Keynote Lectures
Mohammed Boubezari (Lisbon, Portugal)
Can We Shape Cities by Ear?
Co-creating livable urban soundscapes through ambiance-oriented design
What if urban design engaged listening as deeply as vision? This lecture questions the visual bias of design and explores whether soundscapes can be approached like landscapes, with their own sources, structures, and topologies. It examines who shapes the city’s sound – highlighting citizens’ everyday practices as a form of collective authorship – and reflects on the role and limits of designers.
The talk introduces emerging tools to represent and design sonic environments, from qualitative sound mapping to the idea of a “soundscape-graph,” inspired by the historical role of perspective in visual culture. It argues for shifting ambiance, and particularly sound, upstream in design processes. Finally, it discusses current challenges and opportunities, including the potential of generative AI to support more responsive and inclusive sonic design.
Mohammed Boubezari completed his PhD in Architecture in 2001/11/05 by the Université de Nantes. He is a tenured researcher and professor at Universidade Lusófona (Lisbon), Department of Architecture and Urbanism. He currently chairs the COST Action project “CitySenZ – Architectural and Urban Ambiances of European Cities”.
Diane Schuh (Paris, France)
Sound Ecologies Beyond the Human, Exposing Articulation Through Artistic Research
The presentation explores how artistic research can operationalize a posthuman sound ecology. Drawing on Schwab and Borgdorff’s concept of “expositionality,” Diane Schuh argues that sound ecology dispositifs function as apparatuses of disambiguation, making explicit the technical and ethical negotiations that configure what counts as audible. She mainly focuses on Troisième Nature (2026), which critically re-examines Electronic Plant Music by distinguishing biological agency from the musical agency typically attributed to plants through sonification. She proposes that artistic research does not produce transparent access to non-human voices, but rather situated articulations in which the chain of mediation itself becomes the site of knowledge production.
Diane Schuh is a composer-researcher, currently a postdoctoral fellow at EURArTeC/CICM Paris 8/APM-IRCAM. She holds a PhD in Aesthetics, Science and Technology of the Arts (Music) from Université Paris 8 and a national diploma in landscape architecture (ENSP Versailles). Her thesis explored how gardening practices can inform musical composition and listening. Her research investigates post-human co-creativity through transdisciplinary artistic-research methods combining sound ecology, critical technology studies, and landscape thinking.
Barry Truax (Burnaby, Canada)
The Evolution of the Listener within a Technologically Saturated Soundscape
From surrogate environments to the aural sublime
The author traces the early reactions to reproduced sound as linked to the emerging audio industry, and the repositioning of sound as an accompaniment phenomenon, thereby creating the new listener as a consumer. Key figures such as Murray Schafer and Bernie Krause pioneered an expanded concept of listening and recording the sonic environment as a whole, leading to a model of acoustic ecology in both the natural and built habitats. Today, soundscape composition builds on these innovative practices to enhance the listening experience, even beyond the human. The central thesis of this presentation is that experiencing listening within an acoustic ecosystem, where one feels to be part of a larger perspective can influence our worldview, and even allow us to sense the sublime.
Barry Truax is a Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University. He worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and publishing a book Acoustic Communication, that deals with sound and technology. Truax’s multi-channel soundscape compositions are frequently featured in concerts and festivals. SFU gave him the University’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 1999, and an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in 2025.