Sonic Signatures
On the Potentialities of Listening Well By Listening Differently
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22416833 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ida Vandsøe Madsen (0000-0002-0211-3354, University College Copenhagen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 637-661 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-14 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0891-2416 • E-ISSN: 1552-5414 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/08912416261464857 |
| OpenAlex | W7168321874 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
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.
Active listening · Cognition · Element (criminal law) · Ethnography · Soundscape · Subjectivity · History of Emotions Research · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Sound Studies and Aurality
Thinking About Dementia
Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
Listening and Voice
Acoustemology
Introduction
Tracing silences
Listening to Images
Unsettling ourselves
Looking, But Not Listening? Theorizing the Practice and Ethics of Online Ethnography
Sound Subjects and Hearing Cultures
Sound and Sentiment
Ellen and the little one
On Recognition, Caring, and Dementia
This Path Is Full of Thorns
On Listening
Listening to love
Silence at the end of life
Introduction
Everyday attentiveness
Moral Selves and Moral Scenes
| Highly cited | No |
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