About us

Research at the Sound Studies Lab
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The Sound Studies Lab was founded in 2011 by Holger Schulze.
The foundation phase of the lab was funded by the German Research Foundation DFG at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.

The lab invites young and experienced scholars and artists to work on the sonic and sensory aspects of individual lives and in heterogenuous societies, cultures and historical eras. The projects at the lab operate in mobile, experiential and field-based research environments. The basic research strategies of the lab are therefore field research, critical analysis and the production of sonic artifacts. The research of the lab operates in permanent exchange, evaluation, collaboration and cooperation with international researchers and artists in the field of the sound studies.

The researchers and authors, the artists and designers of the Sound Studies Lab document their research processes and publish the results of their research projects on sound studies in a broad variety of formats: in research blogs, in articles for academic journals and art- or music-related magazines, in public lectures, presentations, conferences as well as in specialized workshops and university courses, in sound art installations and performances, in radio features or experimental sound art pieces.

In recent years our research assistants, guest researchers or research collaborators came from Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and the United Kingdom. At our biweekly online colloquium and our workshops we were happy to welcome also participants and contributors from the US, India, Australia, Russia, Canada, Spain, Poland and Turkey.

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For Postdocs: If you are interested in doing your postdoc-project at the Sound Studies Lab you are very welcome. The best experiences we had recently with applications through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie-Actions (MSCA) with a so-called Individual Fellowship (IF). The selection process is highly competitive, but it provides probably one of the best starting grounds for a postdoc-project. Please have a closer look at the specific requirements for such a fellowship. With postdoc projects we wish to support three main focuses of an anthropology of sound, building upon our recent endeavours:

  • multi-sensory, proprioceptive and experiential aspects of sounds in everyday life, in the arts, music, and in research
  • further developing and expanding all sorts of sensory methods in research and in dissemination (e.g. sonic writing, deep listening, sonic fiction, sensobiographical walking, audio papers)
  • investigating forms of embodied, situated sound knowledge and its role within sonic epistemologies

For PhDs: If you are interested in doing your PhD at the Sound Studies Lab you are very welcome; though we need to stress that it is formally required by the University of Copenhagen that you have been (or will be) granted the necessary funding for your PhD with a full position. Please have a closer look at the yearly calls of PhD-scholarships at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Copenhagen. With PhD projects we wish to support primarily the following focuses of sound studies in general:

  • studies of highly specific, maybe recently ignored areas in sound art, sound design, popular culture, everyday life and the history of sound research (cf. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, Sound as Popular Culture, Sound Works, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound)
  • combined with an application of advanced concepts in sound studies (cf. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies, The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound)
  • leading to the conceptualization of new and challenging research within and approaches to sound studies 

For students on the BA-, MA- or PhD-level: If you are interested in learning developing or expanding your research approach or project (i.e. your bachelor, your master or your PhD-thesis) at the Sound Studies Lab you are very welcome to join us as fellow or guest researcher for a semester or any smaller amount of time. The best experiences we had recently with applications through the ERASMUS-programme as a so-called ERASMUS-trainee. If your university is part of this programme, please do not hesitate to contact us; however, you need to be aware that currently we might have only 1 place for an ERASMUS-trainee at a time. Please have a closer look at the specific requirements for such a traineeship.

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The main activities of the lab take place at the Departments of Arts and Cultural Studies IKK at the University of Copenhagen. The main cooperation partners of the lab are right now the CLB Berlin and the Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Historische Anthropologie at the Freie Universität Berlin. Previous cooperation partners for research projects as well as workshops include the Archiv für Semiotik at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Internationales Design Zentrum Berlin, the Design Research Lab, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin.

 

Presentation

Sound Studies Lab (2012)

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