Listening Across Disciplines

Listening across Disciplines is an Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) funded network project which brings together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists as well as scholars and practitioners from the humanities to work across disciplinary boundaries on the recently emerging focus on sound and listening. 

Lectures are organized around three themes:

  • Listening to the Environment
  • Listening to Bodies and Materialities
  • Listening to Language Culture and Artifacts

Listening to the Environment

Episode 1 with Raviv Ganchrow.
Broadcast date: 2 Nov 2016

Raviv works with sound, listening and technology as a sinologist. In this broadcast he discusses the interdependencies between sound place and listening, aspects of which is explored in his work through installation, writing and the development of pressure forming and vibration sensing technology.

Episode 2 with Peter Cusack.
Broadcast date: 9 Nov 2016

Peter’s project Sounds From Dangerous Places explores soundscapes at sites of major environmental damage such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, Kasabian oil fields and uk nuclear sites. This project is continuous and he is currently researching the regeneration of the North Aral sea in Kazakhstan. He describes the use of sound to explore documentary issues as ‘sonic journalism’. In this broadcast he talks about his Favourite Sounds project which aims to discover what people find positive about their every day sound environment.

Episode 3 with Sabine von Fischer.
Broadcast date: 16 Nov 2016

Sabine is an architectural historian and critic with a background in architecture and artistic practice. Her work focuses on the emergence of modern scientific acoustics, when listening by the human ear is complimented by electric measurement. In this broadcast she talks about the history of acoustics and architecture, with a particular focus on the relationship between measuring, hearing and the human body in the room.

Episode 4 with Bill Chaplin.
Broadcast date: 23 Nov 2016

In this broadcast Bill talks about how he studies the sun and other sun like stars by observing their natural resonances, and explains how sound is made naturally in the outermost layer of sun like stars. This ‘music of the spheres’ as he calls it, is used to not only estimate the properties of the stars, to asses their size, mass and age, but also to probe the structure and dynamics of their normally hidden interiors. His listening work is opening up new stellar systems elsewhere in the galaxy for detailed forensic study and hopes to better understand the interactions we have with our own star, the sun. He also talks about his collaboration with the sound artist Caroline Devine. Her work “5 Minute Oscillation of the Sun” is played as part of this broadcast.

Episode 5 with Mark P. Wright.
Broadcast date: 30 Nov 2016

Mark’s research and practice examines the relationship between humans, animals, environments and their associated technologies of capture. His practice troubles the ethico-aesthetic aspects of listening found within nature documentary tropes and site specific art legacies. Though a practice of playful critical hearing he brings to debate issues of subjectivity, preservation and place within sound arts relationship to ecology and its possible modes of critical representation.

Episode 6 with Salomé Voegelin.
Broadcast date: 7 Dec 2016

Listening Across Disciplines PI Salomé Voegelin is interested in listening as an artist and writer and aims to establish listening is an important socio-ecological sensibility and mode engagement which might however pluralise perception rather than find agreement; she is less interested in the veracity of data and scientific truth as much as in the fact that sound can evoke doubt in what we consider to be real and truthful, and instead can make us hear the sonic possibility of the world.

Episode 7 with Andrea Polli.
Broadcast date: 14 Dec 2016

Andrea is an artist working at the intersection of art, science and technology whose practice includes sound, media installation, public interventions, curating and directing art and community projects and writing. In this broadcast she presents how her listening engages in ideas of geo-sonification and climate activism.

Episode 9 with Alexandra Supper.
Broadcast date: 11 Jan 2017

In this ninth broadcast Alexandra Supper, Assistant Professor of Arts and Social Sciences, Technology & Society Studies, Maastricht University, talks about ‘listening to the sonification community listening’. She will discuss the use, application, problems and scope of sonification, introducing us to the debates that are currently taking place within the international community of auditory display and their quest to establish sonification as a legitimate scientific method.

Episode 8 with Susan Schuppli.
Broadcast date: 21 Dec 2016

In this eighth broadcast we hear from forensic architect and artists Susan Schuppli, Deputy Director Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, who talks about listening to drone strikes in relation to their forensic reconstruction, belonging and war crimes.

Listening to Bodies and Materialities

Episode 10 with Anna Barney.
Broadcast date: 18 Jan 2017

In this tenth broadcast, Anna Barney, Professor in Biomedical Acoustic Engineering in the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton, co-investigator of the Listening across Disciplines project, talks to us about her different kinds of deliberate not listening in relation to dementia and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Her talk reflects on the avoidance of listening for reasons of privacy and bio-medical ethics and as strategy for efficiency and objectivity in analysis.

