Through listening, we build relationships with places and subjectivities. How can aural memories and listening experiences help to understand processes of trauma and recovery? What are the ethical implications of listening to testimonies of traumatic experiences? This paper examines the ethical responsibility of bearing witness within trauma and recovery in music scholarship. I draw on my research with survivors and parents of victims of the Bataclan terrorist attack in Paris, which unfolded on the evening of 13 November 2015 during a rock concert. Considering my research as a process of co-construction of knowledge, I show how the study of listening experiences and aural memories of survivors contributes to understanding trauma, mnemonic dynamics and processes of recovery related to sound following violent events. Furthermore, I argue that qualitative research is a process of collective discovery, which transforms the subjectivities of both researchers and research participants. The process of witnessing is dialogical. Exploring and writing about Bataclan survivors’ embodied experiences of sound required an ethics of listening and mutual understanding. Through our research-centred relationship, I discovered as much about my interlocutors as about myself and my own relationship to music, sound and silence.