Listening to the Zoo Project Dataset, 2017-2021

Rice, Tom (2022). Listening to the Zoo Project Dataset, 2017-2021. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855383

The context of the research Every year 700 million people visit zoological gardens worldwide, with more than 30 million of these visits taking place in the UK. Apart from the significant economic role they play as tourist attractions, many zoos also aim to educate their visitors about biodiversity, exposing them to species they would not otherwise have the opportunity to encounter directly and providing information about these species. As part of their educational role, many zoos offer the public opportunities to learn about and engage with conservation and environmental protection projects. Zoos are usually approached as places where animals are, first and foremost, seen. This project, however, aims to transform the way we think about zoos by attending closely to an aspect of these institutions that has previously been neglected or overlooked: their sounds or 'soundscapes'. Its aims and objectives Through close collaboration with two project partner zoos in the UK, this project seeks to trial innovative sound research methodologies to generate detailed knowledge about how sounds are woven into the experience of zoos for visitors, staff, people who live near zoos and for zoo animals themselves. It sets out to explore how listening, and attending to different kinds and qualities of sound can promote new forms of awareness of human and animal behaviour in the zoo context. The project sets out to change the mode in which zoo visitors engage with species on display, prompting the development of an 'acoustic mindfulness' that complicates, challenges and augments a visually-orientated approach to animals in the zoo. It also aims to explore whether silent listening (where groups of volunteers visit the zoo and listen whilst being silent) can have transformative effects, prompting people to be more sensitive to how, for instance, anthropogenic noise impacts upon both human and animal behaviours. The research is interdisciplinary, combining approaches from the social and natural sciences with the goal of producing a multi-species sonic ethnography of the zoo, something that has never been done before but which promises to allow social science to inform environmental awareness and citizenship in new ways. The study will enrich our grasp of the social processes underpinning relationships between humans and animals by providing a sonic perspective. Its potential applications and benefits This project has clear potential benefits for a wide range of academics from a variety of disciplines who have an interest in human-animal relations, especially as these are expressed in the zoo setting. It will complement, but also challenge and develop existing methodological and theoretical approaches to the zoo in the social sciences which foreground vision and acts of looking. In addition to producing outputs for academic audiences, the project will facilitate the production of innovative sonic resources that can be used by the partner zoos to enhance the conservation education and environmental awareness activities they conduct with schoolchildren and other zoo visitors. The project will also generate findings that can be applied by zoo keepers and researchers in order to provide optimum sound environments for the animals in their care. Dissemination of the research findings and sound resources through zoo associations will create opportunities for the project to benefit a large number of other zoos, their users and animals, both nationally and internationally. The findings and impact resources that will be produced through the project also have considerable potential applications and benefits for other settings in which animals are kept in captive conditions, such as farms, laboratories and some human homes.

Data description (abstract)

This dataset comprises data gathered during a number of different work packages in the Listening to the Zoo project.

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