Open Call

Amid planetary crisis, there are communities worldwide committed to nourishing and co-creating relational forms of life that foreground reciprocity, care, and respect—drawing on longstanding Indigenous practices and experimenting with multispecies justice and more‑than‑human governance. 

Time to Listen (26–27 June 2026) asks what sound can do within this turn. We invite participants to expand listening and music‑making to include more‑than‑human actors—attuning to animals, plants, rivers, ecosystems, and technologies as sonic partners—and to decentre anthropocentric listening by situating sound within ecologically interconnected worlds. At stake is creativity itself: when relation becomes the site of creative action, what new forms of shared agency, reciprocity, and co‑making emerge? And methodologically: how might the arts, listening/attending, practice, ritual, emotions, stories, humour, and ‘productive weirdness’ catalyse the disruptions needed for transformative openings?

The conference is part of the SPREEKLÄNGE project, a festival of contemporary music along the Spree River in Charlottenburg organised by the Academy of Arts (25–28 June 2026). The conference will take place in the Academy’s venue at Hanseatenweg. It is jointly organised by field notes / inm and the Academy of Arts and developed in collaboration with composer and researcher Liza Lim, who leads the music-based, multi-year research project Multispecies Creativity and Climate Communication (2025–2029) at the University of Sydney.

Open Call: 

We invite artists, curators, and researchers to propose sessions they would like to lead during the symposium on 26–27 June. Sessions are 45 minutes long, and the format is open: it can range from lectures, project presentations, workshops, sound walks, listening sessions, to guided improvisations. We are seeking contributions that engage with the theme of Multispecies Creativity in Music and Sound.

Potential starting questions include: 

• How can meaningful artistic interactions between species go beyond simply playing along with animal sounds?
• How might relationships with Earth-others be rethought and deepened, and made mutually transformative?
• What responsibilities arise when we work with more-than-human sound sources and collaborators?
• Which systemic interactions can be identified within examples of inter- and multispecies music?
• What conditions need to be created to enable creative spaces for such sonic networks?
• How do these sounding multispecies networks expand our understanding of musical creativity? Or more simply: what do we actually mean by “creativity”?

If interested, please submit a short abstract (max. 2 pages in English) describing the content and format of the session, brief information about yourself, and any technical requirements (video, audio, etc.) by 15 March 2026 via email to info@field-notes.berlin.

26–27 June 2026
Academy of Arts, Hanseatenweg