The Museum as a Listening Site: Toward an Untamed Auditory Practice

Script for presentation at the 2. edition of Sound in Museums conference, 17.-19. October 2025, at National Museum of Music, Mafra, Portugal.

Hello everyone – thank you for coming, lovely being with you here today. Thank Andrew, thank you previous presents.

Thank you to the Sound in Museums organizers for including this presentation.

I’m Lukas Quist Lund, and I’m the director of the Bureau for Listening, an artist and research collective and platform based in Copenhagen.

To being I have a few notes:

Firstly, I have chosen not to have visual aid, so you are welcome to close your eyes. If you want, feel also welcome to lay down. The way we occupy a space shape our ability to present, to think, to listen and to respond in it – and you are welcome to change your position in here.

“Are you listening?” – this conference asks us this. My first reaction to this question, is that it’s something my schoolteacher would ask me this if drifting away, if daydreaming – it feels like a question that calls me back, demands my presence, obediently. As if I must listen in a specific way. I’m curious about the reception of this question, because how do we invite others to listen?

When giving a short presentation of 10 minutes, for me, the aim is less to give a fulfilled account or a complete outline of a project or argument – rather, it’s an opportunity to sketch and propose a framework that allows us to ask new questions, to occupy a gap or linger at a threshold, which may activate our imagination. I hope you will indulge me in this.

We have over the course of this conference already listened to quite many great presentations on the subject of ‘Sound in Museums’ – and I will simply just return to and remind us of the complexities of these; the mystery and entangledness of sound and the contested and very diverse constructs and histories of a museum; What is sound? What constitutes a museum? How many different, yet still incomplete answers do we have for these questions?

I invite you to,

Imagine sound – what is it to you?

Imagine museum – how do you define it?

Imagine a listening site – what could this be?

Imagine this – and be attentive to, how we all imagine this differently.

What does this complexity and incompletion tell us – what does it offer?

I would like if the question of what sound is, and what a museum is, can remain a question, to remain unsettled. We are all holding both shared and very different references for Sound in Museums – this complexity is a gift.

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My presentation is titled: The Museum as a Listening Site: Toward an Untamed Auditory Practice – and its especially questions of listening and the untamed within the museum that I will respond to.

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To approach the museum as a potential listening site is an invitation to rethinking what kind listening we are interested in fostering within the museum, and perhaps to invite a shift in orientation – from the gaze that collects and measures, to an attentiveness that unsettles.

What does it mean to listen in a space built for the gaze?

When do we move from hearing a work, to listen to or even with it?
What forms of listening are cultivated here, within and by the museum – and which listening practices are quietly refused?

Perhaps the museum already listens, constituting a listening site, though not always kindly.

As Chimera Singer shared with us yesterday, the listening in the museum is never neutral.
Its walls hear us as we walk, whisper, hush ourselves. Rather than silence, we experience the struggle of attempting to be quiet – the experience that our soundings isn’t welcome.
We may feel instructed in how to listen properly – even not agreeing with this ‘properness’ –
to lower our voices, to attend, to restrain – as a slide in Chimera’s presentation said; don’t talk, don’t touch, don’t respond.

Perhaps the listening site of the museum is a place, where we are invited to demonstrate our ability to submit ourselves, to exercise what the museum may consider a sign of social respect and self-control.

The space will often tell us which way to move, what to face, how long to linger. And as guests we often compete in navigating this orientation of the museum the best – rather than challenging it.

Within the museum, we are always already specifically orientated – toward certain objects, narratives, sounds, and gazes, toward particular ways of engagement, and just as often, specific forms of disengagement.

Sara Ahmed reminds us that orientation is always situated.
“The lines that allow us to find our way, that are in front of us, also make certain things, and not others, available… When we follow specific lines, some things become reachable and others remain, or even become, out of reach.” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 2007, pp. 14–15).

These lines, she writes, are not abstract – they are historical, economic, embodied.
They pass through us long before we begin to move.

And while we do not seek to touch and experience everything – to which degree do we follow domesticated and violent lines of orientations, and to which degree are we able to confront these lines of listening within the museum?

How does the lines of orientation within the museum organize our listening; discipline, and tames it?
In what ways does the museum orients the body toward, stillness, and submission –
toward a domesticated ear that hears only what is sanctioned to sound?

To center the practice of listening, we may engage what Ahmed calls the work of reorientation.
A work that seeks to attend to the lines that guide and situate our listening – to sense the other lines that run beside and behind us, in-between and beyond what is known and reachable.

Brandon LaBelle offers a way to think with this.
“One is equally oriented by the world as one makes orientation for oneself – To orient is thus to be situated, to find one’s bearings, within a given space as well as within or against particular social structures and systems… one is often pushed onto certain tracks, or forced off others. One therefore practices orientation, is situated by it, which shifts as bodies shift, as one aligns or misaligns, attunes or disturbs, is welcomed or pushed out.” (Acoustic Justice, 2021, p. 128).

