Hearing and listening with dementia: Auraldiversity, sonic ethnography, and personhood

This thesis develops an account of how sound and listening come to operate differently for people living with dementias, of which little has been written outside of cognitive neuropsychology. Many of the syndromes referred to as dementia can affect hearing and listening, with auditory symptoms usually manifesting early on in the progression of disease. Such symptoms can include changes in sensitivity to sound, and to abilities relating to perception, recognition, interpretation, and valuation. Engaging with concepts and ideas from disability studies, sound studies, cognitive neuropsychology, and gerontology and dementia care praxis, I show how listening with dementia points towards new ways of thinking about connections between sociocultural contexts and individual differences of ability, experience, and ways of knowing and relating in and through sound. Previous scholarship has emphasised a plurality of hearing abilities, examining for example the politics and socialities of deafness and hyperacusis in the built environment, music, and sound technologies, and in scholarship on sound and disability.

The thesis is accompanied by two ethnographic sound works, exploring sound in the lives of two people living with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment, respectively. These were made in dialogue with interlocutors, representing our situated experiences of hearing and listening in a variety of places, primarily through conversational engagement, listening activities, and acoustic ecology methods. Together, the thesis and two sound works attend to questions of personhood and represent an attempt to understand something of the lived, sensory dynamics of sound for these interlocutors: in short, they are attempts to hear the hearing of others. This is intended to contribute to the accelerating agenda of auraldiversity within sound studies, exploring the complex sensory and sociocultural dynamics of these illnesses, which require representation in this ongoing work.