Main description:

Outlines how in modern societies hearing, health and sound technologies are entangled in multi-faceted ways.

The book brings together, for the first time, historians, scholars from media studies, social sciences, cultural studies, acoustics and neuroscientists to show and discuss how modern technologies play a decisive role in the ways 'normal', enhanced or 'smart' hearing as well as hearing impairment have been configured and experienced.

Addresses current hearing practices that become increasingly mediated by personalized hearing technologies and aids that engage with continuously changing sonic situations along advanced algorithms and intuitive apps.

Contents:

1.An Unquiet Quiet: The History and 'Smart' Politics of Sound Masking in the Office. 2.Technologies of Silence. 3.Pleasure and Pain with Amplified Sound: A Sound and Music History of Loudspeaker Systems in Germany, ca. 1930. 4.Measuring Listening Effort: An Attempt to Quantify Mental Exertion. 5.Hearing Echoes as an Audile Technique: From "Facial Vision" to Experimental Psychology and Echolocation. 6.Mobile Music Listening and the Self-Management of Health and Well-Being. 7.Better Hearing for All - Smart Solutions for the Clinical, Subclinical and Normal-Hearing Population. 8."The Future is Ear" (Hunn 2014): Infrastructures of 'Smart Hearing'. 9.Listening or Reading? Rethinking Ableism in Relation to the Senses and (Acoustic) Text. 10.Binaural Gaming Arrangements: Techno-Sensory Configurations of Playing the Audio Game A Blind Legend. 11.Hearing Like an Animal: Exploring Acoustic Experience Beyond Human Ears. 12."Adaptive Environments": Ambient Media and the Temporalities of Sonic Selfcare. 13.The Shepherd's Farewell: Shared Hearing as (a Mode of) Healing - Music, Imagery and Emotion-Neural Dynamics. 14.Dis/abling Smartness: AAC Devices, Music and Acoustic Wellbeing.