Silence is a rare – often beautiful, sometimes discomfiting – phenomenon. Harnessed in different manners, silence has multiple cultural, societal, scientific, psychological, artistic and military implications. In the 20th Century, the impact and exploitation of silence manifested in the technological search for the soundless environment: a search which centred upon environmental control and design. Dr Fiona Smyth’s (School of Education, Trinity Long Room Hub) Spectres & Camouflage project explores how technologies for silence and environmental design were used and reappropriated across disciplines in the 20th Century. Linking architecture and construction with music, military history, and acoustics, it looks at how these disciplines interacted and propelled each other forward in the design and exploitation of the silent environment between 1938 and 1970. Ultimately, this project offers a new concept of environmental design – with silence as a catalyst – mapped across disciplines.

 
Portrait photo of Dr Fiona SmythI can’t even begin to express how delighted and honoured I am to receive this award for my project ‘Spectres & Camouflage’. It is an unprecedented opportunity to develop ideas that have been swirling around for years, and to build on the foundations of research as an MSCA Global Fellow at Harvard and Trinity College Dublin.

Dr Fiona Smyth Trinity Researcher

  

‘Spectres & Camouflage’ links architecture and construction with music, military history and acoustics to explore how different disciplines propelled each other forward in the design and exploitation of the silent environment in the twentieth century. It is a really exciting time to conduct this research – just as documents that were previously classified are now entering the public domain – and I am very fortunate to be surrounded by a wonderful network of brilliant friends, family, colleagues and students. I am so immensely grateful for their support, thought-provoking questions, and inspiration and especially for the insight and guidance of Trinity’s Research Development Office in bringing this proposal to where it is now.
The ERC Programme has been identified as an area of strategic relevance for Trinity (Funding Diversification Plan 2014) and for Ireland (Innovation 2020) and is widely supported by Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and the Irish Research Council as the most highly regarded source of funding for “frontier research”. The ERC offers an exciting opportunity for researchers to fund their best idea, it gives them a significant amount of money over 5 years and allows them to dedicate themselves to delivering the best frontier research in their field. This will have significant impacts of the development of their careers.