Speaker Bio
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez is an Associate Professor at UC3M and Honorary Research associate at the University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC). She leads the i_mBODY lab, in which research focuses on understanding how sensory-based interaction technologies could be used to alter people’s perceptions of their own body, their emotional state and their motor behaviour patterns. Her research is empirical and multidisciplinary, combining perspectives of psychoacoustics, neuroscience and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
She is currently Principal Investigator of the AEI-funded Magic OutFit project, which aims to inform the design of technology to make people feel better about their bodies and sustain healthy lifestyles. She is also Principal Investigator of the project BODYinTRANSIT funded by a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council. Prior to this she obtained a PhD in Applied Acoustics at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). She was a post-doctoral researcher in the Lab of Action and Body at Royal Holloway, University of London, an ESRC Future Research Leader and Principal Investigator of The Hearing Body project at University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC) and a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Universidad Loyola Andalucía. Her work has led her to receive the 2019 “Excellence Award” from the UC3M Consejo Social and the 2021 Science and Engineering Award from the Fundación Banco Sabadell. Her current research interests include body perception, embodied cognition, affective interaction, virtual reality and wearable and self-care technologies to support emotional and physical health.
Sensing the body through sound
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Thursday 6th February 2025. 14:00-15:00 GMT. Online.
Music makes us dance and move, but can sounds do more for our body? We may easily think that hearing is the least relevant modality for our sense of bodily self, compared, for instance, to touch, vision and interoception. Yet audition provides rich information about what is happening inside and crucially outside of our bodies: we hear ourselves breathing, or our joints crack; we hear our hands clapping against each other or stroking a piece of velvet; we hear the sounds of our footsteps mixing with those of others as we go down the stairs. Rarely is there an action or event that we are involved in which is silent, and yet audition remains relatively ignored as a contributor to our sense of self. This talk aims to correct this oversight, by highlighting the surprising but also special contributions that audition brings to our sense of self.