Tom Rice
recently completed his PhD at Goldsmiths College, looking at ways of developing the framework for an ‚auditory anthropology‘.
"The Resounding Body"
The act of auscultation, or listening to the body, transforms it. Perceived acoustically, the body is no longer an object or a sequence of surfaces, instead it becomes a dynamic acoustic field, a hive of sonic events, predictable and recursive, dramatic and strange. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork among cardiologists at St Thomas‘ hospital in London, my work explores how medical listening techniques, in particular stethoscopic listening, allow the body to be re-imagined and re-experienced through sound. Though ubiquitous, the stethoscope is a powerful technology which shapes the body both as it perceives and is perceived.