National Center for Sonic Cultural Heritage
Center for Sound Studies is a proud partner in the new (October 2024) National Center for Sonic Cultural Heritage, based in Struer, and with excellent partners: National Museum of Denmark, Sound Art Lab and Struer Museum. We are excited about the collaboration and the new opportunities that arise with a national research center focused on our shared sonic cultural heritage. The new center will contribute to developing our understanding of how sound and listening are important to our cultural life and history.
Sonic Citizenship
We propose that the concept "sonic citizenship" is a fruitful framework for the multitude of ways in which we form the aural backgrounds to each other in the rhythms of our daily lives, where citizenship is practiced, negotiated, and maintained through our everyday sonic activities. Sonic citizenship opens a discussion on how we aurally take part in, and attune to, our community and who in the community has the privilege to raise their voice (to talk and make sound), a right to be heard and listened to.The project on sonic citizenship was initiated by associate professors Morten Breinbjerg, Marie Højlund and Anette Vandsø under the global COVID pandemic in 2020 and has since been explored from various angles in regi of Center for Sound Studies.
The AIAS-SHAPE-project explores how text-to-speech (TTS) technology and synthetic voices influence the website-communication between Danish public authorities and citizens and discusses which democratic implications this imply. We are witnessing a general shift from written to voice-mediated input and output, in human-computer-interactions, and this development is currently boosted by the EU Accessibility Act (https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 ) that has to be complied before June 2025. These changes hold promise for democratic inclusion of people with visual or reading difficulties, but also call for critical studies of control, design, perception, and experience of digital, synthetic voices including an understanding of the subtle layers of nonverbal communication like gender, age, moods, emotions, authenticity, trust, etc. that automatically influence the communication.
Read more here:
https://aias.au.dk/aias-fellows/current-fellows/iben-have-1
https://arts.au.dk/en/news-and-events/news/show/artikel/to-nye-fellows-paa-aias-fra-ikk
The monograph Reading with Ears and Writing with Voices documents and investigates an aural and oral turn in digital communication and media culture in the last decade. Born-written media like newspapers, books, letters, notes, e-mails, and text messages, are presently experiencing a surprising popularity in digital audio versions and offer a convenient and effective way to communicate in everyday life compared to encoding and decoding visual letters. Social and cultural implications following from ear-reading and voice-writing are critically discussed in relation to concepts like a ‘polyphonic public’ and a ‘resonant democracy’. The monograph is also an introduction and consolidation of a “new” research field in audio media studies (AMS) in international media- and communication studies.
Read more: https://www.carlsbergfondet.dk/en/what-we-have-funded/CF22-1324
Sound & Historic Artists’ Studios
This research project (2024-2027) investigates how historic house museums can utilize sound for interpretation and communication in different ways. With a Research Through Design approach, the project develops and tests different sound installations and investigates how museum visitors use and experience the sound, and how it contributes to their understandings of the past, of objects, buildings, people and artistic processes, at two different historic house museums. The project also explores sonic methods for interpreting the historic sites and their immaterial heritage. The project is a collaboration between Postdoc researcher Mia Falch Yates, Skagen Art Museums and Johannes Larsen Museum.
The project is funded by Ny Carlsbergfondet.
