Caroline Claus is a Brussels-based artist–researcher working at the intersection of urban sound studies, spatial practice and planning/design research. With a background in sociology (UGent), urban development and spatial planning (EhB & VUB), and a practice-based PhD in Architecture (KU Leuven, 2022), she develops listening-based methods that treat urban sound both as affective material for public discussion and as input for planning and design.

Her projects take the form of audio essays, listening atlases, sonic cartographies, installations and lecture-performances. Rather than immersive soundscapes, she focuses on articulated descriptions of sonic conditions that can inform urban strategies, design decisions and public deliberation. A central notion in her work is the sonic habitat: urban sites understood as intentionally shaped sonic environments, where lived experience, affect and spatial configurations are tightly entangled.

Claus’s approach builds on her long-term community outreach work in urban development; Urban Sound Design Process (Warsaw, 2015) marked an early methodological milestone. She explores how listening can function as a mode of urban analysis and strategy.  Her doctoral research, Towards a Decentering of the Listener in Planning and Design Research: Attuning to Affective Sonic Materiality for Transitory Railway Space along Brussels Line 28 (KU Leuven, 2022), further developed this line by linking sonic experience to questions of access, exposure and co-presence in infrastructural space. She frames this trajectory as “listening as urban strategy” (or Sonic UX): using situated listening, annotation, and geospatial analysis to understand how planning decisions are sensed in everyday sonic life.

Recent work includes CDA Sonic Drift, a sonic geographic dérive in Brussels North developed within her ReSilence EU S+T+ARTS residency.  Combining geolocated recordings, situated annotation, participatory feedback and GIS-based analysis, the project proposes a decision-oriented way of reading “sonic space shifts” in relation to densification, mobility and the transformation of public and semi-public space.

Across her practice, Claus treats circulation as part of the work: methods must hold as they move between audiences and disciplines. She therefore publishes and releases artefacts, including memos, atlases, scores, datasets, publications, and interfaces, so that research remains traceable over time, attribution is clear, and questions can be discussed and renegotiated in public, with accountability.