CFP: Living in the Soundscape: From Cognitive to Cultural Approaches and Back (thematic issue)

This is an open call for papers for a thematic issue of AVANT. The planned issue will be devoted to research on hearing and understanding sound.

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

In recent decades, cognitive hearing science and sound culture studies 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 the broadly understood sound culture and the role of sound in shaping sustainable development. In these contexts, silence, which we manage and use in various ways, can also be a valuable object of research.

Submission topics include, but are not limited to:
Section 1
• Challenges in cognitive hearing science
• The role of hearing in the study of situated learning
• Social cognition and hearing: an obvious link?
• Research on the influence of background noise on decision making and well-being
• Predictive processing and hearing; active inference in auditory hallucination research
• Research on sound in the context of mental disorders; research on disturbed or abnormal perception of sound
• Cognitive abilities and cultural differences in sound perception
• Synesthesia and the soundscape
Section 2
• Epistemology of hearing; philosophy of sound art
• Evolution of hearing and language: biological, cognitive, and cultural issues
• Ecological approach: hearing objects, hearing events, hearing problems
• Sound environments – research and design
• Visualization of sound in science
• Does science deal with silence?
• Sound in user experience design: cognitive challenges
Section 3
• Sound in scientific research and the dominance of visualization in science
• Music and film production: technological horizons and research questions
• Does hearing have a gender? Does hearing research have a gender?
• Challenges in sound culture studies
• Towards sustainable development: the social and environmental role of sound; sound pollution
• Urbanocene: the role of sound in urban metabolism
• Soundscapes – case studies. A special session will be dedicated to the presentation and analysis of the soundscape (of your city, neighborhood, workplace or home).

The deadline for submitting papers is December 31, 2023.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.