Quantum Listening is listening in all sense modes to or for the least possible differences in any component part of a form or process while perceiving the whole and sensing change. The Quantum Listener listens to listening.[1]

In her posthumously published work of the same name, Pauline Oliveros proposed that ‘quantum listening’ could entail tapping into many histories at the same time. In the quantum world, and in contrast to normative understandings of classical sound waves,  the oscillations of quantum bundles of vibrational energy called phonons mean that echoes are not just reflections that slowly fade away, but rather form resonances and may gather strength cumulatively.

The closing session of Fertile Void channels Oliveros in a conceptual echo, and invites Tania Candiani, houaïda, and Sundar Sarukkai to reflect on the resonances of Fertile Void in their own practice. Considering sound and the sonic as themes central to art-science collaborations in the quantum realm, the conversation pulls together different threads of the programme, with the German premiere of Tania Candiani’s video work HUM (2025) forming a cadence.

​​HUM is an audiovisual work created in the context of Candiani’s artistic collaboration with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), developed over several visits and in dialogue with scientists, engineers, and the architecture of the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. The work explores the seemingly universal language of the trumpet shape—a form that resonates through nature, culture, and the cosmos. Blending visual and auditory layers, Candiani traced connections between sinkholes and black holes, ancient instruments and conceptual models, alphorns and scientific experiments at CERN. Through composed soundscapes and carefully constructed imagery, the film explores how this geometry amplifies the connections between the human, the natural, and the infinite, inviting viewers to uncover the unseen threads interweaving our world.

Filmed across multiple experimental zones within CERN—including A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), the Data Centre, Linear Accelerator 4 (Linac 4), and the Large Magnet Facility (LMF)—Candiani aimed to transform these scientific sites into stages for sonic and poetic reflection. Throughout the work, the spiral functions as both a visual and conceptual structure, drawing parallels between sound waves, data flows, and cosmological patterns.

By bringing together scientific and artistic vocabularies, HUM opens a space for intuition and sensorial inquiry within environments shaped by reason and precision. The viewer is invited to listen—to machines, to space, to the body—and to consider the hum as a shared frequency between matter and meaning.

HUM was commissioned by Arts at CERN, with the generous support of the Fondation Didier et Martine Primat 

[1]  Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening (London: Ignota Books 2022), 15.