Episode 11 with Rupert Cox. Broadcast date: 25 Jan 2017

Episode 11 with Rupert Cox.
Broadcast date: 25 Jan 2017

 

The eleventh broadcast in the series features Rupert Cox, a Visual Anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manchester, who will be talking about the anthropology of sound and in particular his field work, undertaken together with Angus Carlyle, on the US Military basis in Okinawa, Japan. (the CD developed from that research Air Pressure, is published by Gruenrekorder, Germany/ 2012/ Gruen 094/ LC09488/ GEMA/ EAN: 4050486059081)

Episode 12 with Cathy Lane.
Broadcast date: 1 Feb 2017

In this twelfth broadcast in the series we will hear from Cathy Lane, composer and sound artist, Professor of Sound Art and co-director of CRiSAP at the London College of Communication, UAL, who will be talking about sound based investigations of place and listening to the past through the present. Through a discussion of her work in the Outer Hebrides she ponders notions of archives and archiving, history and orality and negotiates issues of communication and how we record and compose the spoken voice and situate its social body in sound.

Episode 13 with John Wynne.
Broadcast date: 8 Feb 2017

In the thirteenth broadcast in the series, Dr John Wynne, artist and Reader in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, UAL, will be talking about Listening in the context of “Transplant and Life”, a project produced in collaboration with photographer Tim Wainwright, that gives a voice to transplant patients at two of the world’s leading centres for heart, lung, kidney and liver transplantation, Harefield Hospital in Middlesex and The Royal Free Hospital in London.

Episode 14 with Dan Rowan.
Broadcast date: 15 Feb 2017

 

In the fourteenth broadcast Dr. Daniel Rowan, Lecturer and Director of Programmes in Audiology at the University of Southampton, and lead scientific advisor to the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf, will be talking and demonstrating listening with cochlear implants from switch on to a trained ear.

Episode 15 with Andrew King.
Broadcast date: 22 Feb 2017

 

In the fifteenth broadcast we are hearing from Dr. Andrew King, Professor of Neurophysiology Oxford University, and Director of Oxford Auditory Neuroscience Group, who is talking about listening and how we hear. He will introduce us to methods of recording neurons in order to understand and reconstruct the activity of listening, and demonstrate how information about the auditory world is represented in the brain.

Listening to Language, Culture and Artifacts

Episode 16 with Simon King. 
Broadcast date: 1 Mar 2017

In the sixteenth broadcast of the series Dr. Simon King, Professor of Speech Processing at The University of Edinburgh, where he is director of The Centre for Speech Technology Research, will be talking about different methods of speech synthesis, the sound of natural speech as gold standard, and the status of listening as a development cycle in the production of synthetic speech. “When you are listening to synthetic speech are you using the brain in the same way as when listening to natural speech?”  

Episode 17 with James Wilkes. 
Broadcast date: 8 Mar 2017

In this seventeenth broadcast we hear from Dr. James Wilkes poet, writer and Senior Researcher in the Department of Geography, University of Durham; Associate Director of Hubbub a collective of researchers and artists exploring rest and its opposites – including noise, work and mindwandering. James works with the textures and rhythms of spoken and heard language and will be talking about imagining into being a distant world by listening to 15th Century Chansons.

Episode 18 with Marcel Cobussen. 
Broadcast date: 15 Mar 2017

In this eighteenth broadcast we hear from Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture at Leiden University, The Netherlands,and editor of the Journal of Sonic Studies, who will be considering music from its silence and its space and debate the need for dialogue and an ethics of listening.  

 

Episode 19 with Joanna Norman. 
Broadcast date: 22 Mar 2017

In this nineteenth broadcast in the series we hear from Joanna Norman, Senior Curator at V&A, and Lead Curator for the Scottish Design Galleries at V&A Museum of Design Dundee, who will be talking about listening in the context of the V&A. In particular she will be discussing the museum’s musical instrument collection addressing the paradox of its mute display. Her presentation asks how curators can try to get around the silence of the artefact?  

Episode 20 with Thomas Gardner. 
Broadcast date: 29 Mar 2017

In the twentieth broadcast of the series Thomas Gardner, composer, improviser, teacher, computer programmer and academic, course leader of the MA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, UAL, will be talking about musical measurements, equality and hierarchy; and put his audience through an exercise of rhythmic counting.

Episode 21 with Daniela Cascella. 
Broadcast date: 5 April 2017

In this twenty-first broadcast we will be hearing from Daniela Cascella, a London-based Italian writer whose work focuses on sound and literature across a range of publications and projects. On the occasion of her presentation she makes her audience read quietly from the text ‘Beginning to write after Clarice, after Clarice’s‘, asking them to listen out for sonic moments in the text.  
Episode 22 with Holger Schulze. 
Broadcast date: 12 Apr 2017

In this twenty-second broadcast we will be hearing from Holger Schulze, Professor of Musicology at Copenhagen University, Principle Investigator of the Sound Studies lab and founding member of the European Sound Studies Association, who will be introducing the idea of alien forms of listening – and the beginning of talking.  

Episode 23 with Michael Bull. 
Broadcast date: 19 Apr 2017

In this twenty-third and final broadcast in the series we will be hearing from Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies at Sussex University, co-editor Sound Studies Journal, and author of many publications on sound and the social sphere, who will be talking about listening to people, air raid sirens, conflict and war.