Getting it together—Interdisciplinary sound environment research

Abstract

The Sound Environment Center at Lund university is an interdisciplinary center created to coordinate research on sound and soundscape issues and is known to be the first of its kind worldwide. Ranging from acoustics to medicine, psychology, and cognitive sciences, as well as humanities like musicology and linguistics, soundscape research adresses many interdependent areas and touches upon health as well as philosophical, aesthetic, and technical issues. To get a holistic comprehension, these perspectives need to be synchronized. Therefore, the center has an interdisciplinary board and a mission to study sound environments from multidisciplinary perspectives. Focus lies on research and contact between researchers. The center has external funding for larger research collaborations on topics such as teachers voice strain and rooms acoustics, health effects of combined exposure to noise and airborne particles, cognition, and sound exposure. In addition to initiating research projects, the center arranges symposiums adressing topics such as Noise and health, Seductive Sounds, Operational Sounds, Dangerous Sounds' and Sound, Cognition and Learning. Further topics have been Sound Design, Sounds and Silence for Mental Recreation, Teachers Voice Comfort, and recently Wind Turbine Noise. The symposiums facilitates cross disciplinary contacts and discussions, many of them producing published papers and reports.