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We are pleased to announce the launch of SoundEffects, a new international peer-reviewed journal on sound and sound experience operating on the Open Journal System. SoundEffects brings together a plurality of theories, methodologies, and historical approaches applicable to sound as both mediated and unmediated experience. The journal primarily addresses disciplines within media and communication studies, aesthetics, musicology, comparative literature, cultural studies, psychology and sociology. In order to push the boundary of interdisciplinary sound studies into new areas, we also encourage contributions from disciplines such as health care, architecture, and sound design. As the only international journal to take a humanities-based interdisciplinary approach to sound, SoundEffects is responding to the increasing global interest in sound studies.

"The possibility that sounds might be objects, entities, or things is an open question.  However, many theories of sound close the question down via reductive assertions. Some argue that sounds cannot be things because things are autonomous entities whereas sounds are relative. Others argue that sounds cannot be things because things are durable bodies whereas sounds are temporal phenomena. The following essay begins by reviewing and critiquing these arguments as they appear in musicology, sound studies, and philosophy.  Arguments against sound's autonomy are generally motivated by anthropocentric ideologies, which by presuming humans' ontological privilege reduce sounds to human experiences, practices, and conditions.  "

"Crumpling a thin sheet produces a characteristic sound, comprised of distinct clicking sounds corresponding to buckling events. We propose a physically based algorithm that automatically synthesizes crumpling sounds for a given thin shell animation. The resulting sound is a superposition of individually synthesized clicking sounds corresponding to visually significant and insignificant buckling events. We identify visually signifi- cant buckling events on the dynamically evolving thin surface mesh, and instantiate visually insignificant buckling events via a stochastic model that seeks to mimic the power-law distribution of buckling energies observed in many materials. In either case, the synthesis of a buckling sound employs linear modal analysis of the deformed thin shell. Because different buckling events in general occur at different deformed configurations, the question arises whether the calculation of linear modes can be reused. We amortize the cost of the linear modal analysis by dynamically partitioning the mesh into nearly rigid pieces: the modal analysis of a rigidly moving piece is retained over time, and the modal analysis of the assembly is obtained via Component Mode Synthesis (CMS). We illustrate our approach through a series of examples and a perceptual user study, demonstrating the utility of the sound synthesis method in producing realistic sounds at practical computation times."

"As museums continue to search for new ways to attract visitors, recent trends within museum practice have focused on providing audiences with multisensory experiences. Books such as 2014's The Multisensory Museum present preliminary strategies by which museums might help visitors engage with collections using senses beyond the visual. In this article, an overview of the multisensory roots of museum display and an exploration of the shifting definition of 'object' leads to a discussion of Pierre Schaeffer's musical term objet sonore - the 'sound object', which has traditionally stood for recorded sounds on magnetic tape used as source material for electroacoustic musical composition. A problematic term within sound studies, this article proposes a revised definition of 'sound object', shifting it from experimental music into the realm of the author's own experimental curatorial practice of establishing The Museum of Portable Sound, an institution dedicated to the collection and display of sounds as cultural objects. Utilising Brian Kane's critique of Schaeffer, Christoph Cox and Casey O'Callaghan's thoughts on sonic materialism, Dan Novak and Matt Sakakeeny's anthropological approach to sound theory, and art historian Alexander Nagel's thoughts on the origins of art forgery, this article presents a new working definition of the sound object as a museological (rather than a musical) concept."

"The Discovery of Sound in the Sea website will introduce you to the science and uses of Sound in the Sea. There are several major sections on the site such as The Science of Sound in the Sea, People and Sound in the Sea, and Animals and Sound in the Sea. You will find the site's Audio Gallery a fascinating place to visit where you can listen to underwater sounds created by marine animals, human activities, and natural phenomena such as lightning, earthquakes, and rain. Check out the Technology Gallery and discover a variety of equipment that uses sound to investigate the ocean. Watch video interviews with scientists that study how marine animals produce and hear sounds. Investigate how scientists use underwater acoustics to track ocean currents, identify potential obstacles, and quantify fish distributions. There are also resources for many specialized audiences, including teachers, students, the media, and decision makers."

