Listening to/in the Field: Polyphony in the Exploring Arctic Soundscapes Project.

Abstract

This article reflects on the Exploring Arctic Soundscapes project, a transdisciplinary venture of sevennatural scientists, social scientists, and artists that sought to explore how a focus on sound could spurdevelopment of a new research sensibility for generating insights beyond the comfort zone of anyone discipline. Viewing sound less as an object of study (“what sounds define a place?”) or method-ology (“how do we listen to a place?”) than as an inroad for addressing complex forces and questionsof becoming in place, the researchers turned to sound as a focal point for exploring difference andrelations between the researchers and their modes of data acquisition, analysis, and artistic-academicproduction. The “field” in which we carried out our work thus became, simultaneously, the place(the island of Andøya, in Arctic Norway), the human and more-than-human communities on Andøyaand the adjacent ocean, the transdisciplinary team of researchers, and the universe of (direct andindirect) outputs from our research. The experience of listening to sound(s) in the field demonstratedhow transdisciplinary research across the sciences, arts, and humanities must be seen as an unfoldingprocess, where all parties learn from each other as they pursue their disciplinary research agendas,rather than a pre-determined journey toward a single, “interdisciplinary” output.