Listening Across Disciplines

Listening Across Disciplines responds to the Highlight notice for Cross-Council Enquiry with a strong commitment to cross-disciplinary research by bringing together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists as well as scholars and practitioners from the humanities, stakeholders from press, education and health, as well as Early Career Researchers and the general public, to conduct a cross disciplinary research of listening as a methodology of enquiry and communication. It will provide a network in which culture and science can meet to debate and initiate innovative modes of knowledge production that bring value to the arts and humanities as well as to technology and science research, and a general public.

The network brings together significant researchers and consolidates existing initiatives and methods of listening to advance its understanding and application across a wide range of disciplines. It is developed in the context of a recent emphasis on sound in the arts and humanities. And although science too has recently embraced listening, it remains a largely qualitative method of investigation, considered as generally subjective and peripheral to more established data assessment and analysis methods. In response, this network expands the interdisciplinary focus of sound studies, from its origin in arts and humanities, into science and technology, to explore the potential of cross fertilisation between artistic research and practices of listening and its scientific or technological methods and applications.

The project will be realised through three network events, each lasting two days, and two online platforms, a website and a blog site.

While the website serves to document and archive, to produce additional material and to disseminate the research globally, and the blog site enables faster exchanges and plural authorship, the network events will provide application and substance to the online network and enable a real world exchange. These events will feature workshops and technical demonstrations of listening strategies, tools, methods and instruments, as well as presentations of approaches to analysis, evaluation, and communication. They provide an applied forum for knowledge sharing and enable a shared enquiry into the possibilities of listening as a progressive and functional research methodology.

The issues under investigation are:

The scholarly and public understanding of listening as a skill and methodology

The discipline specific applications of listening and how they can be shared

The analytical, data gathering and diagnostic function of listening compared across the disciplines

The legitimacy and evaluation of the heard for the arts and humanities and for science disciplines

The role of listening in the transfer of results and outcomes to other researchers, professionals and a general public.


In order to achieve focused discussions and guarantee relevant outcomes the events are organised in three themes:

Listening to the Environment focuses on ecological, geological, architectural and spatial concerns

Listening to Bodies and Material considers social and medical issues, anthropology and forensics

Listening to Language Culture and Artefacts deliberates on speech and language, technology, museology and curation.

Each event incorporates a public listening workshop that opens the selective forum to a more general audience and offers an immediate opportunity to experience listening as a thoughtful and directed methodology.

The principal and longer term aim of this network project is to establish a research hub that provides the infrastructure and shared terrain to develop and document, educate and disseminate information, guidelines and policies on listening as a methodology of investigation and communication that advances what research can be conducted and what information and outcomes can be obtained in the arts and the sciences.

This project is intended to produce a network of significant practitioners and researchers who employ listening in a variety of ways across a range of disciplines. It will involve stakeholders from health, education and press, Early Career Researchers and the general public. Three networking events and two online platforms will ensure a thorough, well documented and shared process of investigation on listening as a methodology for research and its communication to fellow researchers and professionals as well as to other end users, who will utilize its findings beyond academia in various public orientated contexts.

The immediate impact of the network is on the participants attending the network events, for whom its discussions and findings potentially present new modes of engaging their subject area and novel ways to interact across disciplines. The online platforms ensure the network activities and outcomes find immediate dissemination to the broader community of researchers and professionals concerned with sound and listening, and the general public, who will gain an understanding of listening as a shared skill across the arts and sciences and who will benefit from directed longer term outcomes. The website serves as a point of access, as archive and for documentation; the blog site enables faster responses and facilitates public discussion. The public activities element of each network event will offer an immediate experience of listening as a directed methodology and impact on its popular imagination and understanding. The network's impact will also benefit the following groups: artists and musicians as well as their audiences through acoustically improved exhibition and performance spaces; NHS staff and patience through improved diagnosis and disease monitoring; the hearing and visually impaired, teachers and students, as well as museum visitors through an understanding of informative auditory environments.

The network project will inform a larger funding bid to to establish a research hub to develop and disseminate information, guidelines and policies about listening as a methodology of investigation and communication. This strengthens and promotes the impact of listening across the disciplines into all areas of research, pedagogy, practice and communication and ensures the lasting and far-reaching impact of the academic and non-academic applications and benefits of the initial network.

To popularize the Network'sts findings and to reach a wider audience, the PI and Co-I will co-produce and host three radio programs with Resonance FM that communicate the exchanges of the network events to public audiences worldwide; and produce two blogs to be published on stakeholders' sites whose reach and influence are extensive.

During the network events participants will be encouraged to blog and tweet via the project's site and hashtag. A dedicated Facebook page will invite network membership beyond its participants and monitor its relevance. Given the topicality of sound and listening, it is anticipated that the questions addressed will attract press beyond those members of the media invited to the network events. The PI and Co-I will maximise this attention to ensure that the outcomes of the network events will be made readily available to both specialist and generalist audiences, to enhance knowledge, communication and application of the issues raised.

The issues addressed are fundamental to a wide variety of disciplines and in the long term the Network's findings are likely to influence policy, a public facing research process has been adopted in other to ensure its findings can support and inform such policy development.

Through this Network we will take a lead role in directing the constitution of this newly emerging interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary area of study and research in Sound Studies, which has broad potential impact on higher education, on research, its public and commercial applications.