Urban sound has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Yet, city planning is concerned mainly with noise, simply because annoying sounds come to the attention of city officials in the form of complaints, while general urban sounds cannot be easily captured at city scale. To capture both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, we propose a new methodology that relies on tagging information of georeferenced pictures. We propose the first urban sound dictionary and compare it to the one produced by collating insights from the literature: ours is experimentally more valid (if correlated with official noise pollution levels) and offers wider geographic coverage. From picture tags, we then study the relationship between soundscapes and emotions. We learn that streets with music sounds are associated with strong emotions of joy or sadness, while those with human sounds are associated with joy or surprise. Finally, we study the relationship between soundscapes and people's perceptions and, in so doing, we are able to map which areas are chaotic, monotonous, calm, and exciting.Those insights promise to inform the creation of restorative experiences in our increasingly urbanized world.

"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."

"Cooking sounds resonate between the interest they draw in contemporary culture and the neglect in which we have been under-hearing them for many years. It is addressed by Tara Brabazon, a researcher in Cultural Studies, in her article The Sounds of Food: Defamiliarization and the Blinding of Taste.[1] She indicates that in food literature, the attention given to sound is reduced and approaches the acoustics of food as an "oral history" of the obsolete, unheard, undocumented geographies created around food, questioning the cultural hegemony of the visual, the tactile, and the gustatory. Anna Harris is an anthropologist studying topics related with well-being and nutrition who wrote the article The Hollow Knock and Other Sounds in Recipes,[2] where she examines how sound has been used to communicate and instruct the preparation of a group of food recipes including bread loafs. "

The influence of the global south in sound practices and sound studies. "In this sounding canon, however, an astounding absence of Global South sound thinkers, artists, and practitioners is observed. Let's measure how many non-western scholars participate in the major canonical texts mentioned above: 1, that's just 2%! "

"A sound artist and musician, Cusack explores the relationship between the sound in an environment, its geography or physical features, and the people living and working there. Peter Cusack ImageHe travels the world to study and collect sounds that uniquely define cultures and ecosystems, from the crack of spring ice breakup on Siberia's Lake Baikal to the sounds of Chernobyl and other sites that have sustained major environmental damage. He is senior lecturer in Sound Arts & Design, London College of Communication, University of Arts London."

"Today a growing group of sonic artists engage with plants as collaborators in their processes and creations. The duo Feral Practice invites audience members to sound walks in forests to reflect on ecological and social issues in the vicinity of trees. Sound artist Mileece senses signals from plants to develop sound-generating algorithms that she combines with field recordings to design immersive sound installations, a technology akin to the one used by Tosca Terán to detect activity in mycorrhizal systems which she converts into musical notes. Cristina Ochoa and Eduardo Vindiola read signalling activity in beets and modulate their rhythmic patterns to perform with them. Leslie Garcia studies plant communication to design prosthetic devices that simulate an abstract voice for plants through a process of biofeedback."

At a time when technological progress is bringing city sounds to the threshold of bedlam it is no longer sufficient to design environments that satisfy the eye alone. Today's city dweller is bombarded by a continuous stream of invisible but highly attention-demanding sounds, smells, and microclimates. His experience of the city is a crazy quilt of sense impressions, each of which contributes to the total picture. It is important to explore the consequences of this invasion of nonvisual sensations on the quality of city life and to ask how manipulation of them might improve that quality. This study explores two aspects of the problem: What is the perceived variety and character of city sounds? How do sounds influence perception of the visible city? Our research is not a scientific experiment, but an exploratory study in which we have attempted to identify those issues that deserve more careful attention in later experimental research and city design.

At a time when technological progress is bringing city sounds to the threshold of bedlam it is no longer sufficient to design environments that satisfy the eye alone. Today's city dweller is bombarded by a continuous stream of invisible but highly attention-demanding sounds, smells, and microclimates. His experience of the city is a crazy quilt of sense impressions, each of which contributes to the total picture. It is important to explore the consequences of this invasion of nonvisual sensations on the quality of city life and to ask how manipulation of them might improve that quality. This study explores two aspects of the problem: What is the perceived variety and character of city sounds? How do sounds influence perception of the visible city? Our research is not a scientific experiment, but an exploratory study in which we have attempted to identify those issues that deserve more careful attention in later experimental research and city design.

