Listening Acts | Performance

The space between making sound and hearing it holds intimacy and possibility.

In this multidisciplinary project, Chamber Made activates Melbourne Recital Centre with Listening Acts – a series of live music performances that explore listening and its role in memory, belonging and identity. You are invited into stillness and asked to consider how we perceive, process, and hold sound – whether through medical devices, recording technologies, or the quiet resonance of everyday objects.

Grounded in the artists’ personal histories and diverse cultural perspectives, these works reveal listening as both solitary and collective – shaped by technology, yet profoundly human.

Song to the Cell by Biddy Connor transforms an IV machine into an instrument in this intimate performance. A vocalist and a medical device entwine in a unique duet of hums, beeps and mechanical rhythms, exploring ideas of healing, dependency, and transhuman connection.

Tactile Piece for Human Ears by Aviva Endean creates an intimate listening experience, capturing sounds through binaural microphones which are designed to replicate the acoustic properties of human hearing. Working with sounds which are on the edge of human perception- wind currents, pipe tone and vibrations heard through bone conduction, Aviva builds acoustic landscapes shaped in real time to feel like they’re happening just for you – immersive, strange and quietly communal.

sounding forms / forming sounds by Alexandra Spence is an evolving electroacoustic performance that highlights the physicality of sound and listening. Beginning as a solo and expanding into a trio with Biddy Connor and Aviva Endean, it uses tuned sinewaves to resonate and vibrate custom-built perspex instruments and drum skins – illuminating the animation of space, bodies, and objects.

Each work invites you to consider, in different ways, what it is to listen. This immersive sound journey will be complemented by Listening Acts | Installations, six installations throughout Melbourne Recital Centre, offering a meditative gateway to listening as a practice.