On May 13, 2019, Anne-Marie Shaver and I were interviewed by Maggie Dellow and Jonah Hrkal at the Fulton Center on the ASU Tempe campus for the “Innovation Happens @ ASU” podcast, a program that highlights the different groundbreaking projects that are going on within the university. After Jonah participated in a soundwalk with us a few months ago, he decided that the Acoustic Ecology Lab was an example of exactly the type of innovation that he thought was representative of ASU.
Over the course of our hour-long recording session, we were asked an array of truly thought-provoking questions – some of which initiated some nostalgic reflection on the year-and-a-half that Anne-Marie and I have been leading weekly soundwalks. What had we accomplished since we started? Something I know that we are both proud of is that through our weekly soundwalks, we have helped give people some listening tools that enable them hear past the buzzes, chimes, and rings everyday life, shifting their attention toward sounds that they had perhaps unnoticed.
We are also proud of the variety of people that we have been able to impact through our Soundwalk program and connections through the Acoustic Ecology Lab, such as the Speech and Hearing Clinic with Dr. Aparna Rao, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, among others. One of the fundamental principles of soundwalking is to include anyone and everyone who is interested, so the fact that we have been able to reach out to so many people and organizations is something we are really happy about.
In fact, one of Anne-Marie’s answers to a question we were asked brilliantly encapsulated why we think that our work in the Lab is meaningful and innovative. She said (and I paraphrase), “We know that we aren’t the first ones to do this… For millennia, sounds had always been important and essential to certain indigenous populations in order to survive. I think what makes our work special is that we are taking these ancient listening practices and we are finding ways to apply them to our current situation, in a way that is relatable and approachable to anyone and everyone. ”
I couldn’t agree with Anne-Marie more. Although everything we do in the Lab is in some way or another related to sound in a general way, every project that we work on is specifically catered for a certain goal in mind. With marvelous projects like Kyle Hoefer’s gunshot detection project in Costa Rica in December 2018, for example, Anne-Marie and I were able to confidently say that the Acoustic Ecology Lab is a brilliant example of innovation happening at ASU.