Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T01:27:51.561Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

THE TOUCH OF THE STETHOSCOPE: SHAPING CONTEXT IN INTIMATE PERFORMANCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2018

Teoma Naccarato  and
John MacCallum
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When tools like the stethoscope and electrocardiogram are appropriated for use beyond their intended purpose – for example in music and dance performance – how does the training of foreign users shift the framing of sound, and therefore what types of sounds from the body and apparatus come to be analysed or considered? Can we qualify the difference between a doctor and a composer listening to the heart through a stethoscope? How do the motives and methods of practitioners inform what they hear, and how they touch – to the exclusion of sensory processes beyond their frame of reference? As a choreographer and composer working with heart rate sensors, we do not seek to reveal or represent the invisible workings of the heart. Rather, in our performances and installations, the sonification and haptification of heart rhythms – along with the noise produced by the apparatus and its use – are a means to compose a context for intimate listening and touch between performers and visitors at the edges of appropriateness.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 73 , Issue 287 , January 2019 , pp. 71 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Young, Louisa, The Book of the Heart (London: Flamingo, 2002), p. xxGoogle Scholar.

2 Peto, James, ed., The Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 Sterne, Jonathan, ‘Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope, and the “Autopsy of the Living”: Medicine's Acoustic Culture’, Journal of Medical Humanities, 22/2 (2001), p. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Sheridan, A.M. (London: Tavistock, 1973), p. 164Google Scholar.

5 Sterne, ‘Mediate Auscultation’, p. 117.

6 Sterne, ‘Mediate Auscultation’, p. 134.

7 Sterne, ‘Mediate Auscultation’, p. 122.

8 Temoa Naccarato and John MacCallum, Synchronism: https://iii-iii-iii.org/portfolio/synchronism (accessed 18 January 2018).