Abstract
Literature on sounds inside institutions has shown that sounds are indispensable to the working of hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutional environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in three eldercare homes in Germany this article suggests that the more permanent care context of institutional homes for the elderly compared to a hospital setting is decisive for people’s interpretation of and engagement with sounds. This is true at multiple levels, such as “monitory listening,” the use of “music as a technology of self,” or sounds as a tool of care. In fact, in this long-term care context even silences prompt action. Based on their experience with individual residents, for example, caregivers can direct their monitory listening not only to existing sounds, but also to the silence of expected but absent sounds. Throughout the article, additional consideration is given to the role of the technologies that produce the sounds, showing how in their design and functioning they shape, complement or prevent people’s attention to sound and silence. Finally, I propose that research is needed that goes beyond an understanding of silence as a healing environment for the vulnerable and sick and instead attends to the complexity of this acoustic event within the context of eldercare homes.
Highlights
I made a similar observation in the three nursing homes in Germany that I visited as part of an ethnographic study on everyday sounds in eldercare institutions
This article is situated at the intersection of Aging Studies, Sensory Anthropology, and the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies which has been deeply informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012; Sterne 2012)
The role of sounds inside hospitals, schools, prisons and other institutions has been examined from various angles, focusing on practices of acoustic surveillance, on the sonic experiences of those immersed in the auditory realm, or on people’s active employment or avoidance of sounds (Gallagher 2010, 2011; Rice 2013, 2016)
Summary
This article is situated at the intersection of Aging Studies, Sensory Anthropology, and the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies which has been deeply informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012; Sterne 2012). Its purpose is to detect and attend to possible malfunctions of the object/subject of attention, indicated by a deviation from what the listener expects to hear or by a sound that explicitly warns about malfunctioning (Supper and Bijsterveld 2015) In his hospital study, Rice (2013) notices how monitory listening often happens alongside other activities. For questions concerning the use and avoidance of music technologies in residential care homes, I take sociologist Tia DeNora’s (2000) concept of “music as a technology of self” (46) as a starting point since this reflects human agency in the context of music listening This concept developed out of an exploratory study about private music listening practices of women in the UK and the US. This specific setting of eldercare homes, the mingling of private and public space, and their special temporal context as long-term will be given attention throughout the article
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