Entering Les Dlices, at the end of a conference devoted to the acoustic signature of an era of radical change, one could not help but wonder about the sound of this place.Here, in the heart of Geneva, in the parlour of the htel particulier where Voltaire lived from 1755 to 1760, it is the muffled sound of traffic through the open windows, the creaking of the parquet floor, the comings and goings of technicians -the room is filled with microphones and cameras -the murmurs of the audience and the rustling of programme notes that can be heard as the summer sky slowly turns a deeper blue.The eye has only a moment to rest on the earth-coloured bust that Jean-Antoine Houdon made of the bestknown occupant of these premises before students of the baroque violin class at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis enter and start playing.Their sparkling interpretation of pieces by Gaspard Fritz, Antonio Caldara and Jean-Baptiste Senaill -among others -makes one feel less transported to the past than connected to the place.This musical moment blends with the sounds of the city, as such performances already did for Voltaire, who heard music by some of the same composers here.What echoed off the walls was not only a selected repertoire but also the murmur of the town's climate, of its inhabitants and of the guests it welcomed -or the outcasts it expelled.Surely, there is something we now know about this place, having listened to and within it, which fits in with the concept of acoustemology, introduced by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld.All we are left wondering is whether the delights after which a French philosophe named his house could have been those of disruption.Voltaire, in any case, remained in the background during the conference itself, as most of the 'big names' that are usually summoned when addressing the topic of eighteenth-century musical sociability were similarly omitted.Instead, participants in the conference brought to light a full range of figures -diverse, ordinary, atypical, sometimes enigmatic -that allowed attendees to think afresh about the aesthetic and social dynamics of the pre-romantic, revolutionary and Napoleonic periods.With a remarkable consistency from one paper to another, this 'repopulation' of late eighteenthcentury musical circles deepened the question of what -and who -it took to hear, to listen and, therefore, to live during those times.Among these reconsidered actors, the most-discussed one was the Basel-based silk manufacturer and bourgeois Lukas Sarasin (1730-1802).Sarasin's extensive music collection and numerous efforts to promote contemporary musicians and composers were, from August 2023 to
Achille Kienholz (Sun,) studied this question.