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The Sound Travels research team will share a recording that exemplifies affective associations made with specific sounds by visitors to free-choice learning environments (a science museum, a park, a zoo, and a botanical garden). This recording reflects direct collaboration with visitors and demonstrates the variation in how people make sense of sound, both in identifying its sources and in describing its effects on their emotional and cognitive states. Our US-based, federally funded project explores the impacts of ambient and designed sound on STEM learning and leisure experiences. Beyond addressing our research questions, we embrace the larger goals of seeking meaningful input from professionals in and visitors to these spaces and directly informing educational design practice. Our methods include multiple stationary ambient recordings within spaces of interest, a post-experience visitor questionnaire, and a “sound search” instrument in which visitors record video clips during their experience to represent sounds that make them feel curious, energized, uneasy, and peaceful. Together, the resulting data reveal not only how visitors are affected by sound but also how visitors experience and notice sound in context, and in what ways a person’s embodied and culturally informed associations with sound relate to their experiences of learning and leisure. 

Does interdisciplinary collaboration make a difference when it comes to communicating engineering concepts to community audiences? This research focuses on the effect of communication strategies on community attitudes toward engineering research. Two cohorts of four academic researchers each, representing eight different disciplinary backgrounds (aviation planning, cancer research, math education, musicology, chemical/biomolecular engineering, material science, soil science, and theater) developed research communication outputs for the public by creating: 1) an individual video presenting their research through the lens of their discipline alone; and 2) a convergent video where they collaboratively discussed their research with others in their cohort around a common theme, integrating all of their disciplinary lenses. Using a panel of respondents (n = 2,938) procured through Qualtrics, and purposefully recruited to create a diverse sample in age and racial/ethnic background, the research team randomly assigned respondents to watch one of three video treatments: one individual video, multiple individual videos, or a convergent video. Then, respondents answered a series of questions about their interest and knowledge of several STEM topics, both before and after watching the video(s). This retrospective pre/post questionnaire technique helps to alleviate response-shift bias present in self-assessed changes in learning attitudes. Our findings show that collaborative presentation videos increased self-reported audience interest in engineering, and perceptions of disciplinary relatedness more than the non-collaborative, individual presentations made by the same researchers. These results suggest a beneficial role for collaborative communication strategies to foster interest in engineering among public audiences, even among people without a background in STEM. Further, collaborative communication led to an increased sense of relatedness among different disciplines, which may be useful for effective public research communication about interdisciplinary engineering projects.