Open AccessBLINDHEDENSAKUSTISKE HORISONTER: Om auditive kundskaber og en akustisk virkelighed
Author(s) -
Pia Lundberg
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
antropologi
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2596-5425
pISSN - 0906-3021
DOI - 10.7146/ta.v0i54.106745
Subject(s) - soundscape , sound (geography) , perception , blindness , materiality (auditing) , object (grammar) , lifeworld , psychology , sociology , aesthetics , acoustics , computer science , art , social science , medicine , physics , neuroscience , optometry , artificial intelligence
With reference to the pioneering research of the few anthropologists, who have made
sound an object of analysis, the article presents the author’s research in a blind community,
thereby calling to attention sound, soundscape, sound-knowledge and sound-skills.
The author takes a point of departure in empirical data from her fieldwork among blind
children and youth in Denmark 2000-2005. An example of the research field is the virtual
world of a computer game for the blind, which shows the difficulty of grasping the reality
of the surrounding world, when this reality consists of sound and sound materiality. The
article proposes that the players of the computer game create soundscapes, for example,
how a pole by the road utters a kind of pole speech, or that a farmhouse in the Wild West
makes its presence through significant farm-acoustics. In addition to new insights on
blindness, the blind lifeworld and other perceptual horizons and skills, the study offers
a cultural, scientific opening into objectifying both sound and sound perception as
cultural phenomena, hence to expand an understanding of sound, acoustics and the
auditory.