Listening Across Disciplines (LxD) is a network project that brings together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists as well as scholars and practitioners from the humanities, to workacross disciplinary boundaries on the recently emerging focus on sound and listening.
The aim of the network is to initiate an exchange that draws together auditory research initiatives and methods from across the disciplines to advance their status and use, and to generate a space where culture and science can collide to generate new knowledge and create innovative modes of knowledge production that bring value within and between the disciplines, and ultimately to a general public.
The project is funded by an AHRC grant and is run by Dr. Salomé Voegelin (PI), Reader in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, UAL, and Co-I Dr. Anna Barney, Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering at Southampton University.
Research
Julian Weaver, Finetuned's director, took part in all three Network Events which were designed to perform key moments of enquiry each pursuing a particular focus: Listening to the Environment, Bodies and Materialities, and Language, Culture and Artefacts.
The events brought together a diverse array of participants which included Susan Schuppli, Andrea Polli, Raviv Ganchrow, Holger Schulze, and many others.
Web Development
We designed and developed the LxD website in Wordpress using advanced development tooling from Roots.io including Sage:
Sage from roots.io stands out as an exceptional tool for WordPress theme development due to its numerous advantages and robust features: a 10,000 hour headstart.
Unlike many other practices in Wordpress theme design, Sage follows a modern development workflow that embraces contemporary technologies and best practices. With its integration of the popular build tools like Webpack and Laravel Mix, Sage allows developers to efficiently manage front-end assets, compile SCSS and ES6, and optimize code for production.
This enabled us to create a fast and optimized theme that enhanced the performance and user experience of the website.
Additionally, Sage incorporates the Blade templating engine, which provides a cleaner and more organized approach to building WordPress themes compared to the traditional PHP-based templating. The separation of concerns and reusability offered by Blade greatly improves code maintainability and facilitates collaboration among developers.
Overall, Sage empowers developers with modern tools, efficient workflows, and enhanced templating capabilities, making it a superior choice for WordPress theme development.
On the backend, we deployed Advanced Custom Fields Pro and Siteorigin's Pagebuilder on a hardened Wordpress configuration which we further reinforced with iThemes Security.
Outcomes
Julian's knowledge of the presented topics and contexts: from sonifying astrophysics data to sensor-based stethoscopy, together with being allocated a free-floating role across the events, provided a number of insights that contributed to the design of the second phase of the project in which Finetuned was to become a co-applicant and project partner.
On the technical side, our decision to leverage Sage tooling allowed us to easily upgrade and re-theme the website when we reached phase 2.
Listen to podcasts of the events, and more, at https://www.listeningacrossdisciplines.net/archives/2016/
Capture of the archived phase 1 site.