From Music to Language: How Five Projects Make Science Accessible to Everyone

What movements do grains of sand make inside a slope when it collapses? The “Granular Perspectives” project brings an artist together with researchers to make the hidden movements of these grains visible and understandable. “Our project combines art and science to get the public – especially children and young people – interested in the fascinating world of granular materials like sand,” explains Medicus. At the heart of the project is an interactive glass sculpture that vividly demonstrates mechanical processes in granular materials such as sand. Medicus continues, “This glass sculpture makes the invisible forces and interactions of grains of sand visible. We were looking for a fun way to demonstrate these scientific concepts.” This Science Communication project aims to raise awareness of sand as a limited resource and its sustainable use. Workshops and exhibitions are aimed especially at children aged seven to ten and teens aged 16 to 19 and are designed to encourage girls and young women to take an interest in technology and engineering. The project inspires curiosity, conveys a fascination for sand as a material, and opens up new ways of communicating science in geomechanics. The interactive sculpture forms the centerpiece, complemented by teaching formats that encourage curiosity and personal exploration.

The live broadcast of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year's Concert delights millions of viewers in almost 100 countries every year. The special blend of tradition and innovation makes this concert series an exciting subject for music research. Each year’s program includes popular classics as well as a fresh selection of the finest dance music. This combination of repetition and change is a valuable treasure trove of data for analyzing performance trends, stylistic developments, and the orchestra's unmistakable musical “fingerprint” over the decades. “We have developed software tools that help us to explore large collections of recordings of many different performances of the same works,” explains principal investigator David M. Weigl. Automatic algorithms are used to synchronize the recordings with each other precisely note-to-note.  “This means: We start listening to a piece in one recording and can switch seamlessly, without interrupting the musical flow, to another recording, giving us an immediate impression of similarities and differences in the recordings,” says Weigl. The Science Communication project is creating a reusable exhibit for public presentation, which will mainly be shown at the House of Strauss museum in Vienna’s Casino Zögernitz. The exhibit is a further development of the digital musicology software created for the original project and allows visitors to use the musical score to interactively explore the extensive collection of recordings of the New Year’s concerts.

If a bottle of vegetable oil is left open for too long, it starts to smell stronger and taste more bitter – and loses valuable fatty acids. The culprit is oxidation, a chemical process that takes place unnoticed in the background. Vegetable oils are among the most important sources of unsaturated fatty acids and natural antioxidants (AOX), which slow down oxidation. The project “Hidden Gems of Nutrition” shows the mechanisms behind this and how scientific findings on the stabilization of oils bring tangible benefits – for flavor, shelf life, and health. The starting point was an FWF project in which methods were developed to increase the natural antioxidant content in oils. This preserves sensitive fatty acids, the oils taste more aromatic, last longer, and are more heat-stable. “We want to convey what happens chemically in the oil, and why these processes are crucial for health, sustainability, and taste quality. To do so, we translate cutting-edge research on antioxidants and unsaturated fatty acids into tangible experiences: multi-sensory, target group-specific, scientifically excellent, and at the same time close to everyday life,” says principal investigator Marc Pignitter. To ensure that this knowledge reaches the people who can benefit most from it, the project is aimed at five groups: young parents, pregnant women, senior citizens, athletes, and family caregivers. The events offer easily understandable inputs, animated explanatory videos, and a tasting session, allowing participants to experience for themselves the difference between fresh, oxidized, and AOX-rich oils. This multi-sensory format is based on the “infosensing” principle: Using multiple senses to learn makes complex processes tangible. The “Hidden Gems of Nutrition” project combines modern lipid research with everyday experiences.

From a medical or psychological perspective, addiction is often seen as an illness.  The “Dreamscapes” research project poses an additional question: What does addiction tell us about the social circumstances it arises from? Where does addiction begin and where does it end, especially in the case of relatively new forms such as media or internet addiction? The project shows that addiction, ranging from alcohol and opioids to digital media, is a reflection of not only individual failures, but also of social developments and problems. Building on the FWF ESPRIT project “Making Sense of Smartphone Addiction,” “Dreamscapes” invites us to look at addiction beyond diagnoses, categories, and prohibitions in a socio-cultural, political, and historical context and to question simple causalities. “Our research focuses on the question of what addiction tells us about our increasingly attention-driven lives,” says principal investigator Suzana Jovicic. Based on ethnographic research conducted in an Austrian addiction clinic, the project sheds light on how people deal with addiction, with relapses, stigmatization, and social pressure. Using theater, storytelling, and interactive formats, the project translates research findings into situations that participants can experience directly. A jointly developed play, a podcast series, digital installations, school workshops, and a public flash mob will create new spaces for exchange and reflection. The aim is not to provide definitive answers or recommendations, but to reflect questions that have arisen from the research back to the public and encourage in-depth reflection on addiction in an age of constant networking.

With their Science Communication project “Communicating Dialects,” a team led by Germanist and linguist Stephan Elspaß wants to make the results of a long-term research project on German dialects in Austria tangible and audible. The aim is to make key results of this project accessible via a digital platform. By providing insights into the diversity and complexity of dialects, the project aims to create an awareness of their cultural value and, just as importantly, reduce prejudices against them. Dialects are the oldest of the language forms spoken today. They are a veritable treasure trove of linguistic information – not only to linguists, who look to them for insights into current and historical variations and changes in language, but also to laypeople, who can find windows into past worlds in dialectal lexis. For many speakers, dialects have a special emotional significance and are an elementary part of their linguistic identity. “This is why it was important to us to give something back to the speaker community who contributed so much to our research,” says Elspaß. To do so, the project draws on extensive audio recordings of around 300 dialect speakers from more than 100 rural locations throughout Austria. The heart of the planned digital platform will be a “speaking atlas of dialects,” which will make it possible to interactively explore the Austrian dialect landscape and listen to audio samples. The platform will use dynamic maps and informational texts to provide insights into linguistic variations in Austria.