Formarly a town and countryplanner soundartist Cilia Erens first introduced soundwalks in the Netherlands in 1987. In her soundwalks, sound panoramas and soundscapes, she uses largely unmixed everyday sounds. In the absence of words, her work reaches deeper layers; ‘audible space’ is her speciality. One of her best-known works is Silencer, a sound show about the stillness of silence. Listening to Erens’ compositions, based on binaural recordings, always creates a new reality within existing realms, a form of ‘augmented reality’. Blindfolding the listener forms one of the basic elements in her presentation forms. Being an internationally operating interdisciplinary artist she makes sound works, gives guestlectures and workshops in the field of Visual art “Oda, a soundrelic (860A.D.-2007)” for SKOR (2007)/ Healthcare a sound work for cataract patients in The Rotterdam Eye Hospital (2009)/ Moving arts “Moving Soundspaces” a project with Robert Steijn for The international choreographic arts centre amsterdam (2012)/ Radio “Meanwhile in” a weekly series of micro portraits of locations of 45 sec. (2012)/ Artist in Residency “Landing Soon#10” in Cemeti art centre in Yogyakarta Indonesia (2009)/ Film “The audible Space” at The Netherlands Film and Television Academy (2002 - until now)/ Research “Chinmoku” an investigation about the stillnes of silence in Japan (2004)/

When I was introduced to binaural recording in 1981, I was handed a tool to create a new form for what has fascinated me from childhood: the sound of everyday life. This recording technique enabled me to approach the transparency of the environmental sound and translate and present it three-dimensionally in a new context. Not as an edited piece, combined with visuals or interspersed with language/text, but with the emphasis on the autonomous power of ambient sound to tell its own story and appeal to the imagination. This is what prompted me to develop ‘listening experiences’, built around my binaural recordings of everyday sound. A typical Erens experience will have the listener traverse soundspaces linked together by hardcuts or crossfades. These soundspaces have been left (largely) untouched.