THE LISTENING PROJECT
The Listening Project is a performance collective consisting of Rosa Ronsdorf, Roos Pollmann, and Rosalie Wammes. The group creates performances grounded in extensive research into female pioneers of electronic music and their unheard stories.
The Listening Project (TLP) explores the unheard women of electronic music, creating a living, feedbacking archive through sound installations and performances. Inspired by pioneers such as Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Suzanne Ciani, and Pauline Oliveros, the collective highlights the invisible, inaudible, and overlooked, revealing the political, spatial, and ecological possibilities of sound.
TLP emerged from the artistic research and thesis that I did at the Dutch Art Institute, where I investigated female pioneers in electronic music and approached the archive as a living, transformative system. The project grew into a collaboration with Rosalie Wammes and Roos Pollmann (ROOSPEEE), turning research into collective practice.
Feedback and deep listening are central to TLP, forming a sonic ecology that connects human, non-human, and environmental matter. The project encourages attentive listening to subtle textures, rhythms, and interconnections, building a counter-archive rooted in sisterhood, collaboration, and ecological awareness. Through this approach, TLP amplifies historically overlooked voices and explores how sound can shape perception, space, and community.
THE ROCKS ARE HER EARS
2023, South London Gallery, UKIn deep dark waves, sounds emerge in long pulsations from cracks in the earth - How do we listen and who do we listen to? This performance is an attempt to listen deeply to time, inspired by composer Éliane Radigue.
200 tapes and a box of a thousand papers
2022, Like Minds, Amsterdam
Does your echo sound the same as mine? What can we hear on the tapes of the past that have produced the sound of the future? A music theater performance by Rosa Ronsdorf, Roos Pollmann, Rosalie Wammes in collaboration with 5 reel-to-reel players, each with their own character in speed, clarity, extra noise, etc. Our starting point was the life of composer Delia Derbyshire and the feminist voices in electronic music that remained hidden in history books. We told her story through found tapes and new compositions inspired by her work.
I want to amplify my box of crackling, shaking, jello
2022Extrapool, Nijmegen
ÉLIANE: Listening is the openness towards what
sounds are telling us
DAPHNE: Towards what lies between and beyond
PAULINE: Listening can be contagious
ÉLIANE: You can listen to something ten ways at
least. Including distracted listening
PAULINE: I would like to amplify my bowl of
crackling, shaking jello.
An attempt to listen to and with archival
feedbacks. Invitees are: The Theremin Witch, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Gita Sarabhai, Pauline Oliveros and other entities passing by.
Take My Time
is a project created with elderly people from Amsterdam North. Through Deep Listening workshops, we engaged in conversations about time, the experience of time, and listening to time. These conversations were recorded onto analog tape music (made in the Willem 2 studio in Den Bosch) and presented in a large pink tent during Open Oscillator fesitval, accompanied with a risoleaflet we made together.The piece is a reference to Delia Derbyshire’s work Four Inventions for Radio, which she created in the 1960s. In this piece, she asked people from all walks of life to reflect on big themes such as God, the Afterlife, Aging, and Dreams. It was the first time that working-class voices were heard on the radio. Combined with her experimental analog tape music, this caused quite a stir. However, the brilliant piece was never credited to her, but to her male employer, Berry Barmange.