A launch event for Listening Glossary, a new book from Silver Press that gathers 217 forms of listening described by activists, artists, D/deaf and hard-of-hearing people, ecologists, musicians, philosophers, and researchers. Editor Hannah Kemp-Welch traces six decades of sonic thought, joined by Manchester-based contributors who read and discuss their entries.

Robin the Fog and his quartet of Howlround reel-to-reel machines present Cast Your Tape To The Wind, a hybrid of installation, performance and introduction to magnetic tape. A sound-hunting exercise gives way to a whirlwind tape-loop session and an improvised performance - audience participation strongly encouraged!

Cymatics is the study of visualising sound, making the invisible visible and revealing the hidden processes of vibration and energy. Mark Wagner presents a talk on the mystical and metaphysical nature of sound, followed by a rare participatory demo featuring a Chladni plate, water cymatics and bubble cymatics.

An impulse response records how a space answers back to sound, letting us place recordings inside derelict buildings, inaccessible sites and rooms that no longer exist. Matt Barnard's talk moves through captured buildings, voices returned to rooms, and spaces played as instruments.

A reverberant building shapes what gets played in it, and if captured it can become something to compose with rather than an effect applied afterwards. The same technique works on things that were never rooms. Any sound can serve as a space to extrude others through, taking on its shape in the process, at which point the difference between a sound and a space stops being clear.

It follows that these recordings are also a form of documentation. Acoustic heritage is an established field, though attention tends to follow the buildings already considered significant, and most spaces deteriorate or come down without anyone having recorded them. Sound recording was first proposed as a way of preserving voices rather than selling music, so the preservation instinct was there at the start. A recorded voice is already affecting; placing one in a space adds situation, the space illuminated around it.

The talk moves through captured buildings, voices returned to rooms, and spaces played as instruments.

SignKid is a deaf music producer, writer and performer who has pioneered a visual language that adapts British Sign Language for live hip-hop, rap, dancehall and afrobeat. He has since extended the approach into music video, overlaying rapping and singing onto his distinctive BSL performance.

Rubbish Music uses sound to trace the journeys, transformations and impacts of our discarded objects. With an orchestra of rusty bells, dirty oven grills, wine bottles and a squeaky chicken toy, Kate Carr and Iain Chambers examine the worlds we make and destroy through what we throw away.

Borders in the arts have always puzzled Jez riley French, and the act of listening itself, he argues, remains too often bordered. Drawing on extended technologies and durational listening to sounds outside human attention, this informal talk treats listening as a constant questioning of perception, convention and faulty histories.

A discussion on the Half Life installation between the artists and archivists. T1/2 is a sound installation built from field recordings of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in eastern Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union conducted over 450 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989. Captured with hydrophones, geophones and contact microphones, the recordings decay in time with the half-lives of radionuclides still present in the ground.

The IKO, a twenty-faced loudspeaker system, is treated not as a sound source but as a spatial instrument, inseparable from its surroundings. This practical demonstration activates the IKO in the space itself, showing how sound can shape, inhabit and reconfigure the rooms around us.