Karin Bijsterveld

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

Abstract This article investigates the role of listening in the knowledge making practices of Western scientists, engineers, and physicians from the 1920s onwards. It does so by offering a two-dimensional typology of the modes of listening that they employ. Distinguishing between two dimensions allows us to make sense both of the purpose and of the ways in which scientists, engineers, and physicians have listened to their objects of study; and it also allows us to appreciate the importance of shifting between modes of listening. At the same time, we argue, understanding the role of sound in knowledge making cannot be limited to the study of listening alone; rather, we have to pay attention to how listening is embedded in broader sonic skills — including the handling of tools for the making, recording, storing, and retrieving of sounds.

“Crying Whenever Monday Comes”: Older Unmarried Women in the Netherlands and the Game of Comparison, 1955-1980

The Dutch Womens Action Committee for Early State Pensions advocated the reduction of the retirement age for unmarried women. In doing this, the committee brought forward an image of older unmarried women that was rather different from the self-images the older unmarried women presented in letters and questionnaires sent to the committee. And the image presented by the committee was again different from the image of older unmarried women that emerged in the parliamentary debate. Such a variation in images and self-images is related to the legal nature of the welfare state and the consequent comparison between social categories.

Traffic noise, honking and urban planning in Amsterdam in 1930

Traffic noise was seen as a serious problem around 1930. Cars and trucks were noisier than today, and the horn was used more frequently. This led to loud protests and anti-noise campaigns, which have been discussed by historians in studies of the evolution of traffic noise in the twentieth century. In this article we first describe the situation around 1930 from a historical point of view, and next we present an approximate quantitative assessment of traffic noise around 1930, including horn noise, focusing on the city of Amsterdam. Noise maps of Amsterdam are presented for cars, trucks, and horns in 1930, and for comparison also for cars and trucks in 2012. The noise maps for 1930 are based on detailed traffic data for Amsterdam in 1930, which were derived from two reports published in 1934 and 1940 about an extensive traffic count in Amsterdam in 1930. The traffic count was carried out in the framework of the Amsterdam Expansion Plan of 1934. The results of the traffic noise analysis presented here are discussed in the light of expectations around 1930 about future developments of Amsterdam, as well as in the wider context of sprawling cities after World War II. The results also put todays approach of traffic noise mapping and annoyance assessment in perspective.

Listening for Knowledge: Introduction

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.

Modes of Listening: Why, How and to What?

This chapter presents a typology of the modes of listening employed across science, medicine, and engineering. It distinguishes between three purposes of listening and three ways 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 what.

Resounding Contestation: The Ambiguous Status of Sonic Skills

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”.

Popping Up: The Continual Return of Sound and Listening

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.

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age (review)

713 this notion preposterous for Europe. The French did not choose to destroy and lose northeastern France, their most industrialized region, and not some rural sector of mere trees and land, nor did Russian leaders willingly sacrifice some one-fourth of their most arable land. In both cases, the invading Germans tore these vast territories from their opponents. At war’s end, the victorious Allies felt no exhilaration or sense of having achieved a greater good from the fact that the Germans had fought the war on and destroyed allied territory and resources. Storey’s discussion of the war in East Africa, however, does indicate that their imperial and social Darwinist view of Africa and Africans enabled Europeans to render the entire eastern part of the continent, its peoples and territory, a sacrifice zone, as they conducted a deliberately destructive guerrilla war that ravaged vast reaches of the inhospitable region. This qualified applicability of the concept of “sacrifice zones” leads this reader to ask “who” rather than “what” was being sacrificed in the original environmental historical contexts from which Storey appropriated the term. Storey’s discussion of wartime military and naval technology is excellent, although he omits the technology of the submarine. He also convincingly explains wartime financing, although this reader would have appreciated more examination of the industrial mobilization necessary to produce the technological weapons of war. Finally, one of the best parts of this work that concentrates on technology and environment is the author’s too-short section on wartime culture, “The Arts of War.” This global history of the First WorldWar does offer a nicely condensed study of the most destructive war in history to that time, but suffers from a puzzling juxtaposition of a dated interpretation of the war’s origins focusing exclusively on Germany and a problematic imposition of the lens of environmental history.

Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (review)

including African-American, Russian, and Dutch.“In 1800–1850,” he writes, “the other [non-British] ethnic traditions were lively and interesting, but localized and not absolutely fundamental to understanding the shared architectural culture of the entire nation” (p. viii). While he calls Spanish tradition in the west “especially rich,” he goes on to say that it is “not discussed here for the simple reason that the vast majority of American citizens had no contact with it at all” (p. viii). Such a statement makes those of us who live on the Pacific coast and are surrounded by buildings influenced by Spanish tradition feel excluded from the mainstream of architectural culture and scholarship. Attention to more diverse cultural traditions and ethnic influences would have made Architecture in the United States a far better book.