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A Simon Fraser University Faculty of Education student’s investigation of how our increasingly complex sound environments affect our learning and emotional/mental make-up has caught the ear of a federal research-funding agency.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has awarded Milena Droumeva a $75,000 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral scholarship to apply her eight years of knowledge acquired at SFU to assessing the soundness of our multi-layered sound environment.

The Bulgarian-born doctoral student will tackle questions like: What is the relationship between the proliferating and overlapping sounds in our environment, and our notions of knowledge and learning? Are we learning our driving ourselves crazy?

Droumeva wants to help create a new body of knowledge that maps out the individual and collective attributes of sounds and listening stances in terms of their ability to stimulate or degrade learning.

“Silence is becoming a privilege and not a right in our social-media savvy and technologically driven society,” says Droumeva, who transferred from Capilano College in 1999 to SFU to study how soundscapes affect people.

“We spend more and more time in artificial soundscapes, comprised of many sounds that are often, individually, intentionally designed to alert us, give us information, set mood, etc.,” says Droumeva. “Yet there is little research and analysis of them and no one has really looked at their combined effect on human attention, learning and well-being.”

During her undergrad studies with Barry Truax, an internationally known electroacoustic composer in the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, Droumeva evaluated how noise pollution, specifically cell phones, affects people.

During her master’s studies as a charter student at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Surrey, Droumeva helped develop socio-ec(h)o, an interactive human puzzle game, to study how environmental sounds help people solve problems (see video below).

A frequent contributor to The Journal for the Canadian Game Studies Association, Droumeva has caught the eye of Mark Grimshaw, a well-published game-sound expert at the University of Bolton in the United Kingdom.

Grimshaw invited Droumeva to write a chapter for his new book Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments, coming out in the new year.

Droumeva’s chapter looks at how our different listening stances, for example background, media or distracted listening, combined with our auditory expectations of popular media, such as film, have affected the evolution of game-sound environments.

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