EARS II:

Background. Contemporary music, in particular electroacoustic music, is not very well known in today’s society. Musicians and researchers should have confronted issues related to making this corpus of music accessible to a wider audience; however, there are only very few projects available that explain electroacoustic music to non-specialists. The PhD project “EARS II ” focuses on this as well as on detailed research about the fundamental concepts of electroacoustic music. At the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre there are two existent projects that are related to and will be integrated into the research: The original EARS project (ElectroAcoustic Resource Site, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk), which provides academic information for researchers in the realm of electroacoustic music, and the Intention/Reception (I/R) project (Weale 2006), which has investigated and shown ways of presenting and introducing electroacoustic music to new audiences thus demonstrating its potential accessibility. Aims. The goal of the PhD project is to develop a web-based resource for children (11-14 year olds in the first instance) with an accompanying curriculum based on the current website EARS I. EARS II will introduce and explain the main concepts of electroacoustic music to inexperienced listeners using relevant multimedia tools and applying different forms of navigation based on the learning situation and the ability of the user. It will offer diagnostic information to users and will also involve user-generated feedback and tagging systems. It will call on elements related to music appreciation (I/R project) and creativity (new ‘Sound Organiser ’ software). The research will focus o