Sharing sound: teaching, learning, and researching sonic skills

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.