Sounding Knowledge: About

This Sounding Knowledge Network developed from the Listening Across Disciplines II AHRC research project led by Prof. Salomé Voegelin. (CRiSAP, Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) and Prof. Anna Barney (Biomedical Acoustic Engineering at University of Southampton) between 2019-2021. Read about the Sonic Pedagogy research strand of Listening Across Disciplines II.

Sounding Knowledge Network responds to the visuo-centrism of conventional educational methods and the resulting lack of participative and embodied learning opportunities. It does so by investigating the potential of a Sonic Pedagogy that promotes and practices embodied, sensory and tacit learning possibilities, which are able to nurture a sensational dimension in education that can engage students within the classroom as well as the complex socio-political environments we live in (Ebner, 2019).

Current educational patterns conceptualise knowledge as predominantly visual and text-based (Gershon, 2011). This focus on visual methods and contents represents the general dominance of visual epistemologies and hierarchies that exclude many learning participants and their experiences which find no representation or cannot be grasped within this hegemonic scheme (hooks, 2009). This exclusion and limitation of the learning experience has educational consequences: disinterest and disenfranchisement of student sub-groups, resulting in gaps in educational attainment and exclusion (Ortloff, 2009), which translate into societal consequences: disengagement from the democratic process, a lack of active citizenship and cultural participation leading to social and cultural exclusion, poverty, extremism and right-wing populism.

Addressing these complex interdependencies, this network brings together a multidisciplinary group of specialists from Sound Art and Sound Studies, Education Studies, Pedagogy and Civic Education, as well as students, teachers, Early Career Researchers and other stakeholders, in order to conceptualise, test and develop sound beyond a narrow expectation of hearing a referential or objective sound (Gallagher, 2017), as radical sensory and participatory element for education. The network will establish Sonic Pedagogy and the practice of Aural Literacy as modes of teaching and learning that can admit the "sensational" (Springgay, 2011), support participative and plural teaching and learning, and thus a participative and inclusive civic identity and agency. The project is developed in the triangulation of Sound Studies, Sound Arts and Education (Pedagogy and 'Bildung'), and within the frame of a 'sonic turn' in arts and social science (Eng, 2017).

The network will be realised through five events: Three online meetings - two to exchange expertise and methods, and one to evaluate possibilities for transfer and impact; and two offline workshops, to create, test and apply Sonic Pedagogy in the form of a toolkit which, as Zine-Workbook, will be available online and in print to be used as a manual for teaching and learning from sound. Each network event will be edited into a radio programme, broadcast both in Germany and the UK. The insights of the network will further be publicised through two peer-reviewed articles and a conference presentation.