A Library and Reading Room for Listening

Bureau for Listening is dedicated to cultivating a growing Library for Listening — a carefully curated collection of books, texts, and publications that explore listening as practice, philosophy, and artistic method. The library functions as both an archive and a resource, gathering works from diverse disciplines, including sound studies, critical theory, poetry, and experimental art.

Alongside the collection, we curate and host Reading Rooms for Listening — intimate, participatory sessions where selected texts are read collectively, slowly, and attentively. These gatherings create a space for deep engagement, where listening extends beyond sound to encompass language, meaning, and shared reflection. The Reading Rooms invite visitors, artists, and researchers alike to experience how listening can transform perception, dialogue, and collective knowledge.

On the Library and Reading Room for Listening
Bureau for Listening explores the intimate exchange between listening and reading — how the act of listening can shape the way we encounter texts, and how texts, in turn, can deepen our capacity to listen. We are searching for possible manifestations of a Library and Reading Room for Listening: spaces where books, bodies, voices, and silences meet.

What happens when the intention to listen informs the design of such a space? Which books, recordings, and materials belong in a library devoted to listening? Could there be someone reading aloud — allowing others to listen? Or perhaps a collective silence, where listening unfolds without words? What, then, is worth collecting, preserving, and sharing?

We also ask what might make such a library radical: Could it offer a form of care? Could it be a site for collective attention, for wonder, and for rethinking how knowledge circulates? The Library and Reading Room for Listening is both a resource and an experiment — an ongoing inquiry into how listening shapes the ways we gather, learn, and be together.

The Library and Reading Room for Listening will be a nomadic space and resource center. We are looking forward to share up-coming locations and lists with resources. We will among others gather physical books, zines, sound-works etc. which we can bring and share with others, and a digital archive for ‘listening materials’.

We also hope to be able to share links and other projects that keeps a similary practice of collecting for a listening library and host a reading room for listening…

If you have any recommendations for projects, books, sites, works etc. which you think would be interesting to share within the Library and Reading Room for Listening, please let us know and we will include it. It doesn’t not have to be directly ‘about’ listening – it can be invitational, inspirational, personal, regarding premises or consequences allowing listening, hopes for future listening and experiences with past listening etc.

Other online platforms, projects, institutions and/or resources on, for and with the subject of listening:

The Listening Biennial

Points of Listening

Listening Across Disciplines

Planetary Listening

Sounding Research

Global Listening Centre

Errant Sound

Radikal Unsichtbar – Centre for Collective Learning and Radical Listening

Listen Gallery (Glasgow)