Researching the Senses as Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Research in the growing field of sensory studies has begun to identify the sensory aspects of experience, particularly in our engagement with material culture. What is yet to receive much attention is how the senses are acquired and used by individuals and communities, and how they inform action. Adopting barth's argument that cultural phenomena are most productively examined as different kinds of knowledge, this article argues that the senses can be examined as any other knowledge source. This article demonstrates the value of examining the senses as knowledge through an account of learning to hear medically. This example is taken from a broader ethnographic study of the aural practices and experiences of ninety-two musicians, doctors, adventurers, and Morse code operators. It argues that hearing is learned, specialized, and specific to the places we go, the people that surround us, and the things that we do. To seek out the sources and value of this taken-for-granted aspect of our experience, it argues that the senses can be analyzed in terms of their foundations, their acquisition, and practice.     

Teenagers' Multisensory Routes for Learning in the Museum

ABSTRACT

In this article I draw on a study of sensory aspects of teenagers' use of digital media, how these sensory aspects are incorporated in emerging learning strategies, and the implications of this for the same teenagers' engagement in museums. My focus is on how an ethnographic approach that attends to the senses may enable a critical review of prevailing pedagogical ideas in museums. Recent developments in museum education have led to large investments in state-of-the-art technology to produce interactive, multisensory exhibits. However, the question of how teenagers respond to these campaigns remains rather under-researched. This article shows how habitual use of digital media in teenage everyday practice incorporates learning to appropriate other people's experiences and ideas through a configuration of vision, touch, motion, and imagination, thereby enhancing non-representational learning qualities such as affect and sensation. The implications of this sensory approach open up routes to differentiate pedagogical settings in museums that on a superficial level apply the same educational technologies, but since they are based in different sensorial belief systems, different conditions for learning unfold in their use. In developing this analysis I argue that through ethnographic attention to the senses we might advance theories of learning within museum education.     

Surprising the Senses

ABSTRACT

We perceive the world around us and the objects in it with all our senses. Designers can therefore influence the way we experience everyday products by paying attention to the multiple sensory aspects of products.

When sensory information from two or more senses conflicts, people can be surprised. Currently, more and more product designers are experimenting with designing products that provide incongruent sensory information. Creating such products enables these designers to evoke interest for their products and let people experience something new.

In several studies, we have investigated people's reactions to and opinions about products with sensory incongruities. The results of our studies suggest that evoking surprise by incorporating sensory incongruities in products can be seen as a means to create more pleasurable product experiences.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

Sensuous stories in the Indian Ocean islands*

Abstract

Providing examples from the islands of the Indian Ocean Region, this article focuses on the multisensory nature of storytelling and listening. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the region (1998–2016), the author proposes a sensuous epistemology that turns on listening to “sense”. She reveals that storytelling can be a profoundly sensuous experience that elicits emotional and physical responses in both the teller and listener. The sensuous quality of stories enable the listener to fully encounter politically inscribed, complex social experiences. Ultimately, the article advances a notion of listening as sense-work, thereby deepening sensory scholarship’s recent, politically reflexive analysis on listening to hear.     

Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress

ABSTRACT

In The Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this article we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that are designed to help people deal with mental distress. We will discuss the way that “bodies” must tack between oft-competing pressures and draws, which emanate from the performance of sense that is contained within these sites. Attempts to “make” sense of the body in such terrains often require an increasingly sophisticated set of skills and expertise and can, despite our best efforts, result in the body being transported to unexpected places. In order to capture a sense of movement, people must try to transform their offline experiences into a set of actions that can be rendered meaningful in terms of an online domain, which we argue is against the way that people sense. We develop a theory of sensory bodies as subject to continual “movement,” drawing on the work of Serres, Simondon, and Manning, before discussing three examples of social media use in mental health, and the potential implications for people having to learn to sense in and through such online spaces.     

Acoustic Cocooning

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, car manufacturers increasingly underline their cars' interior tranquility. Both this acoustic condition and the availability of car audio sets enable drivers to transform their car into a highly personal, controlled and relaxing sonic bubble.

