What does it mean when listening becomes a way of knowing?
Tones of Zones explores how sound can mediate alternative ways of sensing and understanding place. Developed in dialogue with sound composer Benny Nilsen and in conversation with neuroscientists and a physiologist, the work draws on field recordings from a single site and follows how sonic phenomena: through melody, rhythm, and vibration—can reshape conscious awareness of that place.
In doing so, sound is an autonomous presence: a storyteller capable of revealing hidden relationships between bodies, materials, and perceptual systems. Reimagining a place as something with its own layered life and history, the work asks how listening might attune us to processes that extend beyond human cognition.
Presented as an immersive choreographic sound installation, Tones of Zones invites visitors to encounter place as a dynamic ecology of resonances. At a time when technology is radically reshaping how we experience our physical environments, it raises a simple but unsettling question: what does it mean to vocalize a world that is no longer centered on the human?
Choreography: Clarinde Wesselink
Sound design: Benny Nilsen
Costume design: Maïna Joner
Technical support: Rutger Muller
With thanks to: Chala Itai Westerman, Eva Karczag and Susan Leigh Foster
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