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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the results of an industry-funded qualitative interdisciplinary research project that has produced a new approach to motorway noise management called “noise transformation”. Design/methodology/approach Four iterative design tests guided by listening as methodology. These included field recordings, laboratory tests and two field tests. Field tests were conducted in combination with ethnographers, who verified community responses to field-based transformations. Findings Transformation requires an audible perception of both background and introduced sounds in all instances. Transformation creates a 1–2 dB increase in background sound levels, making it counterintuitive to traditional noise attenuation approaches. Noise transformation is an electroacoustic soundscape design method that treats noise as a “design material”. When listening to motorway noise transformations, participants were actually experiencing another rendering of a sound that they had already acquired a degree of attunement to. Thus, they experienced transformations as somehow familiar or normal and easy to feel comfortable with. Originality/value Noise transformation is a new approach to noise management. Typically, noise management focusses on reduction in dB levels. Noise transformation focusses on changing the perceptual impact of noise to make it less annoying. It brings together urban design, composition and ethnography as a means to think about the future design of outdoor environments affected by motorway traffic noise, and should be of interests to planners, designers and artists. The authors have structured the paper around listening as methodology, through which both design and ethnography outcomes were achieved.

We are constantly being warned that our personal data is vulnerable, that it is being used and abused by artificial intelligence, giant tech corporations and controlling governments. But do we really understand what "our data" consists of and what can be done with and to it? Is it possible to unravel the complex entanglements of data gathering and processing technologies in order to see and understand our data in a meaningful way? My Data Body is a virtual reality (VR) artwork that brings together some of our most personal and sensitive data such as medical scans, social media, biometric and social security data in an attempt to make visible and manipulable our many intersecting data corpuses so that they can be held, inspected, dissected and played with as a way to start understanding and answering these questions. My Data Body has been created as part of the interdisciplinary project Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality (KTVR), a multi-faceted project that explores the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary "data body". KTVR brings together researchers across the arts and sciences, to innovate new creatives methodologies, educational resources and ethical guidelines for working artistically with personal data.

In past presentations to the ASA, we have described the design and construction of four generations of unique spherical speakers (multichannel, outward-radiating geodesic speaker arrays) and Sensor-Speaker-Arrays, (SenSAs: combinations of various sensor devices with outward-radiating multichannel speaker arrays). This presentation will detail the ways in which arrays of these speakers have been employed in alternative performance venues—providing presence and intimacy in the performance of electro-acoustic chamber music and sound installation, while engaging natural and unique acoustical qualities of various locations. We will present documentation of the use of multichannel sonic diffusion arrays in small clubs, ‘‘black-box’’ theaters, planetariums, and art galleries.

A discussion of the musical composition ‘‘Thaw/Twist at Bailey’s,’’ in which a field recording of the 2004 spring thaw at Thomas Bailey’s farmhouse in Richland, MI is used to explore the phenomena of temporal/spatial convergence and dispersal. This presentation will cover the creation of the piece, its initial installation for a site-specific 16-channel array of custom-built speakers, and the challenges and merits of adapting it for 5.1 surround sound.