Stefanie Egedy

Across the world, a growing ecosystem of listening bars, hi-fi cafés, collective listening sessions, or ambient gatherings, is changing how audiences engage with music.
As streaming platforms have made music more ubiquitous than ever, listening itself has become increasingly rare. In response, artists, curators, venues and communities are creating dedicated environments that place attention, presence and collective listening at the centre of the experience.
What explains the rise of these spaces? What kinds of audiences are they attracting? How do they differ from clubs, concerts, galleries, or traditional music venues? And what does this shift tell us about changing desires for intimacy, community and cultural participation?
Bringing together practitioners shaping this emerging landscape, this session explores the rise of listening as a cultural format and examines how listening spaces are transforming contemporary music culture.

Artist Stefanie Egedy welcomes delegates into her working environment for an introduction to her practice with sound, spatial perception and low-frequency vibration.

Low-frequency sound artist and composer Stefanie Egedy creates embodied vibrational experiences grounded in sound as a physical force through site-specific installations, commissioned works and compositions. Sub-bass, bass and infrasound (LFS) — their tactility and capacity to permeate and traverse space, perceived by the skin and the body rather than the ear alone, form the core of her artistic practice. Her work explores the relationships between sound waves, architectural bodies and human bodies, investigating the physiological and somatic effects of LFS on human perception and bodily experience. Egedy’s practice builds two bodies of work: BODIES AND SUBWOOFERS (B.A.S.), which explores the sculptural presence of subwoofers and their relationships with human and architectural bodies through LFS, and SONIC ENERGETICS, which creates LFS environments that support somatic grounding and inner orientation. Immersed in this context, she articulates the crossing between sonic and musical language to investigate sonic communication between beings.