Ensembles of Sonic Skills: Conclusions

Abstract

This chapter combines a diachronic with a synchronic approach. It explains how different ensembles of sonic skills, or sets of sonic skills in specific settings, come to prevail with shifting relations between science and technology, science and the professions, and science and society. These ensembles reflect the significance of timing, trust, and accountability in the dynamics of science.

Approximations: On Some Ways to Listen to a Building “in the Making”

“…How to verify and simulate a physical system that is incomplete and in the making? Unlike the bodies of mediate auscultation (Lachmund 1999; Rice 2010) or car engines for mechanics (Bijsterveld 2018), or the noise of airplanes (Peterson 2021), the noise of the building remains “in the making,” provisional and incomplete. Others have pointed out that simulations function as approximations of a complex reality (Winsberg 1999), whereas Elma’s frustration points us to an aspect of simulation in design: it is not just a simplification of a complex system—it also involves guesswork, estimates that fill in what is missing.…”

Music to My Ears: A Material-semiotic Analysis of Fetal Heart Sounds in Midwifery Prenatal Care

“…They argue that apprentices are trained to see the contemporary version of the stethoscope as the “hallmark of a doctor” (Rice 2010), whose ways and purposes of listening are directed toward generating knowledge. Listening analytically to “specific characteristics of sound” (Supper and Bijsterveld 2015, 133) serves the purpose of monitoring or diagnosing well-defined clinical signs (Supper and Bijsterveld 2015, 135; Bijsterveld 2018, 73).…”

“…In the field of sound studies, scholars have framed sonic approaches to bodies in medicine as “listening for knowledge” (Bijsterveld 2018, 3). These studies have been committed to escaping what Sterne (2003, 15) calls the “audiovisual litany.” According to Sterne (2003, 14), the juxtaposition of seeing and hearing, rooted in the Christian religion and commonly mobilized in “Western intellectual history,” elevates seeing to a technique of ultimate, exterior, and distant rationalization and relegates hearing to subjective and mundane interiors.…”

“…These studies have been committed to escaping what Sterne (2003, 15) calls the “audiovisual litany.” According to Sterne (2003, 14), the juxtaposition of seeing and hearing, rooted in the Christian religion and commonly mobilized in “Western intellectual history,” elevates seeing to a technique of ultimate, exterior, and distant rationalization and relegates hearing to subjective and mundane interiors. To counter this, scholars have approached listening as a means for “acquiring knowledge about human bodies…or other research objects” (Bijsterveld 2018, 4). As a consequence, listening changed sides: instead of figuring as the opposite of knowing, listening has become a variant of seeing as knowing via objectification.…”

“…As aesthetic artifacts, these heartbeats are attributed with a “connotative, associative-affective character” (Tagg 1987, 282) and, thereby, become socioemotional expressions and symbolic communication (Tagg 1987, 285). 11 We learn to listen to “good” heartbeat music and thereby to a fetus we jointly get to know and relate to as a “healthy child,” cultivating our listening as a “sonic skill” (Bijsterveld 2018). 12…”