Listening Across Disciplines – LxD II
Listening Across Disciplines – LxD II
Research Project
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council | 2019 – 2021
Principal investigator – Salomé Voegelin, Professor of Sound, London College of Communication (University of the Arts London)
Co-investigator – Dr Anna Barney, Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering, University of Southampton
Post-doctoral Researcher – Dr Mark Peter Wright (LCC, UAL)
Project Administrator – Brigitte Hart (LCC, UAL)
Project Co-applicant: Finetuned Limited
Project Partners: Urbanidentity | University of Edinburgh, Sound Studies Lab | Health Sciences (UoS) | Science + Media Museum Bradford | Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at LSE (the London School of Economics) | Arup, Resonance 104.4FM, Points of Listening
Listening Across Disciplines II (LxDII) is an AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded project which systematically investigates the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities and into science, social science and technology. The project continues and builds on the educational, societal and cultural impacts achieved by an AHRC network project grant of the same name (2016-17).
Working from this substantial and growing network of academics and non-academics, LxDII positions listening as an emerging investigative approach, able to: access new information relevant to the pressing problems of social exclusion, dementia, lung health, auscultation (medical listening) and speech recognition, and deliver new insights to curation, music, art, urban planning and civil engineering, where sound can reveal hidden potentialities and contribute to our understanding of culture and how we live together.
The project is invested in the value of listening as a reliable research method, emphasising for the first time the cross disciplinary benefit of a sonic turn and providing its theoretical discussions with a shareable vocabulary. It will make a major contribution to studies of sound as well as to the practical application of listening across disciplines by establishing listening protocols and resources to build legitimacy and consensus. Thus, this project seeks to enable the potential of listening to yield scholarly and non-academic benefits for an array of questions that we are facing currently, making a radical contribution to current scientific and cultural problems, and impacting powerfully on the development of knowledge production and interpretation.
Research Aims
- To create new knowledge and innovative mechanisms of knowledge production within the arts and humanities, the social and sciences and technology research through listening as a cross disciplinary research tool.
- To establish listening as a legitimate and reliable, future orientated, methodology across the arts and the sciences.
- To develop shared and shareable vocabularies, reference points and interpretative strategies in order to achieve consensus and comparability, and give "sonic knowledge" influence in the evaluation, assessment and theorisation of artistic and scientific problems.
- To support discipline specific teaching and learning of listening through case studies that can serve as teaching material.
LxDII will initiate various forms of public facing research including a live project website, regular radio broadcasts, curated events, presentations and academic outcomes along with a series of public activities organised in conjunction with Points of Listening. The project website makes the research processes, partner visits and listening protocols publicly available.
Image: Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton
Participate
The Listening across Disciplines team invites participants to listen to a sound (which changes monthly) and submit a description, definition or audition of that sound via the homepage of the LxD website. These descriptions help to understand how listening translates into words and communication, and what communal crossovers and shared understandings we can develop from that.
Link to the monthly reveal – showcasing listening descriptions
Events
- Sound & Listening on the edge of Music, Performance, Film and New Media – Dr Salomé Voegelin presented a talk entitled 'Listening out for ambiguous knowledge and unreliable traces of thought,' at Ghent University for Sound & Listening on the edge of Music, Performance, Film and New Media, 2019
- SAY AAAAAAHHHHHH – Dr Salomé Voegelin delivered an improvised, performance lecture in which sonic and textual material was used to stimulate and frame notions of ‘listening’ followed by a Q+A. The Old Operating Theatre, London, 2019
- SSTA Keynote Lecture – Dr Salomé Voegelin & Prof Anna Barney delivered their keynote lecture Accessing Disciplinary Hinterlands through Listening for the Irish Sound, Science & Technology annual conference (ISSTA), 2018 [listen to the keynote via the LxD webpage]
Researchers
Co-investigator Prof. Anna Barney
Principal investigator Professor Salomé Voegelin