Cook, Christopher. 2024. Hearing and listening with dementia: Auraldiversity, sonic ethnography, and personhood. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

No full text available

Text (Hearing and listening with dementia: Auraldiversity, sonic ethnography, and personhood) MUS_thesis_CookC_2024.pdf - Accepted Version Permissions: Administrator Access Only until 31 August 2027. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (1MB)

Abstract or Description

This thesis develops an account of how sound and listening come to operate differently for people living with dementias, of which little has been written outside of cognitive neuropsychology. Many of the syndromes referred to as dementia can affect hearing and listening, with auditory symptoms usually manifesting early on in the progression of disease. Such symptoms can include changes in sensitivity to sound, and to abilities relating to perception, recognition, interpretation, and valuation. Engaging with concepts and ideas from disability studies, sound studies, cognitive neuropsychology, and gerontology and dementia care praxis, I show how listening with dementia points towards new ways of thinking about connections between sociocultural contexts and individual differences of ability, experience, and ways of knowing and relating in and through sound. Previous scholarship has emphasised a plurality of hearing abilities, examining for example the politics and socialities of deafness and hyperacusis in the built environment, music, and sound technologies, and in scholarship on sound and disability.

The thesis is accompanied by two ethnographic sound works, exploring sound in the lives of two people living with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment, respectively. These were made in dialogue with interlocutors, representing our situated experiences of hearing and listening in a variety of places, primarily through conversational engagement, listening activities, and acoustic ecology methods. Together, the thesis and two sound works attend to questions of personhood and represent an attempt to understand something of the lived, sensory dynamics of sound for these interlocutors: in short, they are attempts to hear the hearing of others. This is intended to contribute to the accelerating agenda of auraldiversity within sound studies, exploring the complex sensory and sociocultural dynamics of these illnesses, which require representation in this ongoing work.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00039148
Keywords:	Hearing, listening, auraldiversity, aural diversity, acoustemology, personhood, anthropology of sound, field recording, sonic ethnography, ethnography in sound, co-composition, disability, cognitive neuropsychology, clinical psychoacoustics
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Music
Date:	31 August 2024
Item ID:	39148
Date Deposited:	09 Jul 2025 10:03
Last Modified:	09 Jul 2025 10:08
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39148

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record (login required)