Listening ecology, Book chapter, forthcoming
Becoming Rain
Co-composing listening ecologies as sanctuary-making
A sound and space work made by the artist Janna Holmstedt and Klas Nevrin, first composed for a lab day in the AMIS research project at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, and a book chapter that thinks with it.
The work
The work took place in a darkened room at KMH with the chairs removed. Sound travelled through wooden boards that vibrated and through six loudspeakers pointing in different directions: sea and rain, crackling wood, voices and silence. There was no best place to listen from. Participants moved around, touched the boards or stood still, and each change of position changed what came to the fore. The question moved from what each person can perceive to what the room makes it possible to perceive, and for whom.
The listening part lasted about twenty minutes, inside a longer event with guided listening, shared sounding, storytelling and conversation. Becoming Rain returned at the closing event of AMIS in October 2026.
The chapter
Klas Nevrin and Janna Holmstedt, “Becoming Rain: Co-composing Listening Ecologies as Sanctuary-Making.” In Elin Kanhov and Milla Tiainen (eds.), New Materialist and Posthumanist Music Studies. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.
Rather than analysing the work from the outside, the chapter carries on the inquiry with it, letting participants’ reflections and the audio invitations from the installation interrupt the argument. It asks what a listening ecology can protect: not the participants from the pressures of their field, but the conditions under which a group can meet those pressures together. One of its conclusions is that the ability to sense and tend what a situation asks for is not something an individual has, but something composed by how a room and a meeting are arranged.
We will link to the chapter here when it is published.
Background
Becoming Rain was made within AMIS (2024–26) and builds on listening practices developed in Music in Disorder (2016–19) and in Janna Holmstedt’s spatial and sonic practice.