Grant Awarded!

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Grant Awarded!

The Leverhulme Trust announced its decision to fund this exciting research project titled “A radical new interdisciplinary space for sonification”, or RADICAL for short (grant number RPG-2020-113). Project RADICAL brings together a team of interdisciplinary researchers at Northumbria University and Newcastle University to work on a three-year programme of investigation into the fundamental nature of how we listen to data sonifications. The ambitious aim of the project is to develop a fundamental understanding of the relationship between sonification design and the listener and to stimulate a revitalised agenda for sonification research and practice.

There is ongoing international interest in the advancement of effective sonification designs together with better understanding of how people engage with and listen to sonifications to understand and explore their data. Our research will be an entirely novel application of the perspectives of Research through Design to the design of sonifications and will show how this approach to design can be extended to new research fields. This project will be the first major effort to bring together cross-disciplinary understanding and practice to effect significant change in how we understand the relationships between sonifications, their designers, and their users. From this will emerge a new theory of sonification listening and, ultimately, an aesthetics of sonification. The project’s outcomes will also set the agenda for future sonification research. The lessons learned will, further, have benefit to the fields of sculptural sound composition and music improvisation.