Ecological Interference: Hybrid Soundscapes

This artwork responds to the ideas raised during a time of research and recording in 2015, it explores the way in which humans adapt to technological soundscapes but perhaps ignore how other creatures respond to new sounds in their environment. Sound and noise are subjective, they are experienced different depending on culture, however, there is little research examining how the biophony responds to the anthrophony. This work, an immersive soundscape, intermingles this constant friction between the noise of humanity and the soundscape of nature. It uses the audio and video recordings from these two different spaces, the human voice and the sounds of technological interference to create a human/nature hybrid soundscape

The Sound Wars: Silencing the Working Class Soundscape of Smithfield:Silencing the Working Class Soundscape of Smithfield

The concept of sounds associated with a social class is not new, Emily Thompson and Hillel Schwartz both present historical evidence of the segregation of communities because of the soundscapes they produced, from ancient Greece where noise was often linked with production, madness, and poverty, and was often used as a method for the segregation and suppression of certain groups, to New York City where anti noise campaigns, led by the upper classes, have fought historically for the suppression of unnecessary noise. However, contemporary classifications of noise as a quantifiable and verifiable phenomenon in cities have created what seems like an unambiguous and non-judgmental critique of sound pollution based on statistics. This suggests that we have progressed from the classification of loud sounds as associated with social classes to one connected to pollution. In this paper I expand on a body of work conducted between 2009 and 2014, which examined the social construction of urban soundscapes in the Smithfield area of Dublin city, Ireland. The research was conducted with a group of participants, 84 teenagers and 5 older adults. These participants helped identify, through a series of research methods, concepts and ideas about the meaning of noise and sound and how certain sounds are often linked to social class

Listening To Ecological Interference:Renewable Technologies And Their Soundscapes

The sounds of modernity are increasingly moving into natural habitats. With an influx of new technologies designed to utilise and extract material from nature, the natural soundscape is becoming masked by the mechanical and technological. This article addresses an experience of listening and recording which took place in the summer of 2015, within two different natural landscapes: the southern region of Iceland and the north eastern region of Spain. The field trip exposed a significant keynote sound within each space; a sound produced by renewable technologies. The sounds produced by these technologies, wind farms and hydroelectric power stations, were significantly louder than had been expected. This lead to an analysis of whether the soundscapes of environmentally friendly technologies can or should be critiqued, even if they have a demonstrable impact on the ecosystem

Sonifying Memory:Creative approaches to representing socially constructed soundscapes

This chapter examines an artist residency at the Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland which culminated in the construction of a solo exhibition in 2014. The work was an attempt to represent artistically the soundscape memories of a collection of five older adults who had lived in or near the Smithfield area of Dublin from the 1940s, and sonic data collected by 84 teenagers age 15-16 living in or around Smithfield today. These participants were part of a large PhD research project, which was examining the co-construction of an urban soundscape. The study was interrogating the potential of sound to shape communities' perception of place. Further the research found that the users of space play a part in the co-construction of space, not in an actual physical re-design but in the re-imagining of spatial use and meaning, through the deployment of their own sounds. This research was never intended for installation; instead, the focus was on an examination of the sound as a social construct. However, in reimagining the findings as a work of art, new ideas and questions emerged about how one can represent sensory knowledge through creative practice. This paper will look at both the collection and some of the findings from the research, and how this was translated into a sound installation

The value of ecollogically acceptable insecticide combinations for Colorado Potato Beetle control

Colorado potato beetle is the most notorious and problematic insect defoliator pest of potato and threatens crops in nearly all major potato growing regions. Colorado potato beetle is well known for its ability to develop resistance to chemical insecticides and therefore new and novel treatment methods must be developed and explored. Integrated Pest Management provides the soundest approach to controlling Colorado potato beetle while slowing and preventing resistance development. This work investigated the use of ecologically acceptable insecticide treatments: azadirachtin, spinosad and spinetoram. Reduced dosing and combinational treatments were used to determine if satisfactory efficacy could be achieved while also improving economic results. In 2019 a field trial was conducted with ten treatments and one control. The treatments included the three active ingredients at full and reduced dosing as well as the combination of azadirachtin with spinosad and azadirachtin with spinetoram, both combinations were also carried out at reduced dosing. Efficacy was calculated using the Abbott formula. The results showed that a 50% reduced dose of azadirachtin provided unsatisfactory efficacy results while the full dose provided low to moderate efficacy (47%-84%). Both a 100% full dose and 50% reduced dose of both spinosad and spinetoram provided satisfactory efficacy results (83%-99%), with residual activity of 10-14 days. The 10% reduced dose of both spinosad and spinetoram provided low efficacy results, with the exception of spinosad around days 14-21, where the efficacy improved (75-80%). The combination of a 50% dose of azadirachtin with either a 10% dose of spinosad or a 10% dose of spinetoram only provided moderate efficacy at best, with spinosad (58%-81%) outperforming spinetoram (41%-74%). Both combinational treatments showed the peak efficacy around day 5. Based on the advantages that these treatments offer compared to synthetic chemical insecticides, further work is recommended to determine if these combinational treatments can offer satisfactory efficacy results. The use of 50% reduced dosing of both spinosad and spinetoram is recommended as a treatment method which provides satisfactory efficacy, improved economic results as well positive ecological fate

Exploring teacher identity using poststructural tools

Human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) have been investigated in numerous disease settings involving impaired regeneration because of the crucial role they play in tissue maintenance and repair. Considering the number of comorbidities associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), the hypothesis that MSCs mediate these comorbidities via a reduction in their native maintenance and repair activities is an intriguing line of inquiry. Here, it is demonstrated that the number of bone marrow-derived MSCs in people with T2DM was reduced compared to that of age-matched control (AMC) donors and that this was due to a specific decrease in the number of MSCs with osteogenic capacity. There were no differences in MSC cell surface phenotype or in MSC expansion, differentiation, or angiogenic or migratory capacity from donors living with T2DM as compared to AMCs. These findings elucidate the basic biology of MSCs and their potential as mediators of diabetic comorbidities, especially osteopathies, and provide insight into donor choice for MSC-based clinical trials. This study suggests that any role of bone marrow MSCs as a mediator of T2DM comorbidity is likely due to a reduction in the osteoprogenitor population size and not due to a permanent alteration to the MSCs’ capacity to maintain tissue homeostasis through expansion and differentiation