If we follow LaBelle here, listening itself is a practice of orientation – a work of reorientation –
of alignment and misalignment. To listen, to is engage one’s orientation – not to obediently follow give lines. Listen to is become aware of the line one is pushed onto, and to engage in what ways one may seek to reorientate oneself and others.

To listen is to find our bearings within a field of power and sound, to move along or against the lines that make us audible.

The concept of a listening site is thus a site where we make orientations.

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Could untamed listening, then, be a practice of misalignment?
A deliberate o intuitive shifting of the body against the institution’s acoustic order?
A small act of disturbance – gentle, but insistent?

Untamed Listening is a practice conceptualized and unfolded by Daniela Medina Poch. A framework that responds to questions such as: “How can we understand listening as an untamed practice and how to expand the notion of the untamed beyond the binary of civilized and savage through listening? How could we desaturate our environments to reclaim our listening potential? How does listening serve as a tool for deothering and debordering? And how can an untamed listening become an emancipatory tool to detach from certain epistemologies and tune in with other frequencies?”

Untamed Listening is not a fixed or complete notion – it is a mode of inquiry, a testing of assumptions, a way of becoming and relating – a possible tool for reorientation.

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One aspect of the museum as a listening site, is the listening conducted by the visitor, another is the listening of the museum itself, which is also subjected to a set of different structures and orientations.

It listens through climate systems, visitor metrics, surveys, and security devices.
It listens through technologies and narratives of classification and control.

It listens to strategies and models of economic competition and survival.

It listens with what it already knows, rather than with what it doesn’t know, want to know, or can’t know.
It listens to preserve itself.
Its ear is extractive rather than relational.
Could we say, then, that the museum continues the work of a colonial ear, an ear that seeks to tame the heard – one that captures, measures, collects, silences, and disciplines the sonic as data, as artefact – what is the listening of the museum able to attend to, and what lies beyond its reach?

If listening within the museum is at risk of domestication, if our auditory practices within the museum are kept in a policed, tamed, and controlled site; if we only perform a sanctioned and disciplined form of listening – how may we invite a more untamed listening and auditory practice into being?

How would our own bodies and the body of the museum shift, if we stopped following the museum’s acoustical path of obedience; if we offered an untamed listening practice?

How would the listening of the museum react to the untamed listening of its encountors?

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Untamed listening is a listening that leaks, trembles, that allows a play with opacity.
It accepts that not everything must be made audible.

Untamed listening resists the choreography of submission.
It interrupts the museum’s line of orientation.
It listens with, not to.
It listens besides, not above.
It makes room for the uninvited, the uncurated, the unmeasured and unpreserved.

It welcomes the non-conform, and it adapts to hosting it.

Perhaps listening, in this sense, is a work of turning – turning our attention, our bodies, our assumptions.
Not toward mastery, but toward encounter.
Not toward clarity, but toward resonance.

To think of the museum as a listening site is to imagine it as porous matter – a body among other bodies.

Every wall, every vitrine, every floorboard vibrates with the sounds of maintenance, of footsteps, of traffic folding in.
Every visitor, every breath, cry, and laughter, contributes to the ongoing composition of its acoustic ecology.
The question is perhaps less “What does the museum contain?” rather “How does it resound – and with whom?”

Listening becomes, then, a practice of orientation in motion.
It is a way of tracing the lines of reachability – what we are allowed to hear, and what remains inaudible.

But it is also a way of bending those lines, of sensing what hums just beyond them.
Through listening, we might begin to perceive the museum otherwise:
not as a fixed architecture, but as a field of fluctuating relations.

Listening maintains but it does not preserve.
It opens to the temporal, to the fleeting, to the still-emerging.
In what ways can the museum live with this instability?
Could it allow itself to tremble with what it cannot control, understand and reach?

Perhaps this is what it would mean for the museum to listen untamed:
to attend to what falls off its line, to what escapes its ear,
to the voices that refuse to become heritage.

If the museum were to listen differently, would it then no longer be an archive of mastery and excellence, but a site of failure, becoming and reorientation?

Would it be a space that learns through resonance rather than vision?
A place that listens as it loses its balance?

Can we reorientate our listening away from understanding, extracting, and instead towards accompanying?
Toward not possessing sound, but to dwell and linger with it, to be possessed by the sound, to be trembling by the heard?

Is to think of the museum as a listening site less a question of place, and more of practice – to welcome a continuous, untamed rehearsal for being together otherwise?

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As an ending note, is it even possible to conceive such a thing as a tamed, domesticated, disciplined form of listening – does this even exist? It’s a false discourse? Is listening perhaps rather always already something unsettling, untamable – lies there within listening a force, a sensitivity, that nurture the work of reorientation inherently; is it within the nature of listening to confront and shift one’s orientation?

Is the untamable and generative nature of listening, why we feel at unease, when museums expect, demands, a certain kind of a more passive and receiving form of listening?

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I will end with the first question:

“Are you listening?”

Thank you for your attention.

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Ahmed, Sara (2007). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
LaBelle, Brandon (2021). Acoustic Justice. Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Poch, Daniela Medina (2021). UNTAMED LISTENING: Reflections on the Undomestication of our Listening Practices. Berlin: The Listening Biennial.