Creating Sensory Friendly Zones

According to the late German philosopher Gernot Böhme (1993: 2), atmospheres are like a haze: they are “indeterminate as regards their ontological status” in that “we are not sure whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them.” This is because atmospheres are actually compounded of both:they are a product of the “co-presence” of subject and object. Specifically, atmospheres are “the mediums or the elements through which perception, and hence human action and understanding, takes place” (Böhme in Bille 2013: 58).

Atmospheres are enveloping. Atmospheres are immersive. Atmospheres are affective. Atmospheres induce crowds to form. However, as Danish anthropologist Mikkel Bille (2013: 58) oberves: “People do not simply become immersed in atmospheres on a blank slate but areinherently attuned by the norms of what to expect and by events that have occurred previously” – cultural norms, that is (see further Kane 2015). Thus, atmospheres are cultural and temporal as well as spatial, meteorological and emotional or affective formations.

Our research program seeks to produce a finetuned, sociologically- and sensorially-grounded conceptualization of “atmospheres” (Böhme 2017) through staging atmospheric experiments, or “performative sensory environments” (Howes and Salter 2015) of a limited duration and analyzing audience responses thereto. The ethnographic research processes that feedinto the conceptualization, staging and analysis of the PSEs are as central to this research program as the product – that is, the PSEs. What distinguishes the PSEs we shall be producing is their extremity. This extremity will throw the contours of extant theorizations of atmospheres into relief and extend the study of the atmospheric in some highly productive sociological, musical and extra-musical, and non-neurotypical new directions. Specifically, we plan to stage a curated musical performance keyed to the theme of sonic transgression (Axis 2), or, the scrambling of conventional (cultured) musical expectations and genres by incorporating elements of noise,sound art, improvisatory and experimental musics, and even heavy metal, into the concert, with all the disconcerting effects such a conflicted atmosphere will engender. Secondly, at the oppositeextreme, we shall be exploring how the most banal scenarios or everyday life situations may themselves be experienced as extreme by neurodivergent subjects (Axis 1), who have heretofore been marginalized and denied meaningful participation in the shaping of common spaces –from schools to malls to public transport. Thirdly, we propose to cross these two lines of investigation through designing and staging what could be called a “sensory friendly zone” for neurodivergentand neurotypical individuals alike, as will be explained below.

In the extant literature on atmospheres, the “subjects who experience them” (Böhme) are presumed to be neurotypical. No allowance is made for persons with heightened sensory sensitivities or acuities and neurodiverse sensory processing patterns. Yet a growing body of research, informed by Ayres’ sensory integration paradigm (Ayres 1972, 1979) and Dunn’s sensory profiles (Dunn, 2001), has revealed how neurodivergent subjects do sense differently: for autistic persons, everyday life situations (school, public transportation) are often experienced as extreme (overwhelming, excruciating, and laced with anxiety) while everybody else carries on as normal. The sensory extremity of everyday life situations pose severe challenges for autists to beable to engage with others in these spaces (Clement et al. 2022). Socio-spatial exclusion is common (Davidson, 2010). To be able to attend to such differences in “bodily-sensing” (Park 2008, 2010, 2012) from first-person, experience-near perspectives (Mattingly, 2017) could help inform a more inclusive theory of atmospheres which it is our aim to further.

Co-I Park and PI Grond are in the vanguard of a growing movement to rethink Autism Spectrum Disorders, and other neurologically-related diagnoses or conditions, from an embodied, narrative and critical phenomenological perspective. Of particular note is Park et al.’s theorization of the “sensory-social layering,” or imbrication of extreme sensory experience in the social and built environment (Clement et al 2022). This approach shifts the onus from a focus onthe individual subject as deviant or dysfunctional to the societal and material construction of the environment and its impact on sensory experiences and social interaction within that environment. Significantly, Park’s participatory research with actual stakeholders from the neurodiverse community (who become co- researchers in the process) underscores how inclusive spaces require the creative and collective envisioning of what the autistic youth in her studies called “sensory-friendly zones,” and such zones could well be for the benefit of non-neurotypical and neurotypical subjects alike, for as put by one autistic youth co-researcher: “I can’t be the only one” (Clement et al. 2022). The autistic co-researchers on this project, together with Grond and Park, will use immersive technology andtechniques to capture and record neurodivergent experiences of 1) everyday life in Axis 1, and 2) the curated musical atmospheres created in Axis 2 (see below). These findings will then informknowledge translation with a view to designing and implementing Sensory-Friendly Zones. This research endeavour will build on Park and Grond’s collaboration with artists with sensorysensitivities and acuities in the context of their SSHRC-funded research-creation project focussed on the visual arts.

The methodologies of this research program include ethnographic research (after Laplantine 2015;Pink 2009; Sumartojo and Pink 2019; Howes 2019) with immersive recording technologies for data gathering and data analysis (Schneider, Grond et al 2022). This novel approach will be applied in two partially overlapping contexts, namely: 1) participatory research with autistic youths and adults negotiating everyday spaces; and, 2) experimental and collaborative residencies for the creation of extreme, or new and challenging, musics. To this end, we envision threecollaborative research creation residencies between musicians, neurodivergent participants, collaborators, and co-investigators; one immersive technological residency to investigate the ethnographic potential of the immersive sound recording methods; and two major PSEs, one curated-PSE (c-PSE) in Spring 2024, and one everyday- PSE (e-PSE) in Spring 2025 that will synthesize and publicize the knowledges developed during the residencies and ethnographic forays with neurodivergent co-researchers. The PSEs will in turn be followed by two Writing andExpressive Workshops which will catalyse the translation of the artistic creations into scholarly publications.

Data collection through immersive audio recording during the sorties with autistic co-researchers and the jam sessions with resident musicians leading up to the production of the PSEs themselves, and during the PSEs themselves, offer two complementary ways to study atmospheres. 1) Binaural microphones fixed next to the ears of participants as they navigate and narrate their experience of the city, or a jam session, or a PSE provide unique first-person perspectives for all co- researchers. This aligns with the individual and experience-near aspect of atmospheres. PI Grond has been amongst the first to introduce binaural techniques in ethnographic contexts (Grond and Devos 2016). In contrast, 2) Compact microphone arrays record multiple perspectives of the same PSE that can be listened to ex post and affordresearchers and participants the opportunity to actively re-live and re-explore the recorded atmospheres. This new technology is also known as volumetric audio, or 6 degrees of freedom recordings. It complements the first-person perspective by capturing the sonic elements that ultimately evoke atmospheres. PI Grond has been a leading experimenter with this technology (Grond et al. 2022) in musical and artistic contexts. We will record during sorties, residencies and PSEs with both methods. The collaborating non-profit organization SIT will support immersive data collection with audio visual recording technology.

The immersive data gathered during the above-mentioned investigations will be further processed through the Round Table discussions with participants and investigators, and during the Writing and Expressive Workshops (facilitated by Co-PI Howes). The staging of the PSEscomprises the research-creation (R-C) component of this project (Sawchuk and Chapman 2012). R-C unites artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and material experimentation to generate new ways of sensing, knowing, and being. The PSEs that will emerge occupy a space “between art and science” (Born and Barry, 2010; Galison and Jones, 2014; Sormani et al, 2018), or “between art and anthropology” (Schneider and Wright 2010, 2013; Cox et al 2016; Elliott and Culhane 2017) and, therefore, produce and communicate knowledges that conventional academic or artistic specialties cannot touch.

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