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Abstract
Articulating how to enact a sensory skill is a challenging prospect, as illustrated through the teaching and learning of novices. This article examines strategies employed to overcome the challenges of sharing sensory experience by exploring how medical professionals learn and teach skills of listening to sound: that is, of teaching medical students, and of medical students learning, sonic skills. The article draws on ethnographic research conducted in medical schools and hospitals in Australia and the Netherlands and on historical research conducted in medical archives and libraries in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, from the 1950s until the present. The first part of the paper focuses on the key, often creative, solutions our participants constructed for sharing their knowledge of body sounds, and techniques for its analysis. These didactic solutions are organized in three sections: demonstration; mimicry and repetition; and rhythm and improvisation. We argue that no one strategy leads to the enskillment of novices in listening, but rather, that through the coordination of practices of learning and teaching there is an attempt to obtain ‘sonic alignment’. The second part of the article extends our study of sharing sounds by examining how researchers learn about sonic skills from research participants. Looking at the proposed methodological solutions to the conundrum of how to share audible experience, we reflect on our own ethnographic and historical techniques to attempt sonic alignment with those we study. By integrating into our analysis how we, as researchers, enacted our research material, we understand more about how life we study is enacted too.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the many researchers whose comments have shaped this article, including: the members of the Sonic Skills project and the researchers who were present at the Sonic Skills Expert Day at Maastricht University in January 2013. Additionally, we sincerely thank our participants and the medical institutions, archives and libraries, whose testimony and resources made this article possible.
Notes
1. Sennett, The Craftsman, 50.
2. This Dutch (NWO [Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research], Vici) funded research project Sonic Skills: Sound and Listening in the Development of Science, Technology, Medicine (1920–now) is led by Karin Bijsterveld. It also includes other subprojects by Joeri Bruyninckx, Stefan Krebs, and Alexandra Supper that empirically investigate the role of sound and listening in knowledge production.
3. Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge.
4. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Sennett, The Craftsman.
5. Noble and Watkins, “So, How Did Bourdieu Learn to Play Tennis?”
6. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension.
7. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
8. Grasseni, “Skilled Vision”; Ellis, “Jizz and the Joy of Pattern Recognition.”
9. Latour, “How to Talk About the Body?”
10. Shapin, “The Tastes of Wine.”
11. Rice, Hearing and the Hospital.
12. Sennett, The Craftsman.
13. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.
14. Ellis, “Jizz and the Joy of Pattern Recognition.”
15. Lave and Wenger, Situated Learning.
16. Shapin, “The Tastes of Wine.”
17. Rice, Hearing and the Hospital.
18. Vannini et al., “Sound Acts.”
19. Mol, The Body Multiple.
20. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.
21. Hicks, “The Material–Cultural Turn.”
22. For example, Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
23. Harvey, “Technique and Art of Auscultation,” 53.
24. Van Drie, “Training the Auscultative Ear,” 166.
25. Schmidt-Horning, “Engineering the Performance,” 714.
26. Bull and Back, The Auditory Culture Reader, 3.
27. Krebs and Van Drie, “The Art of Stethoscope Use,” 104–106.
28. Rice, “Learning to Listen,” S43.
29. Myers, “Dance Your PhD.”
30. This is a pseudonym.
31. Rice, Hearing and the Hospital, 100.
32. Ibid.
33. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.
34. Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge; Delamont and Atkinson, “Doctoring Uncertainty;” Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.
35. Van Drie, “Training the Auscultative Ear,” 180.
36. For example, Bickley and Szilagyi, Bates’ Guide to Physical Examination.
37. Howes, “Reply to Tim Ingold.”
38. Sennett, The Craftsman, 186.
39. Epstein et al., Clinical Examination, 629.
40. Thomas and Monaghan, Oxford Handbook of Clinical Examination, 217.
41. Cabot, Physical Diagnosis.
42. Sterne, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact.”
43. Cugell, Introduction to Breath Sounds, 1.
44. Lehrer, “Instruction Script for Audiocassette,” 119.
45. Myers, “Dance Your PhD.”
46. Atkinson, Medical Talk.
47. Latour, "How to Talk About the Body?”
48. Shapin, “The Tastes of Wine.”
49. Sennett, The Craftsman, 181.
50. Henriques et al., “Rhythm Returns.”
51. Rice, “Sounding Bodies,” 309.
52. Harris, “Listening-Touch.”
53. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.
54. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis.
55. Schwartz, Making Noise.
56. Ingold Making, 115.
57. Myers, “Dance Your PhD,” 171.
58. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis.
59. Pink, “Engaging the Senses.”
60. Pink, “Multimodality, Multisensoriality and Ethnographic Knowing,” 271.
61. Ibid.
62. Dicks, “Action, Experience, Communication.”
63. Ingold, “Worlds of Sense and Sensing the World,” 314.
64. For example, Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography.
65. Feld and Bernneis, “Doing Anthropology in Sound,” 465.
66. Rice, Hearing and the Hospital, 16.
67. Corbin, “Charting the Cultural History of the Senses,” 135.
68. Heering, "The Enlightened Microscope,” 352.
69. Afonso and Ramos, “New Graphics for Old Stories”; Taussig, I Swear I Saw This; Myers “Dance Your PhD.”
70. Ingold, “Drawing Together: Materials, Gestures, Lines."
71. Ingold, Making.
72. Sutton, “Cooking is Good to Think.”
73. Pink, “Walking With Video.”
74. Waskul and Vannini, “Smell, Odor, and Somatic work.”.
75. For example, Myers, “Dance Your PhD”; Ellis, “Jizz and theJoy of Pattern Recognition.”
76. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension.
77. Myers, “Dance Your PhD.”
78. Sterne, “Sonic Imaginations.”
79. Rice, Hearing and the Hospital.
80. On the role of toys in visual training, see Grasseni, “Skilled Vision.”
81. Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge.
82. Grasseni, “Skilled Vision.”