“Beautiful Murmurs”: Stethoscopic Listening and Acoustic Objectification

Academic thought on the senses has tended to position objectification as intrinsic to vision and acts of looking (Grosz 1992). Audition and listening, on the other hand, have been imagined as creating an intimate and participatory form of sensory engagement which does not produce objectification (Stoller 1989; Gell 1995). Drawing on fieldwork conducted among medical students, this article details how the teaching of auscultation or stethoscopic listening centers on patients whose conditions create heart sounds known as “murmurs,” which are important diagnostic signs. These patients, and the sounds their hearts produce, become the focus of numerous stethoscopic examinations. Patients are conscious of the way in which clinical auscultation reifies their heart sounds, constructing murmurs as discrete acoustic objects inside their bodies. They also resent feeling objectified as clinical curiosities through repeated listening. The notion that objectification may be brought about through an acoustic practice invites a reappraisal of the perceptual possibilities of audition. Following Bubandt (1998) and Ingold (2000), the article argues that studies of perception should be grounded in the dynamics of particular sensory practices, rather than in preconceived, generalized notions of sight and hearing.