Hearing, health and technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways. The 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 sheds 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 wellbeing 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.
Author(s): Michael Schillmeier, Robert Stock, Beate Ochsner
Series: Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 196
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Foreword: How to use your ears
Introduction: Techniques of hearing: Histories, practices, and acoustic experiences
Chapter 1 An unquiet quiet: The history and “smart” politics of sound masking in the office
Chapter 2 Technologies of silence
Chapter 3 Pleasure and pain with amplified sound: A sound and music history of loudspeaker systems in Germany, ca. 1930
Chapter 4 Measuring listening effort: An attempt to quantify mental exertion
Chapter 5 Hearing echoes as an audile technique: From “facial vision” to experimental psychology and echolocation
Chapter 6 Mobile music listening and the self-management of health and well-being
Chapter 7 Better hearing for all: Smart solutions for the clinical, subclinical, and normal-hearing population
Chapter 8 “The future is ear”1 : Infrastructures of “smart hearing”
Chapter 9 Listening or reading?: Rethinking ableism in relation to the senses and (acoustic) text
Chapter 10 Binaural gaming arrangements: Techno-sensory configurations of playing the audio game A Blind Legend
Chapter 11 Hearing like an animal: Exploring acoustic experience beyond human ears
Chapter 12 “Adaptive environments”: Ambient media and the temporalities of sonic self-care
Chapter 13 The Shepherd’s Farewell: Shared hearing as (a mode of) healing – music, imagery, and emotion-neural dynamics
Chapter 14 Dis/abling smartness: AAC devices, music, and acoustic well-being
Afterword
Index
