Title: Listening Across Disciplines II
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Abstract: This project is the first to systematically investigate the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities and into science, social science and technology. It positions listening as an emerging investigative approach, 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. To evidence and develop listening's capacity as a reliable research tool, this project sets out, through partnerships and embedded co-working staged over five carefully organized phases, to observe, document and analyse listening and to develop protocols of best practice for its shared application across disciplines. Historically benefits of listening have been neglected in most disciplines due to its perceived unreliability. Recently there has been a marked sonic turn across the arts and humanities, with a growing interest in sound and listening. However in science, despite evidence of a broad interest in sound, listening is used mainly as a qualitative process, considered to lack legitimacy and viewed as subjective, peripheral to established data analysis methods, and being in need of technological (visual) verification. This project is invested in the value of listening as a reliable research method, emphasising for the first time the cross disciplinary benefit of a sonic turn and providing its theoretical discussions with a shareable vocabulary. It will make a major contribution to studies of sound as well as to the practical application of listening across disciplines by establishing listening protocols and resources to build legitimacy and consensus. Thus, this project seeks to enable the potential of listening to yield scholarly and non-academic benefits for an array of questions that we are facing currently, making a radical contribution to current scientific and cultural problems, and impacting powerfully on the development of knowledge production and interpretation. The project team is based at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London (UAL) and University of Southampton (UoS). The project unfolds through strategically timed, planned exchanges and embedded co-working with national and international academic and professional partners. The collaboration between CRiSAP (Centre for Research in Sound Arts Practice) at LCC and ISVR (Institute of Sound and Vibration Research) at UoS presents a unique context, instituting the meeting of scientific and artistic perspectives on listening this project seeks to explore. The primary context is the AHRC network project of the same name, led by the PI and Co-I in 2016/17. This project will build on the international network meetings and the findings generated there, which serve to inform and validate its purpose, method and scope. To ensure public participation and access, the team will work in close partnership with Resonance FM (a global broadcasting station) and Points of Listening a public engagement program and will pursue outreach events: the Being Human Festival www.beinghumanfestival.org/, The Winchester Science Centre - science outreach for kids, and the Southampton Science and Engineering Festival www.southampton.ac.uk/per/university/festival/index.page. Outcomes include: A project website, which makes the research processes and the listening protocols publicly available; a book of case studies, which serves as an educational resource, presenting the protocols in a format that can support their implementation in all relevant curricula; a glossary to facilitate shared working and consensus building; a peer reviewed article, and a special issue of the peer reviewed Journal of Sonic Studies.


Research activity codes: 1.4 METHODOLOGIES AND MEASUREMENTS;1.5 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (UNDERPINNING)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE;EAR