Learning to Hear

Reviews / Votes

At once intellectually light-footed and profound, this ambitious investigation into the achievement of hearing competency illuminates the ways people cultivate their embodied senses, revealing the workings of practices that have never before been made available as foundational knowledge. It will take a generation of research to elaborate what Learning to Hear has begun. -- Jack Katz, author of <i>How Emotions Work</i> Starting from the premise that hearing is an accomplishment, sociologist Sarah Maslen sought out a range of highly accomplished listeners-from musicians and physicians to mountaineers and Morse code operators-and trained her ethnographic ear on documenting their practice. This book is a source of a great many insights into the world of sound. -- David Howes, author of <i>The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences</i> Maslen's book is an important sociological study of both the senses and the very fabric of our embodied experience. As she demonstrates through a set of careful comparative studies, hearing is an active accomplishment. Showing how people routinely build on their embodied habits in action, Maslen pushes our understanding of embodiment in theoretically and empirically exciting ways. -- Iddo Tavory, coauthor of <i>Data Analysis in Qualitative Research: Theorizing with Abductive Analysis</i>