2015 — 2017 |
Casey, Michael |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: the Confluence of Music, Art and Science At Long Term Ecological Research Sites
Practitioners of the arts, humanities, and sciences all seek solutions to complex problems, suggesting that collaborations across these disciplines could yield new insights into societal challenges and needs. Deep cultural and practical divides limit these collaborations. This project will bring together ecologists, artists, musicians, neuroscientists, computer scientists, educators, and science communicators to design research using new visualization and sonification tools. Project goals are to stimulate creative thinking, to allow for advanced forms of pattern recognition, and to facilitate a diverse and cross-disciplinary approach to environmental research needs, questions, and results. The project has the potential to expand significantly the participation of diverse cultural, ethnic, and economic groups in scientific research by allowing these groups to co-develop research questions at the outset. Inclusion of educators and science communicators will provide opportunities for students and the public to interact with high frequency environmental data in novel ways, allowing them new ways to comprehend complex data and processes. These new ways of experiencing complex natural phenomena may be particularly beneficial for individuals who have special learning needs, who learn better visually or acoustically, or who are disaffected by traditional numerical presentations of data and results. The project is risky, but promises very high rewards.
The major goal of this project is to encode high-volume and high-frequency ecological data in new ways in order to discover underlying patterns and processes. Online digital visualization and sonification tools will be developed to display multi-dimensional real-time ecological data generated from environmental sensor arrays at two Long Term Ecological Research sites. A novel partnership with neuroscientists will explore how stimulation of different neural circuitry in the human brain allows large datasets to be understood, perhaps in new ways. A current visualization tool, Waterviz, will be re-designed in collaboration with artists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists. Hydrologic data captured with sensors will drive a computer model that calculates all components of a water cycle in real time. These data in turn will drive artistic and musical simulations of the water cycle. The models will be used to test hypotheses that multi-sensory experiences simultaneously engage reasoning, visual, and acoustical brain centers such that large-scale patterns and processes are easier to apprehend; that neurological tools can provide a mechanistic understanding of improved comprehension; and that the engagement of artists directly in the research will stimulate new ideas and insights into complex problems. External evaluation of the project will determine whether artists and scientists are equitably engaged, whether new relationships result, and whether this process stimulates new ideas and insights.
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0.915 |
2017 — 2020 |
Ayres, Matthew (co-PI) [⬀] Calsbeek, Ryan (co-PI) [⬀] Dominy, Nathaniel (co-PI) [⬀] Ter Hofstede, Hannah Casey, Michael |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Mri: Acquisition of An Acoustic Camera For Multidisciplinary Research and Teaching At Dartmouth College
An award is made to Dartmouth College to acquire an acoustic camera for tracking sources of sound in video. The acoustic camera will contribute to multidisciplinary research, teaching and outreach. A teaching module will be developed on the acoustics of natural landscapes using the acoustic camera that can be customized and incorporated into graduate courses, undergraduate courses and teacher training for professional development days. Dartmouth's Science & Technology Outreach team will assist with delivering products from the acoustic camera to the broader community, such as interactive audiovisual depictions of songbird choruses for the Hubbard Brook LTER web portal, movies from research on the acoustics of bats, frogs and primates to present at a local science pub, and audiovisual displays for the website of a National Public Radio special series on sounds in nature.
Sound recordings provide rich information about natural systems and human environments. A major limitation of acoustic recordings, however, is that they do not provide information about the direction or location of the sound source. An acoustic camera is a cutting-edge instrument that integrates both visual and acoustic information to generate video images that identify the direction and source of sounds using a video camera, microphone array, data acquisition board and processing computer. At Dartmouth, there is an unusually large and interdisciplinary community of people united by an interest in acoustics and natural sounds. The acquisition of an acoustic camera will elevate the individual research and teaching programs of multiple faculty in multiple disciplines who study the transmission and identity of sounds in the environment. Furthermore, the acoustic camera will foster cross-disciplinary collaborations among faculty in Biology, Anthropology, Music, and other disciplines. Current projects across the university address the role of sounds in evolutionary processes. These projects range from the dynamics and evolutionary drivers of social interactions in acoustically signaling animals, to the role of soundscapes in the evolution of human hearing, language and music. The ability to assign sounds to individuals within aggregations or pairwise interactions in field conditions will enable researchers to answer unresolved questions for a variety of projects across disciplines.
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0.915 |