Sonic Signatures: On the Potentialities of Listening Well By Listening Differently

Abstract

This article argues that sound-based aspects of fieldwork hold the potential to open up facets of experience that cannot be accessed otherwise. The article builds on insights from cognitive disability studies and remote and in-person fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic among people with dementia and their relatives in Denmark. I argue that these insights can inform ethnographic listening, spatially separated or not, by paying attention to interlocutors’ sonically conveyed emotions and mental images. Moreover, I show how approaches designed to study people who are cognitively different can be used as an element in the general anthropological methodological repertoire. Inspired by the concept of signatures, individual marks of being in the world, I argue that attending to the sound-based elements of signatures, or what I term “sonic signatures,” holds the potential to open up novel realms of knowledge about hidden and individual layers of lifeworlds beyond the here and now.