Ear Pieces: Listening, Diagnosing, Writing - 1815-2015 (360G-Wellcome-200957_Z_16_Z)

Ear Pieces is a collaborative venture, and its purpose is to identify the changing forms and effects of listening in the period 1815-2015. Building on research in the field of sound studies, and drawing on archival resources in the UK and the US, it will be the first project of its kind to assess the mutual legibility of medical and literary records, and so to kindle a dialogue between specialists from the humanities, neuroscience, and clinical medicine. One aim of Ear Pieces is to document the definitional contours of harmful listening in the last 200 years, from colloquial strains of otitis – ‘glue ear’ and ‘swimmer’s ear’ – to peripheral kinds of hearing loss, impairment and excess, such as otosis, sound-blindness, melomania, and Involuntary Musical Imagery. How have such complaints been understood historically? Whose vocabulary are we drawing on when we speak of neurotological trauma? In bringing historians, musicologists, neuroscientists, and literary scholars together – in a series of seminars, a conference, and an essay collection – the aim is to excavate the parallel histories of otology and literature, to evaluate their intersections and points of resistance, and to gauge their present affinities, in public policy and the popular imagination.