Sonic Acts is an interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam that grew out of a festival first held over three evenings at the Paradiso club in August 1994. Its early editions set out to treat the club as a place for critical investigation, placing composers such as Xenakis and Stockhausen next to the electronic artists of the day, and to connect sound with art, theory and technology.
From the mid-2010s, with the 2015 festival The Geologic Imagination and the three-year Dark Ecology project, its programme turned explicitly towards the environmental crisis. Over the years it has hosted figures central to drone and listening practice, among them Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman and Hildegard Westerkamp. In 2022 the annual festival became a biennial; the thirtieth-anniversary edition in 2024, The Spell of the Sensuous, ran across fifteen Amsterdam venues, from Paradiso and the Oude Kerk to the Stedelijk Museum.