Yet how could the car, once a noisy contraction, evolve into such a space for acoustic cocooning? This article studies the introduction of car radio and interior car sound design in Europe between the 1920s and the 1990s. The car radio's meaning shifted from an artifact that brought companionship to lonely drivers, to an instrument that helped drivers to mentally block out their fellows on the road. At the same time, listening to engine sounds changed from a drivers' skill to a practice drivers had to de-learn. Moreover, car sound construction shifted from reducing noise to creating target sounds for specific consumer groups.

This article employs three forms of cultural analysis to understand these shifts: an “archeology of corporate culturology,” the symbolism of sound, and Gerhard schulze's theory on the experience society. Finally, by analyzing the rise of acoustic cocooning in the car, it aims to contribute to the study of “techno-cocooning”: the use of technology for creating sensory privacy.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

Introducing Sensory Studies

ABSTRACT

Color serves a variety of purposes in society from identifying groups to conveying symbolic meanings to providing aesthetic pleasure. More subtle effects of color can be found in the environments that human communities construct around themselves. At Doon School, an elite boys' boarding school in northern India, color is intimately associated with the students' activities, social relationships and sensory experiences. It defines their status and shapes their everyday lives. The uses of color at the school are consistent with a wider social aesthetic emphasizing restraint, logical thought and the training and presentation of the body. Many of these values can be seen to have their origins in the school's colonial history and postcolonial aspirations.     

Bridges

ABSTRACT

This article explores the relationship between the thinking, feeling, moving body, and a city's industrial architecture. It takes as its fieldwork site the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and 59th Street bridges that dominate downtown New York, and uses this to present an ethnographic understanding of lived experience as a continuous sensory exchange between mind, body, and world. New York's bridges, towering 300 feet into the air and 7,000 feet across, established a new sense of scale against which citizens could compare their finite, organic bodies. The article draws upon a practice-based research project, New York Stories, for which I recorded more than a hundred interior dialogues of random strangers as they moved around the city. People's movement across bridges, reveals them to be complex sites of perception, sensation, and experience, which generate ongoing streams of interior dialogue ranging from the trivial to the tragic. For when walking across a bridge people are no longer attached to the land or part of the city but are instead partially in the sky above the water, “making strange” the sense of being on the ground, and subjecting people to various delirious effects including vertigo, flying, and falling, before reaching the other side. It is a story told through words and images in the form of a photo-essay with accompanying text that derives from the practice-based ethnography that is also available in video and audible form online.     

John Coltrane and Me

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the role that cultural objects play in one's personal development by taking a closer look at the relationship between people and the creative products of their fellows. As a launching point to this study, I examine my own relationship with the music of two jazz icons, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, viewing the differences in my reactions to, and uses of, their musical offerings over times as a reflection of my own personal growth. My contention is that under the right conditions people can use cultural objects to reconnect with disavowed aspects of their experiences.     

Sensory Orientations and Sensory Designs in the American Deafworld

ABSTRACT

In order to understand the meaning of deafness, one needs to understand the role of senses in culture. The DeafWorld is a sensory world. People who are d/Deaf create their own sensory profile. There are three principal sensory orientations among d/Deaf people in the American DeafWorld: visual, auditory, and tactile. These orientations have led to the invention of visual, tactile, and auditory sensible objects and architectures to fit the d/Deaf world and d/Deaf subjects' needs. These objects are also partly generated through interaction with the audist sensory orientation of the hearing world and thus constitute a kind of bridge between the two worlds while at the same time contributing to their distinctive contours.     

