Conference 20 Years of Sound Environments

This one-day conference marks the 20th anniversary of the Sound Environment Centre. The centre was initiated in 2004 and established in 2005, with the ambition to bring ideas about soundscape and acoustic ecology into a trans-disciplinary research context. With this conference we wish to revisit this initial trans-disciplinary ambition and ask what roles research into sound and sound environments play in today’s increasingly complex world.  

The conference will explore a number of themes: How the field contributes to contemporary issues such as climate change and ecological disruption. What role sound plays in the processes of decolonization. What consequences a feminist approach has on the study of sound. How sound matters in a world of increasing social injustice and global political tensions. And how the aesthetic qualities of sound help us rethink and imagine ways to new sustainable acoustic ecologies. 

The Sound Environment Centre was inspired by studies into soundscape and acoustic ecology in Canada and elsewhere. It is worth noting that both the founders of the centre and of the World Soundscape project in the early 1970s all were composers who had the trans-disciplinary approach to the study of sound in common. While the methods of study, scientific knowledge and ideological positioning have developed increasingly over the past 50 years, the trans-disciplinary and collaborative approach is still the core of many successful studies of sound.

Conference program

Coffee is served on arrival. 

10.00  Welcome, Sanne Krogh Groth, director at Sound Environment Centre, Lund University

10.30 - 12.00 Health. Bodies of listening and reverberation.

Health effects of transportation noise in Denmark

Mette Sørensen, Adjunct professor at Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark and Senior researcher at Danish Cancer Institute

Investigating aural diversity using extended reality

Stefania Serafin, Professor in Sonic Interaction Design, Aalborg University

Soundbath

Tina Quartey, Percussionist, Now Listen! Tina Quartey

 12.00 – 13.00 Lunch

 13.00 - 14.30 Traces. Preservation, sonic history and listening.

The collecting Ear 

James Mansell, Professor of Cultural History and Sound Studies, University of Nottingham

The Acoustemology of Sirens: A Century of Urban Communication Infrastructures of Fear and Public Sonic Warnings in Sweden

Marie Cronqvist, Professor of Modern History, Linköping University

Transversal listening

Jacek Smolicki, Interdisciplinary artist and Researcher in Media and Communications, Uppsala University

 14.30 -15.00 Coffee

 15.00 - 16.00 Matter. Studies of the non-human.

Shifting views on sex-specific acoustic communication in songbirds 

Katharina Riebel, Associate Professor of Biology, Leiden University

Marine mammals and sound - Why sound and noise in water matter

Josefin Starkhammar, Associate Professor, Lund University

16.00 - 16.15 Refreshment

 16.15 - 17.45 Politics. Fictions and imaginaries of sound.

Layering the Global and the Local

Paul Hegarty, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham

Subjectivity Engines for Possible Worlds: Three Sonic Fictions and their Politics

Holger Schulze, Professor in Musicology, University of Copenhagen

Sound of Democracy: Towards the democratisation of standards for soundscapes 

Sandra Kopljar, Senior Lecturer of Architecture and Culture, Lund University

 17.45-18.00 Rounding off

 18.00 Reception with food and drinks