Listening Across Disciplines II (LxDII) is a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It systematically investigates the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities, science, social science and technology.

The project positions listening as an emerging investigative approach that is 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.

Through partnerships and embedded co-working staged over five carefully organized phases, the research will observe, document and analyse listening. The research is located in two main areas through the development of listening protocols and vocabularies. Public events and experimental workshops are consistently employed throughout the research as a way of co-constructing, testing and sharing cross-disciplinary knowledge.

The collaboration between Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at LCC and ISVR (Institute of Sound and Vibration Research) at UoS presents a unique context for this research, instituting the meeting of scientific and artistic perspectives on listening. Listening Across Disciplines II represents the continuance and development of a network grant called Listening Across Disciplines that was led by the PI and the Co-I from May 2016 until April 2017. This current research project will build on and expand the network of international researchers and initiatives brought together at its meetings and further develop the findings generated there, which serve to inform and validate its purpose, method and scope. Dr Salomé Voegelin, Professor of Sound (UAL) is the principal investigator. Dr Anna Barney, Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering (UoS) is the co-investigator. 

Our Role

Finetuned is the third co-applicant and a project partner. We co-developed specifc parts of the proposal based ideas developed duyring the network project. These specifically focused on the design and development of a web-based glossary that could accommodate the re-definitions and re-use of common terminologies across research fields establising an interdisciplinary reference that could be co-created and maintained by the research personnel and external partners.

Over the course of the project, the glossary becomae subsumed wiht in ocabularies and an adjunct to 'Listening Protocols'; ways of organising and articulating listening in a way that is useful and adaptable to various disciplines, enabling and legitimising sonic processes and materialities as part of research and knowledge production. Such protocols are derived from practice and the observation of practice, and take the form of an instructive document that while providing a shareable framework retain space for the contingency and unrepeatability of sound.

Outcomes

After successve periods of iterative developmemt with the research team over two years, we designed and produced a prototype web application; the Platform for Listening Protocols and Vocabularies. This combines the listening protocols and vocabularies in an application that attempts to embody the two without making an aside of either. The platform is dealt with in depth in a forthcoming co-authored paper to be published in Resonance: The Journal of Sound & Culture;  an interdisciplinary, international peer reviewed journal that features research and writing of scholars and artists working in fields typically considered to be the domain of sound art and sound studies.

Further Information

Find out more at https://www.listeningacrossdisciplines.net

Read more about the Platform for Listening Protocols and Vocabularies

Read our inviited contribution to Resonance Journal: Protocols of Listening: Reflections on the Development of an Interactive Digital Platform for Cross-Disciplinary Sound Research

Capture of the phase II site's homepage