Drever, John L.. 2024. 'Hearing and Listening with Eevee – bridging the auraldiversity of a dog and a human'. In: 7th Conference on Acoustic Ecology: Soundscapes, Biophony and Climate Crisis. Ancient Epidaurus, Greece 7 - 10 November 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

My co-author and collaborator, Eevee, is a 3-year-old female Lagotto Romagnolo (Italian Water Dog). The breed is known for its exceptional sense of smell, primed for truffle hunting, and Eevee lives up to this reputation. She also has very sensitive hearing. This affords her joy when she first hears her best friend Archer, a German Shepherd, who reliably barks on arriving in the park. But some specific qualities of sound and out-of-place sounds can fill her with dread, transforming an erstwhile familiar location into topophobia (Tuan 1977). Large open-air spatial geophonic sounds such as thunder, human sounds such as fireworks or motorbikes, and a range of sounds resembling the above. Drones are very bad. In-door sounds, such as expresso machines, can be terrifying, but then there are the sounds that, to me, a 50-year-old human male, are imperceptible. What our standards and regulations class as ultrasound can be perfectly audible for a dog. So, as a caring and loving pet owner, how do I navigate this everyday soundscape, which for Eevee is akin to what Daughtry (Daughtry 2015) calls the belliphonic. Is the problem her hearing? Do I attempt to desensitise her acute senses through training or drugs? Keep her indoors. Or do I try intervening on the prevailing soundscape, which has been modelled on human auditory metrics (ISO 2014)? In this talk, I will refer to earlier research, when I became a father and my infants were exposed to the noise of highspeed hand dryers. This scenario helped me coin the concept of auraldiversity (Drever 2017). How can this concept accord with more than humans when we come to analysing and designing soundscapes?

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote)
Keywords:	aural diversity
Related URLs:	https://acousticecology.music.uoa.gr/pro... https://acousticecology.music.uoa.gr/
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Music > Unit for Sound Practice Research Music
Dates:	Date Event 9 November 2024 Completed
Event Location:	Ancient Epidaurus, Greece
Date range:	7 - 10 November 2024
Item ID:	37862
Date Deposited:	20 Nov 2024 09:41
Last Modified:	20 Nov 2024 09:41
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37862

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