Litmus.
Tornasole
Outer Space
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Litmus.
Tornasole
Outer Space
Litmus.
An ear-idescent
genre-defying
cross-artform
biopunk and
plurilingual
audio platform.
Litmus is a digital ecosystem dedicated to creative audio works in any language, from all over the world.
Litmus produces and selects podcasts that combine outstanding writing (it’s lit as in literature) and sound design (it’s mus as in music), translates them and organises them in bespoke series and collections that guide the listener through its website and app. This listening house is called Tornasole.
Litmus travels through digital spacetime, mixing memory and desire, mapping and interconnecting audio platforms, web radios and sound producers new and old, from all over the web. This living network is called Outer Space.
Podcast consumption keeps growing massively worldwide.
Time spent on podcasts sees the strongest increase
Podcasts are the only media to see a two figures growth in percentage: +14%, for an average of 40 minutes of listening a day.
In 2023, on-demand audio overtook linear audio for the first time
largely due to the growth in popularity of podcasting, which has seen tremendous success over the past few years. Globally, podcasts amass 464.7 million listeners.
If video killed the radio star, podcasting might just save it
Podcasts have never been as popular as they are now. In fact, 2024 was the first time that a majority of Americans listened to podcasts every single month.
And yet podcasts users are presently confined by two unchallenged barriers.
A linguistic barrier
Unlike books or films, podcasts aren’t translated, and you can listen only to the languages you know, missing out on a great deal of the world’s creations and diversities.
A curatorial barrier
It is very hard to navigate the mare magnum of podcasting. Podcast platforms offer either in-house productions only, or overwhelming amounts of contents organised by unsatisfying algorithms.
Litmus brings to the world of podcasting the experience, outreach and sensitivities of pre-digital media, namely literature and cinema, creating one of the world’s first curated podcast network.
Like someone in love, like a talent scout, Litmus searches the world of audio to discover the most outstanding, ear-resistable existing work and emerging authors, in every language.
Like a publishing house, like Mubi for cinema, Litmus produces, selects, translates, adapts and organises its content in bespoke series and collections that listeners can recognise and trust.
Litmus interconnects audio producers and platforms that have similar ears and hearts, and yet are feeling lonely as twins separated at birth who have never been together since.
Like your favourite librarian, like a forgotten map, Litmus keeps track of the many brilliant audio ventures that, long lost or discontinued, are still wishing to be heard.
Like the lichen it takes its name from, like the symbiosis of a photosynthetic alga and a networking mycelium, Litmus connects and transforms.
Litmus’ listening house is Tornasole.
Tornasole is conceived like a series of poetry in translation, collecting the most challenging and rewarding, innovative and loved audio work in the world, of all genres, in every language, in translation. Tornasole is a translator in a monolingual medium.
Tornasole organises and promotes its podcasts and brings them to the listeners in highly curated forms that include cutting-edge UX approaches, sound and graphic design, typographical sensitivities, content- and form-driven series, bespoke indexes, summaries and other elective affinities. Tornasole is a human selector in the world of audio.
Imagine your favourite literary publisher, counterculture magazine and arthouse producer. Apply it to the world of podcasts, and the podcasts of the world.
How will this work.
Because of its multilingualism, Tornasole explores both the most local approaches to audio as well as world-wide trends, producing, selecting and adapting the audio-world’s brilliance to make it accessible in several languages, in multiple digital formats and across physical devices.
Tornasole will deploy human-enhanced machine transcriptions and translations to generate a textual version of the chosen podcasts. The translations will take two forms, as in films: subtitles and dubbing.
Subtitling isn’t the most immediate solution for audio, but Tornasole has been exploring ways to challenge this habit, developing designs that un-screen your screens, filling them with large, eye-pleasing fonts, as well as cross-devices usage that may kindle your way of listening, all the way to animation, cross art-forms adaptations and printed-paper-first approaches to audio.
As for dubbing, that evolutionary mishap on the verge of being refined by technology, Tornasole will carefully mix human and machine skills. In specific projects compatible with this approach, Tornasole will experiment with a combination of voice cloning and human fine-tuning.
A first series will invite you to listen to silence.
Moe Choucair’s Weather Report deals with the absence of silence due to the sonic terror deafening Lebanon during the last year.
Saleh Addonia tells the world through the different hearing aids that shaped it for him at different stages of his life.
Eleanor McDowall conveys silence as class privilege.
Silencio para rescatar brings you to listen to silence as if you were saving a life.
Jonathan Berman reads the erotic meaning of fleeting silences in classical music.
Sarakatsani falls between a last nomadic generation and first settled one, their kids and nemesis, what can they tell each other, and what not.
silent listen
There is more. Outer Space.
Litmus’ living network is Outer Space.
Tornasole is Litmus’ photobiont, a photosynthetic being partnering with Litmus’ other component, the mycobiont with its evergrowing network of interconnections.
Outer Space is a sound offspring of the wood-wide and the world-wide webs, woven by humans.
If Tornasole is a listening house, Outer Space is like books actively reaching out and making friends across shelves.
Outer Space will expand through space and time, covering digital miles to collect and interconnect audio platforms and productions from every corner of the web – those that are shaping our ways of listening, those that once did and are all but forgotten, and those that are just about to.
Outer Space is an interactive map of the audio-world.
Pick a podcast or a platform on the map, listen to it, then follow its connections: its authors will lead you to their favourite authors, its producers to the producers they admire the most, its sound-designers may lead you astray all the way to their musical inspirations. One audio platform will lead to another, lightly, as in space, as sidereal stepping-stones.
These are all human recommendations, ranging from subtle sonic affinities all the way to factual elements such as language, theme or style. The resulting dataset of interconnected insights are organised and narrated by exploratory data visualization.
And you, the listeners, can possibly add to it if you let us know what other web radio or podcast comes to mind while you are in Outer Space.
We’re nearly there.
Can you hear us?
Litmus.
Promoted by
Associazione Litmus,
based in Switzerland
© Litmus 2025
Litmus’ board is composed by international authors, producers and designers who foster a wide network of collaborations, ranging from individual creators to entire platforms and broadcasters.
Jacqueline Haener
Vanni Bianconi
Zeno Gabaglio
Moe Choucair
Daria Corrias
Eleanor McDowall
Alan Alpenfelt
Litmus.
Promoted by
Associazione Litmus,
based in Switzerland
Litmus’ board is composed by international authors, producers and designers who foster a wide network of collaborations, ranging from individual creators to entire platforms and broadcasters.
Jacqueline Haener
Vanni Bianconi
Zeno Gabaglio
Moe Choucair
Daria Corrias
Eleanor McDowall
Alan Alpenfelt
© Litmus 2025
