Sonic Skills Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920S–Present)
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Sonic Skills Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) Karin Bijsterveld Sonic Skills Karin Bijsterveld Sonic Skills Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–Present) Karin Bijsterveld Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Maastricht University Maastricht, The Netherlands ISBN 978-1-137-59831-8 ISBN 978-1-137-59829-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59829-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952528 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is published open access. The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. This work is subject to copyright. All commercial rights are reserved by the author(s), whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Regarding these commercial rights a non-exclusive license has been granted to the publisher. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover credit: © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research on which this essay draws, has been funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientifc Research (NWO). In 2010, it awarded me with a generous VICI grant for the “Sonic Skills” project (277-45-003). The process of actually fnalizing this essay has addition- ally been supported by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) through an individual fellowship in Amsterdam in the Spring of 2017. The VICI grant enabled me to compose the Sonic Skills research team, and collaborate with its members Joeri Bruyninckx, Anna Harris, Stefan Krebs, Alexandra Supper and Melissa Van Drie. This essay could not have been written without their excellent research and publications—more on these scholars in the frst chapter. Aline Reichow, student in the Maastricht research master program Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology, did exploratory research that found its way in Chapter 5. Jo Wachelder contributed by acting as a highly inspiring Ph.D. co-supervisor. The board and staff of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University did everything in their power to support our activities. One particularly memorable event was the Sonic Skills expert meet- ing held in Maastricht in January 2014. During this meeting, an inter- national group of scholars commented on our project papers, for which I am deeply grateful. These scholars were Lisa Gitelman, Peter Heering, Aleks Kolkowski, Julia Kursell, Cyrus Mody, Rachel Mundy, Trevor Pinch, Tom Rice, Sophia Roosth, Jonathan Sterne, Axel Volmar, and our Maastricht colleagues Wiebe Bijker, Jens Lachmund, and Jessica v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Mesman. I also genuinely enjoyed our 2015 Sonic Science Festival and Exhibition, organized with Marith Dieker’s invaluable assistance. Chapter 3 is largely based on the following open access article: Supper, Alexandra & Bijsterveld, Karin (2015). Sounds Convincing: Modes of Listening and Sonic Skills in Knowledge Making, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 40, 2, 124–144. I would like to thank Alexandra Supper for allowing me to reuse this article. Finally, I am indebted to Rein de Wilde and, once again, Joeri Bruyninckx for their insightful comments on this essay, to Kate Sturge for her outstanding editing work, and to Palgrave editor Holly Tyler, editorial assistant Joanna O’Neill and editor Joshua Pitt for their guid- ance in making the manuscript into a book. CONTENTS 1 Listening for Knowledge: Introduction 1 Acoustic Signatures 1 Sonic Skills 4 Sensory Practices in the Sciences 7 Cases of Sound and Listening 15 Sensory Selectivity 18 References 22 2 Sonic Signs: Turning to, Talking About, and Transcribing Sound 29 Introduction 29 Hazy Sounds: Verbalizations and Descriptions of the Audible 31 Artful Drawings: Musical and Graphic Notation 40 Save the Patient: Survival of Embodied Representation 47 Conclusions 51 References 55 3 Modes of Listening: Why, How and to What? 61 Introduction 62 Existing Taxonomies of Listening: Analytic and Actors’ Categories 63 Purposes of Listening: Why Scientists, Engineers, and Physicians Listen 67 vii viii CONTENTS Ways of Listening: How Scientists, Engineers, and Physicians Listen 70 Sonic Skills: Virtuosity in Shifting Modes and Handling Tools 74 The Missing Third Dimension: Listening to What? 78 Conclusions 80 References 82 4 Resounding Contestation: The Ambiguous Status of Sonic Skills 87 Twittering Timbrados 87 Beyond the Infallible Ear: Repeated Listening and Sensory Calibration 91 At a Glance: Mechanical Visualization and Professional Audition 94 Meter Reading as a Technology of Trust in Expert–Customer Relations 98 There Is More Than Meets the Eye: Struggling with Trained Ears in Sonifcation 102 Conclusions 106 References 108 5 Popping Up: The Continual Return of Sound and Listening 113 Hearing Gravitational Waves 113 The Digital: Portable and Versatile Sound Technologies 115 Somatic Vigilance: Attuning to Instruments and Time 117 Auditory Sublime: Promising Wonder and Awe Through Sound 123 Conclusions 125 References 127 6 Ensembles of Sonic Skills: Conclusions 131 Introduction 131 Timing—And the Relations Between Science and Technology 132 Trust—And the Relations Between the Sciences and the Professions 135 Accountability—And the Relations Between Science and Society 138 Contents ix Epilogue 141 References 144 References 147 Name Index 163 Subject Index 167 CHAPTER 1 Listening for Knowledge: Introduction Abstract 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 defnes the notion of sonic skills, situating it in the wider literature on the auditory dimensions of making knowledge. It presents the case stud- ies on which the essay draws, explaining their geographical, temporal, and methodological scope and the researchers behind them. Keywords Listening for knowledge · Sonic skills · Science · Medicine · Engineering ACOUSTIC SIGNATURES On the afternoon of July 11, 2014, Dutch Public Radio 1 broadcast an interview with science journalist Diederik Jekel. He had breaking news: American geologists had discovered a “super ocean” some 300 miles below the earth’s surface. The journalist immediately added a qualifca- tion. What the Americans had actually found were some stone minerals, originating from the earth’s deep layers, that included water molecules. This prompted the talk show host to ask how certain scientists could be of the super ocean’s existence. The journalist explained that the © The Author(s) 2019 1 K. Bijsterveld, Sonic Skills, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59829-5_1 2 K. BIJSTERVELD American geologists knew they had in fact found water when they sent sound waves deep into the earth. The stones had melted in the earth’s heat, and just as a knock on a table sounds different from a knock on a glass of water under the same conditions, the melted material sounded different from the non-melted. The talk show host was quick to con- clude: “We know it,” she said, “but we have not seen it; it has not been [proven] experimentally.”1 Apparently, she had trouble believing the geologists’ ears. Their fnd- ings had not yet been proven, because the phenomenon had not been seen. By suggesting that hearing something