Professor Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä
The director of the project
University of Eastern Finland
University of Eastern Finland
Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä is Professor and Head of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland, and Docent (Adjunct Professor) at the University of Turku. She is a recognized specialist in studying the changing European soundscapes. During her research career she (author name Järviluoma) has published 139 international and national refereed articles, books, chapters and other publications, among others the results of the large international follow-up project Acoustic Environments in Change (2009) and the widely used textbook Gender and Qualitative Methods (Sage 2003; also SageRM Online 2010). Her whole publication career has been permeated by a strong interest in research methodology, the history of disciplines, interdisciplinarity, and gender. She is the General Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the President of the Finnish Society for Cultural Studies. She participates in the editorial boards of four international journals, and is a steering board member of the Nordic Network on Researching Music Censorship (NORDFORSK 2010-2013. She has intensively been involved in bridging the gulf of theory and practice in the participatory music ethnography project Becoming Audible! and its outcomes.
FM Meri Kytö
Junior researcherUniversity of Eastern Finland (cultural research, ethnomusicology)
Contact: meri.kyto@uef.fi
In her PhD research Meri studies articulations of sonic privacy and acoustic communities in urban environments. Her latest articles have dealt with apartment house acoustemology in Finland and acoustic and electro-acoustic communities of a football fan group in Istanbul. Currently she is working on a sonic ethnography of mahalle (Kuzguncuk) and site (Cengelköy) life in Istanbul and on sonic representations of the city of Istanbul on Turkish films.
University of Tampere
Uimonen’s research is concentrating on the past, present and future soundscapes in Dollar. His theoretical orientation draws on anthropologist Mary Douglas’ concept as dirt as matter out of place adapted to study of sound and noise. Uimonen’s research forms a continuum from 1975 to 2009, studying the pleasant and unpleasant sounds that the young villagers want to hear in their surroundings in the near future. The omnipresence of music in everyday life of the young and the listening of soundscape as well, will be scrutinized.
Dr Noora VikmanPostdoctoral researcher, Senior Lecturer of Musicology
University of Eastern Finland (cultural research, ethnomusicology)
Contact: noora.vikman@uef.fi
In her research Noora Vikman is interested in quieter
environments and specially the phenomena of materializing immaterial in
acoustic culture in the middle of the ongoing cultural and economical shift.
She is analyzing how silence and quietness are understood as germinating
utilizable resources. "Quietness" associates to hi-fi environments
where lesser sounds and quieter tunes of the acoustic environments can be heard
more clearly. In Finland the more dramatic silence as one sphere of immaterial
culture has been chosen as one of the potential national marketing assets. It
is believed to bring additional value for Finnish silent areas. Creating
attention value and giving silence a role as both a commodity and a common creates
huge challenge to redefine the meanings of silence. The most interesting node
is there where this challenge meets the entrepreneurs working on the grass root
and the expectations and subjective experiences of the travelers. The needs and
demands of preserving quiet environments inflict and cause changes in the
conventions of local everyday life styles. Vikman’s applied study utilizes participatory
methods and develops the study of meanings towards the development of silence
as environmental knowhow. The places studied more in detail are Northern
Italian village Cembra and two Finnish, Northern Karelian communes Ilomantsi
and Koli (Lieksa).
