Group items tagged

"Watching people, talking with them, and actively engaging in social practices are the participatory techniques through which the ethnographer learns to see the world as his or her participants do, rich with socially constructed and historically situated meaning. Yet the focus on seeing the world as your participants do sometimes eclipses the other sensory modes that people employ to make sense of social and material interactions."

Positive soundscapes project In the acoustics community, sound in the environment - especially that made by other people - has overwhelmingly been considered in negative terms, as both intrusive and undesirable. The strong focus of traditional engineering acoustics on reducing noise level ignores the many possibilities for characterising positive aspects of the soundscapes around us. Desirable aspects of the soundscape have been investigated in the past, mainly by artists and social scientists. This work has had little impact on quantitative engineering acoustics, however, perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines."

The project set out to give a rich and rigorous account of human perception of and response to soundscapes. To do this it used overlapping methods from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from the quantitative (e.g. acoustics) to the qualitative (e.g. social science) to the creative (e.g. sound art). Qualitative fieldwork (soundwalks and focus groups) determined that people conceptualised a soundscape into three components: sound sources (e.g. a market), sound descriptors (e.g. rumbling) and soundscape descriptors (e.g. hubbub). Lab-based listening tests along with the fieldwork have revealed that two key dimensions of the emotional response to a soundscape are calmness and vibrancy. In the lab these factors explain nearly 80% of the variance in listener response. Interview responses from real soundscapes further indicate that vibrancy can be expressed in two sub-dimensions expressing variation over time and over sound mix. Physiological validation of the main dimensions is provided by images of changes in the brain during listening from fMRI scans and by changes in heart rate. Artistic work and the public responses to it illustrate the huge range of sounds and soundscapes considered positive. Tools for simulating soundscapes have been developed and seem to be effective for several purposes, including design and public engagement - that is, sound play. The project results will lead to new metrics and assessment methods for soundscapes, new ideas for design and user engagement and, perhaps, better policy on environmental noise.

"The International Ambiances Network aims at structuring and developing the research field of architectural and urban ambiances. It wishes to promote the sensory domain in the questioning and design of lived space. This sensitive approach of the built environment involves all the senses (sound, light, odors, touch, heat,…). Such a network favors multisensoriality and pluridisciplinarity (human and social sciences ; architecture and urban planning ; engineering and applied physics). It is open to a wide variety of profiles and includes research activities as well as design, teaching or artistic ones."

"David Bobier is a self-identified hard of hearing media artist with a mental health diagnosis and is the parent of 2 deaf children. His work has been exhibited internationally and has been the focus of prominent touring exhibitions in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces. Bobier has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Grand NCE, Ontario Arts Council and New Brunswick Arts Council. "

This is an article about wind, dust, and their relations to life. It is a meditation on the liveliness of wind and airborne particles as they are experienced on the ground; in cultural texts including film, poetry, and oral history; and in the medium of satellite imagery. In dialogue with recent work in the social sciences and humanities that demonstrates how air and dust from the "South" are treated as foreign "intrusions" into Europe, this article proposes a focus on wind's animacies to further probe and nuance these claims. Situated primarily in Italy and the Balkans, two places where the author has familial relations and, in the case of the Balkans, deep ancestral history, the animacies of wind are examined specifically in relation to Scirocco and Jugo, two interrelated southerly winds commonly blowing in spring and autumn that sometimes bring "Saharan dust" to Europe. As a framework and scaffold, the article draws from Mel Chen's notion of "differential animacies": the ways animacy is bestowed on humans, animals, elements, and objects in hierarchies that are both revealing and "leaky." Exploring the animacies of Scirocco and Jugo shows how the wind acts as a force of de/humanization, as agency leaking across borders of life and nonlife, and as shape-shifting coauthor of collective memory.

"A fossilized ankylosaur voice box reveals that these beasts may have sported a far more sophisticated vocal range than scientists originally thought."

"An immersive marvel of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made by recent college graduate and Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller as part of the 1961 Harvard-Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea that set up tents among the indigenous Hubula (also known as Dani) people. "

"Urbanization has exposed people to extreme sound levels. Although researchers have investigated the ability of people to listen, analyze, and distinguish sound, the concept of noise has not been clearly articulated from a human perspective. The lack of knowledge on how people perceive noise limits our capacity to control it in a targeted manner. This study aimed to interpret the definition of noise from the public perspective based on a grounded theory approach. Seventy-eight participants were interviewed about noise, and four categories of perceived understanding of noise were identified: challenges, definitions of noise, opportunities, and action. As one of the challenges, urbanization is associated with increased noise levels around the human environment. In terms of definition, perceiving sound as noise is considered to be a result of the complex and dynamic process that includes sound, the environment, and humans. Sound and humans interact with the environment. In terms of opportunities, noise may have positive roles on certain occasions, dispelling the misconception that noise is exclusively negative. In addition, we found that noise perception has gradually shifted from noise control to noise utilization. In terms of action, noise can be controlled at the sound sources, susceptible target groups, susceptible behaviors and states, locations, and times where noise is perceived with high frequency. In this study, we investigated several aspects of noise, ranging from noise control, soundscape definition, and 'soundscape indices' (SSID) integration and application. Our findings provide an additional basis for developing better definitions, control, and utilization strategies of noise in the future, thereby improving the quality of the sound environment."