A Guide for Making Listening Guides

Choose something to listen to/with/for/beside/across.

Listen for something else.

Notice when the first thing disappears.

Make an instruction for hearing it again.

Remove the thing.

Keep the instruction.

/

Listen until you know what you hear.

Continue until you don’t.

Begin there.

/

Point to a sound
without naming it.

Point somewhere else.

/

Make a sound important.

Make it unimportant.

Notice what changed.

/

Listen to the edge of your attention.

Move the edge.

/

Ignore one sound deliberately.

Listen to everything that replaces it.

/

Listen without trying to understand.

If you understand,
misunderstand.

/

Decide where the work begins.

Move one step.

Decide again.

/

Write a listening guide
that cannot be followed correctly.

Follow it.

/

Give your attention to someone else.

Listen through them.

/

Wait for a sound
you cannot predict.

When it arrives,
do nothing.

/

Create a question for listening.

Do not answer it.

Give it to the next listener.

September 2026

Developed as an iteration of notes/guides given to the museum hosts of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, on the ocsasion of the exhibition The Sound Of / Lyden af.

The Guide for Making Listening Guides is inspired and formed by research into the sound archive of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, and its relationship and origin within the Fluxus movement.