This subproject focuses on the sonic customization of workplace environments and explores efforts to enhance concentration, creativity, and thought through the regulation of sound. It traces the historical and contemporary use and development of sonic protective gear, acoustic office supplies, and cognitive sound machines, focusing on the real and imagined role of such devices in facilitating creative writing. By doing so, the research highlights how creative practices may not just be assisted by devices that directly stimulate and engage the intellect and senses, but may also be guided by tools that shelter and defend the mind against external disturbance. Here, knowledge production takes place through the voluntary regulation of sensory inputs, as technologies are invited to mediate between noisy exteriorities (busy streets, crowded department corridors) and subjective interiorities (thinking selves).
Building previous research concerned with the regulation and management of noise (Attali, 2009; Bijsterveld, 2008; Goldsmith, 2012; Hagood, 2019; Schwartz, 2011), the development of architectural acoustics (Atkinson, 2015; Blesser and Salter, 2007; Thompson, 2002), and reflections on the historical and philosophical pursuit of silence (Corbin, 2018; Foy, 2010; Prochnik, 2011), the study will explore analog techniques of workplace-related auditory manipulation, but also direct special attention towards the growing market for ‘smart earbuds’, ‘hearables’ and ‘tactical hearing devices’ that provide AI-supported forms of sonic control. Currently, such tools offer a wide range of algorithmic auditory assistance including personalized sound amplification, automated dictation, targeted noise filtering, augmented reality stimuli, and real-time language translation. What rationalities and beliefs about the creative self are reflected in work-related sound assistance technologies? How has devices for sound manipulation been called upon to regulate attention, stimulate productivity, and create optimized spaces for creative thought? And in what ways may tools that regulate sound ambience operate as co-constructors of knowledge?
The subproject will result in a monograph entitled Aural Control: Organizing Sound in Scholarly Work, which explores historical and contemporary efforts to manage sound in three spaces for learning and writing: the library, the lecture hall and the academic office. The book will combine archival research related to national patent offices, invention societies, university archives, and science and technology magazines, with explorations of contemporary commercial technologies for sound conditioning. In both cases, the aim is to reverse engineer and backtrack the operative functions and cultural assumptions that are built into sound assistance devices by studying their technical constitution (as manifested in product descriptions, hardware/software protocols, instruction manuals, patent applications), and public exhibition (as displayed in advertising, news reports, and user reviews). Ultimately, the book aims to deepen our understanding of the interrelation between auditory management and creative thought, with a special emphasis placed on efforts to strategically regulate and orchestrate sound environments in academic settings.
In relation to the work with the Interlocutor.eu, the subproject will further explore how sound-oriented assistance technologies (dictation tools, sound stimuli, language translation, noise protective gear) could be implemented in software. Building on open source speech recognition software such as DeepSpeech (developed by Mozilla) and drawing inspiration from voice command features that are implemented in contemporary ‘hearables’ and ‘smart earbuds’ (such as automatic translation, sound-based cues, attention stimuli), the project will experiment with ways of introducing sonic features to the Interlocutor.eu., while at the same time critically reflecting on shifting attitudes towards the role of sound in facilitating – and obstructing – intellectual thought.
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Maria Eriksson is a media scholar and social anthropologist. She is an expert in music technologies, software studies, and the use of digital and experimental methods [@eriksson+etal:2019]. She has extensive experience designing and executing collaborative research at the intersection of computer sciences and humanistic research and has served as an advisory board member at Humlab, Umeå University – one of Europe’s oldest and most prominent centers for digital humanities research. One of her recent publications includes the co-authored book Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music (MIT Press, 2019), which builds on a series of methodological innovations, including the establishment of a record label for research purposes, the speculative design of software solutions, and the development of technical methods for studying the hidden commodification of user data. Spotify Teardown has received wide-ranging public attention and acclaim and was featured in The Rolling Stone magazine, the Financial Times, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
As part of the research team she will work on the monograph Aural Control while focusing on the subproject Acoustic Assistance.
