This paper offers the ambisonic audiographic form as a viable alternative approach to theorizing within sound studies. The approach is exemplified in the essay-artwork In_Listening_In that allows the listener to be fully immersed in semiotic and sensorial sound. Traditional modes of theorizing emphasize critical distance and objectivity. However, considering sound and listening phenomenologically, sound/object and listening/subject are interdependent, each bringing the other to meaning in a correlation I call sonaurality. The visual paradigm of observational separation is thus ill-equipped to theorize sonaurality. I propose that the writer can consider the experience of sounding from within, acknowledging context, sitedness and partiality as per Haraway (1988). I call this a tomographic approach, borrowing the term from the medical procedure that explores within a body via multiple X-ray slices. In_Listening_In enacts the tomographic authorial position in its textual material and style additionally repositioning the reader as listener through what Smith calls “critical audiography” (2019). The audiographic form is extended via the ambisonic audio potentials of 360VR technology, fully immersing the listener and sensorially reinforcing the arguments. While the essay-artwork can stand on its own academically, this paper argues for the ambisonic audio-graphic form as both a methodology and format that is a valuable approach within sound studies.

Soundscapes and the sounds that compose them are many and varied, and deserve our attention. Ecoacoustics is the rapidly advancing scientific discipline of recording and monitoring the sounds in our environment and can be used as an indication of the health of our environment. Generating interest among the general public can be chal-lenging, and this paper introduces research into creative ecoacoustic visualisation. It aims to increase public awareness of ecoacoustics and its use in broader conser-vation initiatives by using evidence-based, iterative methods to design ecoacoustic visualisation experiences that enhance audience engagement with sound, space and place.

This short paper is a provocation in which we lean into the notion of sentience in Creative-AI music. The purpose of this is to highlight that a critical component when using bucket terms such as “creativity”, “intelligence” or “sentience” in the design and deployment of artificial intelligence must be its context. The focus of this paper is a practice-based project called Solaris, a jazz quartet where three musicians are AI. Within its context we can claim that we achieved high levels of sentience. The paper starts with a brief discussion of the concept of sentience, positions our point of view and how we approach the concept, and then describes the artistic and technical processes used to build a novel dataset and to train our neural networks. We conclude with an account of the experience of playing alongside sentient artificial musicians and reaffirm the importance of context for the planning, design and utilisation of Creative-AI.