Visual impairment,sport and somatic work: the auditory experiences of blind and partially sighted cricket players

This article explores the auditory experiences of a group of visually impaired elite sportsmen and how their sporting participation provides an alternative way of being in team sport. Here, the focus is upon the constructed auditory structure of visually impaired cricket and how this vast, featureless sporting space is endowed with social value. Unlike previous research into the spatial experiences of relatively stable environments, this article is the first to detail how visually impaired people conceptualize and negotiate such a dynamic and fluid space. Drawing upon the concepts of somatic work, and auditory knowledge, this article establishes the participants’ rich sensuous experiences of this physical activity and how their negotiation of the dynamic sporting environment, through the active creation of unique sense-making strategies, subverts the dominant ocularcentric notion of the sporting body. Rather than blindness being reduced to a state of deficit, visually impaired cricket provides an embodied platform to celebrate the participants’ multifarious capabilities.     

The Post office feud: sensing urban disturbance in late eighteenth-century Copenhagen

Abstract

The so-called Post Office Feud was one of a series of popular protests and riots which took place in Copenhagen during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Compared to other similar events in the period, only a few, indirect hints to any explicit political discontent come through in contemporary representations of the disturbance, or in the subsequent investigations carried out by the authorities. On the contrary, it was the textualisation of sensory and emotional experiences that dominated the testimonials and written statements ensuing from the Post Office Feud. This article examines how the police, students, and other Copenhageners attached meaning to the disturbance by explaining the escalating violence in urban public space with reference to various sensory experiences.     

Touching Consumers,engaging the Senses in Consumption

ABSTRACT

For years, the Campbell's Soup Company advertised their brand of soup through a message of “Mmm, Mmm, Good.” This slogan reached mass audiences primarily through visual and auditory media messages of television and print. Campbell's recently switched to a new form of advertising to consumers through an IAd application. The format works through Apple iPhones by first showing an interactive ad teaser, “You're getting warmer,” then when clicked through asks consumers to download cooking applications individually to their iPhones. This shift represents a change in appealing to consumers' senses and social sensibilities. The former media approach appealed to a rational social sensibility and mass audiences of eating soup at home as an enjoyment shared with others. The latter iAd slogan and iPhones media approach appeals to a more tactile sense and individualistic sensibility. This article explores the particular confluence of social, sensory, and media factors that intersect with a marketed food brand, and discusses its implications for the way manufacturers mix and blend new sensory messages and mobile media channels to appeal to a new sensibility in people's changing eating habits.     

Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Manchester through the Ears

ABSTRACT

As part of a wider sensory ethnography on the development of place attachments and situated knowledge amongst international newcomers to a city (Manchester, England), this article tells the story of my collaboration with Phoebe, a student of acoustics from bandung, Indonesia. Using a participatory sensory ethnographic method, Phoebe was encouraged to devise her own contribution to my project, which was modeled around her own sensory preferences and technological expertise. Our work together took place over a period of 4–5 months and yielded a series of soundscape compositions and accompanying narrative texts, all of which conveyed Phoebe's newly acquired sound-based knowledge, or acoustemology, of Manchester. Using narrative textual accompaniments to her recordings, Phoebe ascribes qualities to her surroundings that overlap with her own personal qualities, in effect showing how much she blends with her new city. As Phoebe and I subsequently listened to and “talked over” her soundscape compositions, they evoked sound marks, or sensory memories, of the landscape, sounds and music that Phoebe left behind in Indonesia. these sound-elicited interviews added further layers of emplaced knowledge to both of our constructions of the city.     

Sensing Voice

ABSTRACT

Through a consideration of the underwater singing practiced by contemporary American soprano and performance artist Juliana Snapper, this article addresses the inherent relation between materiality and the voice, the sensed and the embodied. I focus on the physical and sensory properties of singers' and listeners' bodies; the space within and the matter through which sound disperses; and how the relation between these aspects plays an integral part in what it feels like to sing, and what it is possible to hear. I aim to demonstrate that a sensory reading of singing and listening may capture dimensions of the voice that are difficult, if not impossible, to account for using conventional analyses of music or standard readings of vocal repertoire. However, a sensory approach to sound does not offer a stable explanation of what sound or music is. Instead each such account unveils a composite manifestation of our understanding of sound at a given moment in time and space.