" Science of storytelling 5 identified specific sounds that filmmakers use to scare us in horror-thriller films. In this article, I will be revealing the science of how different sounds in horror-thriller films optimise engagement. The research findings are based on a 5-year scientific study of suspense and engagement in horror-thriller films. I will first summarise the film experiment research methods and how our brain responds to a fear stimulus through a chain of neurological processes that can be recorded and analysed. Finally, the research outcomes (highlights) describe how viewers physiologically responded to specific sounds in horror-thriller films, in terms of anxiety durability (time) and intensity (level)."

"This issue of Interference asked authors to consider sound as the means to which we can explain the sonic. Contributions to the study of sound, apart from practice-based works, are often disseminated through language and text. This is the case for most analysis or research into sensory based and phenomenological studies. There is of course a strong case to be made for text; it is the universal way in which contemporary knowledge is transmitted. But perhaps there is an argument to be made for new ways to not only explore sound but to disseminate ideas around the sonic. For example, in what way can 'sonic papers' represent ideas about the experience of space and place, local and community knowledge? How can emerging technologies engage with both the everyday soundscape and how we 'curate this experience'? What is the potential of listening methods as a tool to engage community with 'soundscape preservation' and as a tool to critique and challenge urban planning projects?"

"Interface: Echolocation Headphones. 10/12 Echolocation Headphones is a project that studies new applications for parametric sound technologies. This study emphasizes on augmentation of the auditory sense by enhancing our current ability of processing omnidirectional sound by providing a focal point to audition, similar to a visual focal point. Currently, human echolocation is being explored by the blind who have reached an increased understanding of sound and spatial relationships. In other species echolocation is facilitated by different evolutionary traits that differ from the current human senses. These headphones provide the opportunity for focal audition similar to a focal point in vision, depicting a more detailed spatial image of the parameters of the space surrounding the subject. "

"Instead of dealing with the aesthetic aspects of the acoustic environment, the evolution of listening habits or cultural representations of urban noise, sound will be considered as a means for action and social practice. This paper tries to develop a praxiological approach to sound. To do so, two major obstacles must be overcome. On the one hand, it is necessary to challenge the three main socially recognized categories of sounds: music, speech and noise. "

"Chris Watson shares his experience as a composer and location wildlife sound recordist, discussing the technical elements of field sound recording and presenting his recordings of the rainforests near Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Brinicles (icicles forming under sea ice) in the Arctic and Antarctic. He concludes with a case study, presenting a piece of sound art, commissioned by the National Gallery, created in response to John Constable's The Cornfield."

"This article presents a unifying theory of soundscape ecology, which brings the idea of the soundscape-the collection of sounds that emanate from landscapes-into a research and application focus. Our conceptual framework of soundscape ecology is based on the causes and consequences of biological (biophony), geophysical (geophony), and human-produced (anthrophony) sounds. We argue that soundscape ecology shares many parallels with landscape ecology, and it should therefore be considered a branch of this maturing field. We propose a research agenda for soundscape ecology that includes six areas: (1) measurement and analytical challenges, (2) spatial-temporal dynamics, (3) soundscape linkage to environmental covariates, (4) human impacts on the soundscape, (5) soundscape impacts on humans, and (6) soundscape impacts on ecosystems. We present case studies that illustrate different approaches to understanding soundscape dynamics. Because soundscapes are our auditory link to nature, we also argue for their protection, using the knowledge of how sounds are produced by the environment and humans."

THE SCHOOL OF SOUND began in 1998 as a single, four-day event aimed at exploring the creative use of sound in the arts and media, with a special emphasis on film and screen productions. It was responding to the limited opportunities to study sound, particularly for film. Our first event attracted over 200 people from 25 countries. The programme featured Walter Murch, Michel Chion, Piers Plowright, Mike Figgis, Laura Mulvey, Peter Kubelka and the Quay Brothers. Since then, the SOS has expanded its programme to include weekend seminars, intensive practical workshops, lectures, 'listening' events, consultancies for professional practitioners and, of course, the international symposium held every two years.