Hearing or Listening?

Psychoacoustic is key to out listening experience

This is a great article by George Massenburg that outlines the differences between hearing and listening: one “hears” with one’s brains, not only with one’s ears.

Hearing is the act of perceiving sound by the ear. Listening is a conscious mental process, as much about the brain as the ear, and it starts with establishing attention to a sound

Read the article here

Dr. Abby Aresty as a Post-Doctoral scholar at the Acoustic Ecology Lab @ ASU

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Abby Aresty as a Post-Doctoral scholar to the Acoustic Ecology Lab @ ASU. Abby is a composer and sound artist who uses technology to facilitate unexpected interactions between people, the built environment, and the natural world. Aresty’s work is rooted in the fields of acoustic ecology, sound art, and electroacoustic composition, and has included concert works, public sound installations, soundwalks, pop-up galleries, multimedia collaborations, biofeedback interfaces, and sound sculptures, including prosthetic listening devices.

Abby received her Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Washington in 2012. From 2013-2014, she was a Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and from 2014-2016, she held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Electronic Music and Sound Studies at Grinnell College.

Aresty Pic

We will be launching the new Acoustic Ecology Lab site very soon and you can expect to hear a lot more from Abby over the coming months.

Green is good for you

Interesting article in the American Psychological Associations publication about how regular exposure to the natural world can help restoring mental clarity heal the body.

We are planning to look at the benefits of taking hospitalized and elderly people into national parks virtual using EcoRift. We hypothesis that this could be a valuable aid to healing and wellbeing.

Psychologists’ research explains the mental and physical restoration we get from nature–and has important implications for how we build our homes, work environments and cities.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/greengood.aspx

cropped-cropped-Listen12.jpg

Dr Feisst keynote speaker at Sonic Environments Conference

soundwaves

 

Sabine Feisst was a keynote speaker at Sonic Environments in Brisbane, Australia. Organized by the Australasian Computer Music Association and the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology, this international conference brought together artists and scholars from Europe, the U.S., Canada, Asia, New Zealand and Australia to discuss “ecological, social and cultural contexts of our sonic environments” and deepen our understanding of the role of sound and technology in a rapidly changing world. In her keynote address, Feisst elaborated on ecomusicological perspectives on sonic environments.

 

Feisst_Keynote