A significant part of LxDII's work has been the development of listening protocols and vocabularies. These two interlinked aspects of the research project have now been brought together on an interactive digital platform created by our partner Finetuned.
Through the different phases, the project has positioned listening as an emerging investigative approach that is able to access new information relevant to the pressing problems of social exclusion, dementia, lung health, auscultation (medical listening) and speech recognition; and to deliver new insights into curation, music, art, urban planning and civil engineering. We believe sound can reveal hidden potentialities and contribute to our understanding of culture and how we live together.
The listening protocols and vocabularies were developed through the encounters and embedded co-working with our partners, as well as from the practices of the LxDII team members. They reflect on the diverse ways that sound is understood across disciplines and reveal the different methodological approaches to the sonic. Recognising the centrality of these listening protocols and vocabularies for the development of an understanding of sound’s potential as a new knowledge device/dimension, as well as for a shared approach and interdisciplinary working, we felt it was important to make them publicly available. To this end, we developed the interactive digital platform to open the protocols and vocabularies to cross-disciplinary scrutiny and inviting further examples and approaches.
Some of these protocols might appear idiosyncratic, highly personal, subjective and poetic even, others are extremely impersonal, in search of an objective method and approach, and historically/discipline embedded. The format allows a user to browse for vocabularies and protocols for listening in their own field. Additionally, they can recognise cross-references and shared practices as well as learn from differences across disciplines, and hopefully feel enabled to understand other’s listening practices and feel inspired to expand their own methods.
The development and design of this platform represents one of the main outcomes of this project and is motivated by the belief in a sound-based interdisciplinarity: to advocate and enable a transversal working with sound. Members of the LxDII Team have discussed their involvement in the project in a collaboratively authored article in the forthcoming issue of Resonance Journal, which will be published soon.
But in the meantime, please enjoy exploring our new Platform for Listening Protocols and Vocabularies.