Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

We tend to associate the sciences with seeing—but scientists, engineers, and physicians also use their ears as a means for acquiring knowledge. This chapter introduces this essay’s key questions about the role of sound and practices of listening in the sciences, and explicates their relevance for understanding the dynamics of science more generally. It defines the notion of sonic skills, situating it in the wider literature on the auditory dimensions of making knowledge. It presents the case studies on which the essay draws, explaining their geographical, temporal, and methodological scope and the researchers behind them.

This chapter focuses on processes of representing and sharing sound in the sciences. How have scientists, engineers, and physicians talked about sound and transcribed sound into legible signs? What did they do to ensure the acceptability and standardization of their verbalizations and notations? Why did embodied forms of notation survive despite a wider trend toward mechanical objectivity? And in what contexts did scientists become interested in the epistemological relevance of sound in the first place? This chapter also introduces most of the case studies and listening technologies in more detail.

This chapter presents a typology of the modes of listening employed across science, medicine, and engineering. It distinguishes between three of listening and three of listening in the sciences. The three purposes discussed are diagnostic, monitory, and exploratory listening; the three ways are analytic, synthetic, and interactive listening. Using ample examples, this chapter illustrates the six modes of listening and the virtuoso mode-switching of scientists and other experts. It reflects on the incidence of specific combinations of purposes and ways of listening, and asks how these listening modes interact with the third dimension of listening: listening to .

This chapter asks how listening in the sciences became contested over time. Why did sonic skills, and notably diagnostic analytic listening, acquire such an ambiguous epistemological status? The chapter traces the rise of mechanical and visual technologies such as the spectrograph, and the shifting relationships of trust between makers and users of knowledge. It shows how each novel knowledge-making technology, either auditory or visual, requires processes of sensory calibration with existing technologies. And it discusses how sonification scientists have strategically presented visualization as both ally and enemy for trained ears, without yet finding a “killer application”.

This chapter aims to explain why practices of listening continue to “pop up” as routes into knowledge-making despite the dominance of visualization in the sciences. It identifies three recent trends behind this phenomenon: the rise and versatility of digital technologies, the significance of somatic vigilance and synchronization in today’s large instrument-based laboratories, and the role of the auditory sublime in the public fascination with sonification.

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.