Sonic Mapping

How do we hear the power embedded in public space?

Sonic Mapping is an ongoing project exploring the politics of listening. Drawing on Brandon LaBelle’s three stages of listening, I use sound as a tool for mapping spaces—through recording, drawing, and photography. Each site becomes an unfolding score of its own, where sound reveals hidden relationships of movement, authority, and encounter.

By situating myself in different public contexts, I gather sonic materials—ambient noise, fleeting conversations, echoes, and silences—and translate them into experimental forms in the studio. These translations might take shape as diagrams, sketches, or spatial interventions, layering audio with visual traces.

This practice continues the critical trajectory of Material Conversations, extending its concern with how materiality and perception shape our understanding of place. Sonic Mapping asks: how does listening—deep, reflexive, and embodied—shift the way we experience power in the everyday?

Through this process, the work becomes both a map and an invitation: to listen differently, to re-tune attention, and to encounter the social fabric of space through its sonic dimensions.