Living in the Soundscape: From Cognitive to Cultural Approaches and Back

“Living in the Soundscape: From Cognitive to Cultural Approaches and Back”

Multidisciplinary Avant Symposium, June 2–3, 2023, Katowice (Poland)

Note: The event will be held in person, except for sound/performative poster/paper sessions.

The symposium is devoted to research on hearing and understanding sounds. It is a multidisciplinary event with a wide range of approaches spanning from cognitive to cultural research, also encompassing various philosophies of sound and hearing.

With the dominance of focus on issues related to vision in the cognitive and cultural sciences, hearing may seem to be simply one of the modalities. As a consequence, is it not better to treat humans as multimodal beings and treat their environments on a similar basis? Certainly, multimodality is an important feature of our “being in the world”. Regardless, however, we see great value in examining and reflecting on the specifics of our hearing and of sound landscapes in which we grew up, but which we create.

In recent decades, cognitive hearing science on the one hand and sound culture studies on the other have emerged. At the same time, issues related to this modality are present in various types of research projects related to learning, situated problem solving, language practice, prosody and its application, social interaction, mental disorders, auditory affordances, human-environment interaction and user experience design, a (possible) role of sound in scientific research, as well as on the broadly understood sound culture, and on the role of sounds in designing sustainable development. In these contexts, silence, which we manage and use in various ways, may also be a valuable subject of research.

Although the symposium is not directly devoted to music, we encourage you to analyze its sound “matter” in the scope suggested above.

We do not expect specialists combining cognitive and culture approaches; rather, we aim at designing a space for mutual inspiration and exchange. We are also looking forward to philosophical approaches. We strongly encourage you, as far as possible, to see your participation in our event as an opportunity to demonstrate phenomena worth investigating in practice. Therefore, among the forms of presentation, apart from classic papers, we also offer performative papers and posters/sound installations (technical guidelines for those interested will be posted soon). In this context, we are already announcing the post-conference issue of the journal, which will include your special, enhanced with sounds (possibly supplemented with multimedia) publications.

Submission topics include, but are not limited to:

• Challenges in cognitive hearing science

• The role of hearing in the study of situated education

• Social cognition and hearing: obvious relationship?

• Research on the influence of background sound on decision-making as well as on the sense of well-being

• Predictive processing and hearing; active inference in research on auditory hallucinations

• Research on sound in the context of mental disorders; research on disturbed or non-standard perception of sounds

• Cognitive abilities and cultural differences in the perception of sounds

• Epistemology of hearing; philosophy of sound art

• Hearing and language evolution: biological, cognitive, and cultural issues

• Ecological approach: hearing of objects, hearing of events, hearing of problems

• Sound environments – research and design

• Visualization of sounds in science

• Does science deal with silence?

• Sound in user experience design: cognitive challenges

• Sound in scientific research and the dominance of visualization in the sciences

• Synesthesia and the soundscape

• Music and film production: technological horizons and research issues

• Challenges in sound culture studies

• Towards sustainable development: the social and environmental role of sound; sound pollution

• Urbanocene: the role of sounds in urban metabolism

• Soundscapes – case studies. A special session will be devoted to the presentations and analyses of the soundscape (of your city, neighbourhood, workplace or home environment)