This presentation introduces the first year of the doctoral project From Soundscape to Sonotopia: Sensitive and Creative Listening as a Paradigm in Music Education. The research investigates how practices of sensitive and creative listening can transform Music Education in middle schools, moving beyond reproduction toward co-creation, presence, and relational awareness. The school is approached as a sonotopia, a sonic and affective territory that is continuously co-constructed by its community.The theoretical framework builds on R. Murray Schafer (1994) and his work on acoustic ecology, Pauline Oliveros (2005) and her practice of deep listening, Jean-Luc Nancy (2007) and his conception of listening as relation, and Brandon LaBelle (2010) on acoustic territories. Together, these perspectives support the central research question: how can listening reshape the culture of music classrooms and the wider school environment?The first year of fieldwork (2025/26) is being carried out with approximately 170 students in 5th and 6th grades at a middle school in Odivelas, Portugal. The methodology combines autoethnography (Ellis, Adams and Bochner, 2011; Spry, 2001), a/r/tography (Irwin and Springgay, 2008), and collaborative sound practices inspired by Schafer (1994), Oliveros (2005), and Small (1998). Planned activities include Invisible Listening exercises, soundwalks (Westerkamp, 1974), improvisations with everyday objects (DeNora, 2000), and the creation of a Museum of Noise (Voegelin, 2010; LaBelle, 2010). Data will be collected through sound maps, audio excerpts, student portfolios, and reflective journals.The project aims to explore three main dimensions of transformation. First, in terms of attention and presence, the study will examine how students may develop sustained listening and reframe classroom sound not as noise but as material for creation. Second, regarding creative participation, it will investigate how improvisation might promote distributed leadership, as students alternate between proposing, listening, and organizing sonic ideas. Third, at the level of relational environment, the research will consider how practices of sensitive and creative listening can foster collaboration and respect, while reimagining classrooms, corridors, and playgrounds as spaces for sonic exploration and artistic invention.The presentation will combine theoretical framing with an interactive component. A portable speaker will be used to share sound excerpts from the fieldwork in progress. The accompanying poster will include a QR code linking to a digital repository, where the international community will be able to follow the evolution of the research, access materials, and interact with the sonic practices under development.