This unique consortium draws on the research excellence of interdisciplinary and complementary design innovation labs at three universities - Lancaster University, Newcastle University and the Royal College of Art and connects it with public and private sectors, linking large and small-scale businesses, service providers and citizens. Together, our expertise in developing and applying creative techniques to navigate unexplored challenges includes that of designers, artists, curators, producers, broadcasters, engineers, managers, technologists and writers - and draws on wider expertise from across the partner universities and beyond. The Creative Exchange responds to profound changes in practice in the creative and media-based industries stimulated by the opening of the digital public space, the ability of everyone to access, explore and create in any aspect of the digital space, moving from 'content consumption' to 'content experience'. It explores new forms of engagement and exchange in the broadcast, performing and visual arts, digital media, design and gaming sectors, by focusing on citizen-led content, interactive narrative, radical personalization and new forms of value creation in the context of the 'experience economy'. The primary geographic focus is the Northwest of England centred around the opportunity presented by the growth of MediaCityUK and its surrounding economy. The three universities act as local test beds with field trials in London, Lancaster and Newcastle prior to larger public facing trials in the northwest. This will support the North West regional strategy for growth in digital and creative media industries, whilst generating comparative research and development locally, nationally and internationally. The Creative Exchange has been developed in response to a paradigm shift in content creation and modes of distribution in a digitally connected world, which has profound impact for the arts and humanities. This transformational-change is taking place within the landscape of a growing digital public space that includes archives, data, information and content. How we navigate and experience this space - and how we generate content for and within it - is central to how we create economic, social, cultural and personal value. The Hub draws on new and agile approaches to knowledge exchange for the creative economy that have been previously developed by the partner universities and new ones co-developed with specialist arts organizations, sector organizations and communities of users.

This project is the first to systematically investigate the potential of listening as a legitimate and reliable methodology for research across the arts and humanities and into science, social science and technology. It positions listening as an emerging investigative approach, able to: access new information relevant to the pressing problems of social exclusion, dementia, lung health, auscultation (medical listening) and speech recognition, and deliver new insights to curation, music, art, urban planning and civil engineering, where sound can reveal hidden potentialities and contribute to our understanding of culture and how we live together. To evidence and develop listening's capacity as a reliable research tool, this project sets out, through partnerships and embedded co-working staged over five carefully organized phases, to observe, document and analyse listening and to develop protocols of best practice for its shared application across disciplines. Historically benefits of listening have been neglected in most disciplines due to its perceived unreliability. Recently there has been a marked sonic turn across the arts and humanities, with a growing interest in sound and listening. However in science, despite evidence of a broad interest in sound, listening is used mainly as a qualitative process, considered to lack legitimacy and viewed as subjective, peripheral to established data analysis methods, and being in need of technological (visual) verification. This project is invested in the value of listening as a reliable research method, emphasising for the first time the cross disciplinary benefit of a sonic turn and providing its theoretical discussions with a shareable vocabulary. It will make a major contribution to studies of sound as well as to the practical application of listening across disciplines by establishing listening protocols and resources to build legitimacy and consensus. Thus, this project seeks to enable the potential of listening to yield scholarly and non-academic benefits for an array of questions that we are facing currently, making a radical contribution to current scientific and cultural problems, and impacting powerfully on the development of knowledge production and interpretation. The project team is based at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London (UAL) and University of Southampton (UoS). The project unfolds through strategically timed, planned exchanges and embedded co-working with national and international academic and professional partners. The collaboration between CRiSAP (Centre for Research in Sound Arts Practice) at LCC and ISVR (Institute of Sound and Vibration Research) at UoS presents a unique context, instituting the meeting of scientific and artistic perspectives on listening this project seeks to explore. The primary context is the AHRC network project of the same name, led by the PI and Co-I in 2016/17. This project will build on the international network meetings and the findings generated there, which serve to inform and validate its purpose, method and scope. To ensure public participation and access, the team will work in close partnership with Resonance FM (a global broadcasting station) and Points of Listening a public engagement program and will pursue outreach events: the Being Human Festival www.beinghumanfestival.org/, The Winchester Science Centre - science outreach for kids, and the Southampton Science and Engineering Festival www.southampton.ac.uk/per/university/festival/index.page. Outcomes include: A project website, which makes the research processes and the listening protocols publicly available; a book of case studies, which serves as an educational resource, presenting the protocols in a format that can support their implementation in all relevant curricula; a glossary to facilitate shared working and consensus building; a peer reviewed article, and a special issue of the peer reviewed Journal of Sonic Studies.

Listening Across Disciplines responds to the Highlight notice for Cross-Council Enquiry with a strong commitment to cross-disciplinary research by bringing together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists as well as scholars and practitioners from the humanities, stakeholders from press, education and health, as well as Early Career Researchers and the general public, to conduct a cross disciplinary research of listening as a methodology of enquiry and communication. It will provide a network in which culture and science can meet to debate and initiate innovative modes of knowledge production that bring value to the arts and humanities as well as to technology and science research, and a general public. The network brings together significant researchers and consolidates existing initiatives and methods of listening to advance its understanding and application across a wide range of disciplines. It is developed in the context of a recent emphasis on sound in the arts and humanities. And although science too has recently embraced listening, it remains a largely qualitative method of investigation, considered as generally subjective and peripheral to more established data assessment and analysis methods. In response, this network expands the interdisciplinary focus of sound studies, from its origin in arts and humanities, into science and technology, to explore the potential of cross fertilisation between artistic research and practices of listening and its scientific or technological methods and applications. The project will be realised through three network events, each lasting two days, and two online platforms, a website and a blog site. While the website serves to document and archive, to produce additional material and to disseminate the research globally, and the blog site enables faster exchanges and plural authorship, the network events will provide application and substance to the online network and enable a real world exchange. These events will feature workshops and technical demonstrations of listening strategies, tools, methods and instruments, as well as presentations of approaches to analysis, evaluation, and communication. They provide an applied forum for knowledge sharing and enable a shared enquiry into the possibilities of listening as a progressive and functional research methodology. The issues under investigation are: The scholarly and public understanding of listening as a skill and methodology The discipline specific applications of listening and how they can be shared The analytical, data gathering and diagnostic function of listening compared across the disciplines The legitimacy and evaluation of the heard for the arts and humanities and for science disciplines The role of listening in the transfer of results and outcomes to other researchers, professionals and a general public. In order to achieve focused discussions and guarantee relevant outcomes the events are organised in three themes: Listening to the Environment focuses on ecological, geological, architectural and spatial concerns Listening to Bodies and Material considers social and medical issues, anthropology and forensics Listening to Language Culture and Artefacts deliberates on speech and language, technology, museology and curation. Each event incorporates a public listening workshop that opens the selective forum to a more general audience and offers an immediate opportunity to experience listening as a thoughtful and directed methodology. The principal and longer term aim of this network project is to establish a research hub that provides the infrastructure and shared terrain to develop and document, educate and disseminate information, guidelines and policies on listening as a methodology of investigation and communication that advances what research can be conducted and what information and outcomes can be obtained in the arts and the sciences.