Co-Hosting Shared Soundscapes: Practices of Listening and Hospitality in the Multispecies City

Within the larger CitySoundscapes research project in Munich, which explores the relationships between urban biodiversity, sound, and wellbeing, Shared Soundscapes investigates how artistic and ethnographic practices of listening can create contact zones between researchers, residents, and other species. Through a series of co-hosted HörSalons (Listening Salons), we experiment with forms of attentiveness and hospitality that render the city audible as a multispecies habitat.

Each HörSalon is collaboratively hosted with local partners: neighborhood initiatives, artists, residents with a special connection to local aspects of sound and hearing, and environmental NGOs. Designed as spaces of encounter and co-learning rather than instruction, they invite participants to engage in guided listening exercises, sound walks, and collective reflection. These practices open the city’s acoustic layers—bringing into relation the audible and the barely perceptible, the near and the distant, the human and the nonhuman, and the tools and instrumentarium of bioacoustic research. By attending to sound together, participants experience how listening itself can foster reciprocal awareness and ecological sensitivity.

An example is the Insect Buzz HörSalon, co-hosted with BUND Naturschutz in a conservation area near Munich’s Harlaching Hospital. Here, the buzz of grasshoppers merged with the rhythmic drone of rescue helicopters, making audible the coexistence of emergency and abundance within shared urban space. Participants described a sense of calm and connection emerging from collective listening and the recognition of intertwined habitats.

Through these co-hosted acts of hospitality, Shared Soundscapes develops listening as an ethnographic and artistic method for cultivating multispecies attention. The HörSalons demonstrate how creating hospitable conditions for listening can generate situated, affective knowledge about biodiversity, while inviting citizens to experience urban environments as shared, more-than-human soundscapes. As they are all co-hosted with local city dwellers, initiatives, and NGO's, they also weave a net of relations around the topic of listening that moves far beyond a simple transfer of knowlege from institutions to the "outside world": they create conditions for creating knowledge together.