The project continues and builds on the educational, societal and cultural impacts achieved by the global network of significant partners from across the disciplines that were brought together in the AHRC network project of the same name (2016-17). Working from this substantial and growing network of academics and non-academics, LxD II 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. From there, it aims to provide the infrastructure and shared terrain to develop and document, educate and disseminate information, guidelines and policies on listening that can be applied in any disciplinary context.

To do so, the 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 works through the framework of five strategically timed phases of investigation, organised through directed interventions with partners from a range of disciplines and professions, to observe and analyse listening, its processes and applications, and to determine whether it is possible to establish “listening protocols” that might act as transferable knowledge tools.

To create new knowledge and innovative mechanisms of knowledge production within the arts and humanities, the social and sciences and technology research through listening as a cross disciplinary research tool.

To establish listening as a legitimate and reliable, future orientated, methodology across the arts and the sciences.

To develop shared and shareable vocabularies, reference points and interpretative strategies in order to achieve consensus and comparability, and give "sonic knowledge" influence in the evaluation, assessment and theorisation of artistic and scientific problems.

To support discipline specific teaching and learning of listening through case studies that can serve as teaching material.

The Listening Across Disciplines II partners come from a range of disciplines spanning biomedicine, anthropology, urban planning, civil engineering infrastructure, architecture and speech technology. View the full list of our partnering institutions.