Techniques of Hearing

History, Theory and Practices

Michael Schillmeier, Robert Stock, Beate Ochsner, Michael Schillmeier, Robert Stock, Beate Ochsner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367713973
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000736373
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Sign Language

Hearing, health, and technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways. This edited volume addresses this complex relationship by arguing that modern hearing was and is increasingly linked to and mediated by technological innovations.
By providing a set of original interdisciplinary investigations that shed new light on the history, theory, and practices of hearing techniques, it is able to explore the heterogeneous entanglements of sound, hearing practices, technologies, and health issues. As the first book to bring together historians, scholars from media studies, social sciences, cultural studies, acoustics, and neuroscientists, the volume discusses modern technologies and their decisive impact on how "normal" hearing, enhanced and smart hearing, as well as hearing impairment have been configured. It brings both new insights into the histories of hearing technologies as well as allowing us to better understand how enabling hearing technologies have currently been unfolding an increasingly hybrid ecology engaging smart hearing devices and offering stress-free hearing and acoustic well-being in novel auditory environments.
The volume will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, sound studies, sociology of health and illness, medical history, health and society, as well as those interested in the practices and techniques of self-monitored and smart hearing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword: How to use your ears
• Introduction: Techniques of hearing: Histories, practices, and acoustic experiences
• 1 An unquiet quiet: The history and “smart” politics of sound masking in the office
• 2 Technologies of silence
• 3 Pleasure and pain with amplified sound: A sound and music history of loudspeaker systems in Germany, ca. 1930
• 4 Measuring listening effort: An attempt to quantify mental exertion
• 5 Hearing echoes as an audile technique: From “facial vision” to experimental psychology and echolocation
• 6 Mobile music listening and the self-management of health and well-being
• 7 Better hearing for all: Smart solutions for the clinical, subclinical, and normal-hearing population
• 8 “The future is ear” : Infrastructures of “smart hearing”
• 9 Listening or reading?: Rethinking ableism in relation to the senses and (acoustic) text
• 10 Binaural gaming arrangements: Techno-sensory configurations of playing the audio game A Blind Legend
• 11 Hearing like an animal: Exploring acoustic experience beyond human ears
• 12 “Adaptive environments”: Ambient media and the temporalities of sonic self-care
• 13 The Shepherd’s Farewell: Shared hearing as (a mode of) healing – music, imagery, and emotion-neural dynamics
• 14 Dis/abling smartness: AAC devices, music, and acoustic well-being
• Afterword
• Index