Abstract
This sound-based artistic research project at Erasmus MC reimagines healthcare through listening and sonic-world-building. In 2025, three survey-based animated sound works were exhibited at ArtEra. Two participatory workshops followed in September 2025, producing two new animated sound works that were integrated into the installation in early 2026.
Description
Centering Listening in Designed Spaces of Care is a sound artistic research project developed in relation to Erasmus MC and presented through ArtEra. It began with a simple but urgent question: what would healthcare sound like if listening were treated as part of care from the start, rather than as something to manage after the fact? The project responds to hospital sound not as background noise, but as a social, spatial, and emotional condition that shapes attention, stress, and atmosphere.
The project grew out of my wider practice in sound-driven design and from conversations with Critical Alarm Labs and Dr. Elif Özcan Vieira, where it became clear that hospital acoustics are not only technical issues but also matters of experience, participation, and design culture. From there, the project developed in phases: first through survey-based reflections on the future of hospital sound, then through workshops that brought patients, staff, students, engineers, and other participants into shared listening and co-creation.
Survey responses first generated three animated audiovisual works in collaboration with Tal Goldstein and Leeza Pritychenko, exhibited at ArtEra in early 2025 as part of Small Gestures, Big System – Propositions for the Current Healthcare System. In September 2025, two workshops at Erasmus MC expanded the project into embodied practice through deep listening, acoustic cartography, and sonic world-building. To keep participation open and accessible, I developed a simple iPad-based interface that allowed participants to compose sound without advanced audio software skills. This helped shift the process from technical training toward listening, discussion, and collaboration.
The workshop material was then developed further with animation designer Leeza Pritychenko and composer Miguel Ángel Clerc Parada into two additional audiovisual works, which were added to the installation in early 2026. The final outcome is a layered body of work that combines survey imagination, public workshop exchange, and audiovisual translation. Rather than offering a fixed solution, the project creates provotypes: open-ended propositions that invite reflection on how hospitals might be designed through more humane and shared listening practices.
ISA Entrant: Colette Aliman
