Individual listening, shared space: shaping listening through instrumental design

This performance-based research proposes a series of short, repeatable concerts (approximately 10 minutes each), built around a new work for cello composed by composer Alessandro Perini and cellist Elide Sulsenti, performed through a dedicated instrumental setup in which the mediation of listening is itself the instrument.

Rather than treating headphones as neutral transmission devices, the project constructs a specific apparatus in which the cello, microphones, signal routing, and the individual headphones provided to each listener form a single extended instrument. This “lutherie of listening” positions both the work and the instrumental apparatus as co-emergent: they are instaurated— that is, they acquire meaning and function — through the mediations and translations between human and non-human actors that constitute the performative assemblage.
Within this framework, performance thus becomes an act of care: the performer assumes the role of custodian of the system and guarantor of musical meaning, responsible for stabilising an assemblage in which sound, technology, and perception are in constant negotiation. This stabilisation occurs live and remains open to variation across iterations, rendering the apparatus itself a site of ongoing inquiry.

While the sound of the cello is distributed individually through the headphones, the electronics inhabit the shared acoustic space, producing a layered condition of private immersion and collective presence. The personal listening space thus proves permeable, giving rise to a shared presence and rendering audible the relational conditions of the event.

Through repetition and iterative performance, the project investigates how instrumental design can actively construct modes of listening, how agency is redistributed between performer and technical systems, and how mediated intimacy reshapes the ontology of live musical experience.