order a hardcopy or a free dowload: Thymos Books
Too Body to Fail in IKEA
This work is part of the master elective/seminar Too Body to Fail in collaboration with Pieter Ginckels. A group of 22 students from KU Leuven Architecture, LUCA School of Arts Fine Arts, Interior Design and Film entered IKEA Ghent as an unannounced presence. Moving through the store’s staged domesticity, they activated a series of performative strategies that quietly reframed the familiar.
Walking in a flock, they navigated the showroom floors as a collective body. Through action words and scores, they engaged with the store’s objects not as commodities but as material for attention. Each student chose an everyday object, a chair, a cup, a key, and spent time with it differently: noticing its weight, texture, balance, and sound; exploring how it transformed through holding, balancing, passing, or stillness; attending to what shifted when a gesture was repeated or a context altered. As in the work of Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci, the approach favored precision and economy over theatricality. The object remained recognizable, yet became strange.
The intervention followed a score, unfolding gradually through the store’s corridors and display rooms until its final gesture: all 22 students and their tutor lay down in the beds of the showroom and fell asleep. An act of collective stillness inside a space designed for perpetual consumption.
Upcoming!
On a Good Day, Only Moderately Precarious
A collaboration between Sofie Bussé, Ray Hindryckx, Nora Keilig, Susan Smith and Esther Venrooij.
Our work begins with the idea of the precarious ensemble: a temporary group of image- and sound-makers collaborating through the RSVP cycle developed by Anna and Lawrence Halprin. We move between its four elements: Resources, Score, Valuaction, and Performance. We will use them as a flexible framework rather than a fixed order. Resources such as sounds, images, gestures, and locations form the ground from which open scores emerge.
These scores serve as invitations to act, guiding movement and decision-making without closing down possibilities. Through ongoing valuaction (Halprin’s practice of observing, evaluating, and adjusting in real time) we allow each contribution or shift in attention to influence the direction of the work.
What we call “performance” is the continuous unfolding of these exchanges: a collective process shaped by the group’s responsiveness and its willingness to stay in motion. In this shifting field, students engage in improvisation and real-time composition, letting performance seep into ordinary spaces and gently disrupt them. We listen to audio topographies: the hum of environments, the resonance of bodies, the friction between public and private rhythms. By drawing on expanded listening practices we tune ourselves to the subtle politics of place. Images and sounds emerge as responses, questions, hesitations. The ensemble changes shape with each contribution, revealing how small gestures can tilt the balance of a collective.
This work will be presented at EMAF Festival in Osnabrück in Germany, across two locations: a screening wall near Langerhalle, and a long durational performative piece at The Glass House on Dielingerstraße.
My Practice
I am an artist, composer, and educator, moving between listening, making, and teaching. Nearly everything I do begins with the ear: the way a room breathes, how footsteps echo on a stairwell, how sound moves through a landscape. My work spans composed music, improvised electronica, video, and site-specific installations, but my deepest fascination is audio topography, the way sound shapes space, and the way space reshapes sound.
My doctorate at KU Leuven is called Audio Topography: The Interaction of Sound, Space, and Medium, and today I continue that exploration as a professor there, supervising doctoral research on “Spatial Experiences.” At LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, I lead seminars such as “Audio Topography” and “Too Body to Fail,” where students learn to listen with their whole bodies. These classrooms are less about delivering content and more about cultivating curiosity, exercises, and encounters.
My research and artistic projects You See I Write by Ear, Shift Coordinate Points, Grey Alder, mirror my ongoing interest in how listening can re-arrange our sense of the world. Teaching is not separate from this work; it’s an extension of it. Each sound walk, assignment, or seminar is an invitation to others to experiment, to discover that listening can be an artistic practice, an ethical act, and sometimes even a form of care.
What matters to me is the moment when listening tilts from passive hearing into something active, relational, transformative. Whether in a department store, an abbey, or the stairwells , I keep returning to the same question: how can sound open a space, between people, between disciplines, between the seen and the unseen?
A performance of “Vessel” at festival Présences Electroniques in Genève, Switzerland 2011.
A notebook 2010
Often when I am sitting in empty spaces listening to nothing happen, and anticipating something’s arrival, I think of this self-fulfilling prophecy: that we experience what we want to experience – and hear what we are expecting to hear. And those who are besieged by voices or music are merely doing what we all do, only in supercharged mode, like the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, with her psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols and her phobia of the Michelin Man.
Today, sound is everywhere, yet it is harder to hear. It surrounds us, yet listening has become thin, often a secondary gesture to the screen. And yet, when practiced deliberately, listening opens another space: a space of attention, of relation. It allows the unnoticed to emerge—the rustle of leaves beyond the traffic, the low pulse of infrastructure, the quiet hum of a building settling into its own weight. It draws us toward texture, toward the grain of things. Listening has become a central method in teaching, composing, and performing. It is not just a way of receiving, but a way of reaching out—tuning into environments, materials, silences. In soundwalks and classrooms, libraries and stairwells, we listen not for answers but for presence. Sometimes we employ tools: field recorders, contact mics, parabolic ears. Sometimes we simply sit still.
Compositions, installations and performances
Music is a performance art based on a horizontal concept of time. Time is viewed as a line, which a composer divides into parts or blocks, i.e. form. ‘The composer (organiser of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time.’
Not all works that use sound are necessarily musical pieces. The field of sound, the matter of a musical piece, has broadened out and moved into the domain of the visual arts, becoming sound art. The practice of sound art reflects on the spatial, material and dynamic qualities of sound, and it can activate the relation between sound and space. A source can produce sound, leave this body and emanate into the public space. And when a sound reaches your body, as a listener you become part of this sonic event. Sound art is not considered to be an experience having to do with musical form (beginning, middle, end) or performance.
Writings, Images and sounds
Sound art is often defined as an art form dealing with two disciplines: sound and space. Sometimes a third field, acoustics, is mentioned, because a sound work is presented in space, dealing with the spatiality and physicality of sound. I propose to view sound art not only with respect to the fields of sound and space, but to add an additional field: medium. The medium is the object, technology, instruction, or matter that shapes and creates the form of the work. It is the vehicle or vessel we need to create sound waves, which has a defining impact on the aural architecture or acoustics. It could be a collection of tools that delivers the sound, a drawing that evokes an aural image, or even a movable ceiling with a pulley and counterweights. Traditionally in art, the medium is considered to be the link between sound and space, but in some of twentieth-century sound works the medium is not necessarily the go-between sound and space.
