“The Sounds That Live Here” is an artist residency and creative project led by sound artist Lauren Tortil at the Boutchou 2 nursery, located a few streets away from Bétonsalon, in Paris’s 13th arrondissement.

The project explores the role of the senses, particularly listening, in how very young children perceive and make sense of the world. Its starting point is the observation that, in contemporary Western society, sight has become the dominant sense, at the expense of listening, touch, smell and taste. Every day, we are exposed to vast amounts of visual information through phones, computers, television, public signage and advertising, among other sources. Information is conveyed through images, and from childhood we are taught to read, describe and critically assess them. But what about the soundscape and our perception of it? When and how can we educate our ears?

Following in the footsteps of Célestin Freinet, who developed new educational techniques to foster children’s awareness of the world of sound in the late 1930s, many artists and composers have since introduced new experimental methods. Drawing, among other references, on Sonic Meditations (1971) by the American composer and educator Pauline Oliveros, and A Sound Education (1992) by the Canadian composer, theorist and educator Murray Schafer, Lauren Tortil has spent around a decade developing her own experimental approach to sound pedagogies, moving back and forth between workshops and residencies. She has worked with a wide range of participants (children, teenagers, students and adults).

Now the mother of a two-year-old child, she wishes to bring renewed attention to the earliest sensory experiences – particularly those involving sound – of children under three. The first thousand days of life are a crucial period during which young children gradually discover the world, form their first relationships, and develop their sensory, motor, emotional, and cognitive abilities. In fact, even before a child can name sounds, they perceive and experience them: a voice, a rhythm, a rustling sound, or a moment of silence capture their attention and fuel their imagination. Listening thus becomes an early form of exploring the world, at the intersection of physical sensations, relationships, and emotions.
This project aims to explore the richness of the daycare center’s soundscape and to examine the role that listening plays within it. Voices, children’s expressions, gestures, activities, and atmospheres come together to form a unique soundscape that reveals the rhythms of the day, the relationships between children and adults, and the identity of the place. What sounds inhabit the daycare center? What do they tell us about the life that unfolds there? How do they contribute to the collective atmosphere and the relationships among its occupants? How are the very young children themselves active participants in this soundscape, and how do they perceive it?

To this end, the artist proposes involving the young children, their parents and the nursery staff in the project, encouraging them to pay renewed attention to the familiar sounds that shape their daily lives, while exploring the role of listening and touch as means of perception, communication and care. Through regular visits to the nursery’s different units, the artist aims to establish a collaborative creative process structured around two stages: observation and experimentation.
By spending extended periods immersed in each of the six units and adopting an attentive listening approach, the artist will document all the sounds she perceives – their nature, volume, rhythms and other qualities – in the form of musical scores. This unobtrusive period of immersion will allow her to absorb the atmosphere of the nursery, meet the young children and staff, and develop a sensory understanding of the soundscape, paying close attention to the musicality of the sounds and rhythms that run through everyday life. Through games, experiments and interactive setups designed in collaboration with the staff, participants will be then invited to refine their listening, discover the qualities of the sounds around them and explore different ways of interacting with this soundscape. These experiences will foster sensory curiosity, attentiveness to others and shared discovery. They will offer opportunities to approach sound as a material to explore, transform and share. They will also open up a space for encounters between young children and adults, in which listening becomes a way of attending to oneself, to others and to the surrounding world.

“The Sounds That Live Here” seeks to reveal the sensory and relational dimensions of the nursery’s soundscape, while making listening a shared and lasting artistic experience that develops over time. The residency will result in a series of creative works emerging from this collective process, which will subsequently become part of the nursery’s everyday life.