About Beyond Listening
Beyond Listening explores how music can reconnect people in an age of personalised streaming and algorithmic recommendation.
The idea
Songs are rarely just background noise. They carry memories: a summer, a person, a place, a feeling that is hard to put into words. Most of the time those memories stay inside a pair of headphones. Beyond Listening asks what happens when they are shared out loud.
The project turns listening into a ritual of storytelling. At a listening session a small group sits in a circle, everyone brings one song, and the group listens to each one in silence before the person tells the story behind it. Conversation, vulnerability and connection follow.
The Entity
At the centre of every session stands the Entity: a rotating, 3D-printed light-and-sound sculpture with three gramophone-like speakers, surrounded by circular seating. In Everyday Mode it plays songs together with the personal stories they evoke. In Live Mode, participants choose a track and record the memory attached to it, right into the sculpture.
A human-made archive
Every recorded memory becomes part of a collective archive, shaped by lived experience rather than algorithmic logic. This website is its home. You don't have to wait for a session: choose a song, record the story it holds for you, and listen to the stories of others.
Beyond Listening shifts listening from an individual habit to a shared social practice, celebrating music as one of humanity's oldest ways of creating belonging and community.