Sounds Convincing: Modes of Listening and Sonic Skills in Knowledge Making

Supper, Alexandra; Bijsterveld, Karin

doi:10.1179/0308018815z.000000000109

Cited by 21 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…The concept of "monitory listening" thereby describes one of several modes of listening. Its purpose is to detect and attend to possible malfunctions of the object/subject of attention, indicated by a deviation from what the listener expects to hear or by a sound that explicitly warns about malfunctioning (Supper and Bijsterveld 2015). In his hospital study, Rice (2013) notices how monitory listening often happens alongside other activities.…”

Section: Sound Studies and Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Caring through Sound and Silence: Technology and the Sound of Everyday Life in Homes for the Elderly

Greubel

2020

A&A

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Literature on sounds inside institutions has shown that sounds are indispensable to the working of hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutional environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three eldercare homes in Germany this article suggests that the more permanent care context of institutional homes for the elderly compared to a hospital setting is decisive for people’s interpretation of and engagement with sounds. This is true at multiple levels, such as “monitory listening,” the use of “music as a technology of self,” or sounds as a tool of care. In fact, in this long-term care context even silences prompt action. Based on their experience with individual residents, for example, caregivers can direct their monitory listening not only to existing sounds, but also to the silence of expected but absent sounds. Throughout the article, additional consideration is given to the role of the technologies that produce the sounds, showing how in their design and functioning they shape, complement or prevent people’s attention to sound and silence. Finally, I propose that research is needed that goes beyond an understanding of silence as a healing environment for the vulnerable and sick and instead attends to the complexity of this acoustic event within the context of eldercare homes.

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Section: Sound Studies and Anthropologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Caring through Sound and Silence: Technology and the Sound of Everyday Life in Homes for the Elderly

Greubel

2020

A&A

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“…As Bijsterveld (2018) has argued, drawing on historical and ethnographic work, a surprising number of practitioners in these sites tend to rely on listening in their everyday practice, to gain specific knowledge about their instruments or the objects under study. Drawing on an extensive typology of listening modes across these sites, Supper and Bijsterveld (2015), show that instrument operators deploy their 'sonic skills'an acute ability for listening along with a skillful handling of instruments to do sofor a variety of practically and epistemically important purposes: to explore new phenomena, to diagnose technical malfunctions, and, in keeping with Mody's observations, to monitor instrumental processes. Attending to such different purposes of listening as well as to the ways listeners shift between them, the authors (2015) propose, may help to better understand how non-visual senses actually contribute to processes of knowledge-making.…”

Section: Somatic Vigilancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…I call this engagement 'somatic vigilance' to denote a set of laboratory practices that emphasizes physical monitoring, practical understanding and craft knowledge as a mode of engagement with automated or otherwise epistemically opaque instruments. This approach to the maintenance of trust in instruments is exemplified by the ways in which operators draw specifically on their auditory sense and 'sonic skills'including listening skills and related technical skills (Supper and Bijsterveld, 2015) in relation to the laboratory's material environment. These observations demonstrate that, more than a quality of the instrument or automation itself, trust in the instrument is continuously reaffirmed in an embodied relation with the operator.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Somatic Vigilance and Sonic Skills in Experimental Plasma Physics

Bruyninckx

2019

Science as Culture

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In contemporary laboratory workstations, automation promises a technological fix for producing more robust workflows. By insulating the experiment from tacit or embodied knowledge, it is expected to produce more reliable output. This apparent tension between trustworthy disembodied protocols and the unreliable human factor should not, however, be taken at face value. Instrument operators routinely face uncertainties and instrument opacity, and their concerns may be further aggravated when processes are automated. In some contexts, therefore, researchers cultivate such embodied practices precisely to assure themselves of the reliability of automated instruments and protocols. This qualitative study of research practice in a multidisciplinary research group in physics and materials science shows that researchers complement instrument readings with 'somatic vigilance', a set of laboratory practices that emphasize hands-on instrument knowledge, material witnessing and rely on sensory experience to monitor experimental processes. Equating physical and epistemic proximity to an instrument, operators use these techniques to monitor their instruments and to manage their own expectations. Operators' reliance on auditory information and sonic skills to monitor their instruments and their environment illustrates the value of somatic vigilance on the laboratory's work-floor. Connecting scholarship in science and technology studies on trust management and embodied practice, somatic vigilance calls attention to the continuous maintenance of both instruments and user expectations as well as the situated and often embodied techniques that are required to manage trust in instruments. More than an unreliable human factor, it suggests that researchers instead, conversely, consider embodied knowledge a way to fix automation.

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“…In conjunction with this work, a research program funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and coordinated by Karin Bijsterveld examined a diversity of listening arrangements in professional practices related to science, engineering, and medicine under the rubric of "sonic skills". The notion of sonic skills (Bijsterveld 2009;Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012a;Supper and Bijsterveld 2015) stresses the entwinement of listening skill (and the ability to engage in different modes of listening) with concrete practical skills in the making, recording, storing and retrieving of sound in such contexts as hospital wards (Harris and Van Drie 2015), conference halls (Supper 2015), shop floors (Krebs 2014), field sites (Bruyninckx 2012) and laboratories. The papers in this special issue both draw on and extend this work.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%