A Digital Platform for Sharing Collective Human Hearing

Abstract

People are hearing various natural and artificial sounds, but it is hard to imagine how hearing the sounds from people collectively can be effectively used in our everyday lives if those sounds become sharable. The sharing economy, which uses digital technologies to share a variety of physical resources in a peer-to-peer manner, has been attracting attention in recent years. Investigating the feasibility of sharing human hearing offers promising opportunities with which to expand the current scope of the sharing economy. In this study, we have developed a digital platform named CollectiveEars to share collective human hearing and explore the opportunities and pitfalls of sharing human physical senses on a digital platform. The first contribution of the study is to present an overview of CollectiveEars. The second contribution is that we reveal opportunities and pitfalls of CollectiveEars by extracting insights from two experiments. The third contribution is to show three examples to extend CollectiveEars.