This Postdoctoral Fellowship supports a research project that will identify and analyze ways of using sound to explore data and to communicate technical knowledge. The goal of this project is to create new opportunities for technology and knowledge transfer, and innovative conceptual development, by facilitating sustained interactions between researchers in the arts and sciences. It will bring to light how techniques such as sonification, field recording, and interactive auditory displays have the power to make research findings accessible to lay and multidisciplinary audiences, and to make science more accessible for people with visual impairments. A better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of sound as a medium for rigorous scientific work, as well as the promises and pitfalls of translating experimental sound across social groups, will serve to enhance the potential of sound technology for science communication and outreach.
This research project will explore the emerging role of sound technology at the interface of artistic and scientific work using three case studies. The first is an historical study of the electropenetrograph (EPG), a now-standard piece of entomological equipment that initially represented data as audible noise but was eventually silenced in favor of visual techniques, such as waveforms. The second is a study of the laser vibrometry, which makes audible the vibrational ecologies of plants, insects, and agricultural researchers; it will explore the ways scientists and their non-human subjects cultivate shared perceptual worlds through the exchange of vibrations. The third is a study of the use of Max/MSP digital signal processing language to sonically represent and interact with RNA sequences (for example). The project will provide empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to the STS literature on sound, technology, and performativity in science. Empirically, it will provide a thick and comparative description of three areas of scientific work, each of which employs sound in a different moment of the knowledge production process. Theoretically, it will place concepts and techniques from experimental music and sound art into conversation with the literature on performativity in science. Methodologically, it will augment written ethnography with active and collaborative sound work, taking part in the production and experience of experimental sounds to provoke interdisciplinary conversations and blur the studio/laboratory distinction.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
