Returning the Ear / Tim Shaw and Jacek Smolicki

Returning the Ear

Returning the Ear is an ongoing collaborative project that explores urban and rural environments through soundwalking, field recording, and sonic interventions. The project challenges the visual dominance in how places are typically understood by foregrounding listening as a creative and generative mode of engaging with the world. Combining attentive soundwalking, field recordings (including electromagnetic signals) and DIY technologies, the project develops experimental methods for sensing, mapping, and documenting environments through sound. Public soundwalks, often silent or lightly guided, have taken place in cities such as Newcastle, Stockholm, and Barcelona. These walks frequently culminate in live performances or sound installations that recompose and remediate the collected sound material. Through these activities, Returning the Ear cultivates a deeper, responsive form of listening that draws attention to the sonic textures and subtle dynamics of everyday environments. Positioned as a post-digital practice, it blends analogue and digital techniques to explore the entanglements between human and other-than-human worlds.
Time: 3-4pm
Meeting point: Smith Campus Center,1350 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138
Tim Shaw is an artist and researcher working with sound, light, and communication media to create performances, installations, and site-responsive interventions. His practice engages environmental sound art, digital media, media archaeology, walking practices, and experimental instrument building. His projects explore hidden forms of communication in the environment, including insect sound worlds, augmented soundwalks, high-voltage instruments, radio transmissions through trees, and musical material extracted from rocks. Shaw’s work is presented internationally at festivals and in diverse locations—from forests, caves, and mountains to museums and galleries. He has collaborated with artists including Chris Watson and Phill Niblock. In 2026 he will be a Forum Basiliense Fellow at University of Basel and will lead the Meteorological Media Spark project at Zurich University of the Arts.
https://tim-shaw.info/
Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher exploring the critical, existential, and technological dimensions of listening, recording, and archiving across human and more-than-human contexts. His work includes soundwalks, soundscape compositions, experimental archives, and installations presented internationally at festivals and venues such as Ars Electronica, Sonorities, and In-Sonora. He co-founded the Walking Festival of Sound, a nomadic platform connecting artists, researchers, and communities through shared listening practices. Smolicki earned his PhD from Malmö University in 2018 and has held research positions at Simon Fraser University and Uppsala University. He edited Soundwalking: Through Time, Space, and Technologies (Routledge, 2023) and co-edits Relational Technologies (forthcoming 2026). In 2026 he is a Loeb Fellowship and ArtLab at Harvard University Fellow.

The Walking Festival of Sound

Walking Festival of Sound is a transdisciplinary event exploring the role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings. It combines a number of free and public events including walking performances, walking seminars and listening sessions, all taking place in diverse public spaces and online. Walking Festival of Sound facilitates a meeting point for the international network of practitioners and researchers interested in sound and walking. Through diverse events we explore how walking and listening practices can augment and challenge the way we perceive, navigate through, and care for our shared environments. In 2019 the festival took place in two cities, Stockholm, Sweden and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. In April 2021, the festival moved to Krakow, Poland and Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2022, the festival visited Seoul, Korea and Vancouver, Canada. Zurich, Switzerland, was the festival's site in 2024. In 2026 the festival visits Cambridge and Boston in the USA.

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