SENSOTRA Project by Heikki Uimonen & Meri Kytö
During the last Cresson’ Winter School “Hark Cresson is 40” we had the pleasure to listen to the presentation of this research project on Wednesday, January 30
Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe, 1950-2020 (SENSOTRA) is a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant funded five-year-long-project led by professor Helmi Järviluoma. The project aims at producing new understandings of the changes in people’s sensory environmental relationships in three European cities during a particular period in history, 1950–2020, through a new transgenerational methodology, ethnographic “sensobiography”.

The findings will challenge existing ideas about shared experiences across generations, about how people share sensory experiences and about the use of digital technologies in urban space. The interdisciplinary impact extends beyond cultural, sound, and music studies to areas of psychology, human geography, environmental aesthetics, and media history and theory. At present we are still able to study people ethnographically who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, who therefore lived their early years without digital technologies. The moment is also ideally suited for studying generations born straight into the digital world, where there is a need to enable young and older people to maintain a many-faceted relationship with their environments.

In his presentation Dr Heikki Uimonen demonstrated a Sensotra research method sensobiography walk with volunteers Dr. Meri Kytö and Dr. Rainer Kazig. In real life situation the walk is carried out by a researcher and two informants. Informants from different generations are asked to participate to two walks by their own choosing, talk about their experiences and sensations during the walk with video camera attached to their clothing and take part in short interview and perhaps another interview later. The researchers are interested in walkers’ observations, feelings and their stories, so there are no right or wrong way to do the walk.



Heikki Uimonen (PhD) in an ethnomusicologist and a docent on acoustic communication and soundscape studies at the Universities of Tampere and Eastern Finland and he was part of COST project standardizing soundscape concept in Europe. He has published articles, a monograph and edited anthologies on music consumption, radio music, compact cassettes and changing sonic environments. His research interests include sonic construction of place, mediated music, social use of music, transforming soundscapes and how all these intertwine. He is currently working in projects Sensory Transformation and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe 1950–2020 (researcher) and ACMESOCS. Auditory Cultures, Mediated Sounds and Constructed Spaces (principal investigator). He is the board member of Finnish Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Meri Kytö is a post-doctoral researcher in music studies at the University of Tampere. Her dissertation (2013) investigated articulations of private and common acoustic spaces in urban environments, especially Istanbul. Currently she’s writing on sensory agency of technology, library soundscape design and a critique of the concept of acoustic community. Her previous work has been on cultural intimacy in film sound, ecocritism in soundscape composition, online frustration of neighborhood noise and apartment home acoustemology. She has been active in the Finnish Society for Acoustic Ecology and it’s projects since 2000, currently curating the FSAE online soundscape archive. She is the editor of the Finnish Yearbook of Ethnomusicology and on the editorial board of Soundscape: the Journal of Acoustic Ecology. A committed advocate of transdisciplinarity, she is also the vice-president of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology, a board member of the Finnish Musicological Society and an active member of the ECREA Media and the city TWG.
Crédits photographiques : SENSOTRA Project
Citer ce billet : “SENSOTRA Project by Heikki Uimonen & Meri Kytö”, par Heikki Uimonen & Meri Kytö. Publié sur Le Cresson veille et recherche… le 19 mars 2019. Lien : https://lcv.hypotheses.org/?p=15305.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Léa Mosnier (19 mars 2019). SENSOTRA Project by Heikki Uimonen & Meri Kytö. Le Cresson veille et recherche…. Consulté le 11 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/qsl3
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