For 70 minutes you are going to sit in total darkness, surrounded by loudspeakers, and take a sonic trip that encourages you to imagine the human body and the practice of medicine through your ears instead of your eyes. Together with 150 other people, you’re going to listen to early recordings of medical auscultation, the throb of healthy and unhealthy arteries in the brain, sonic representations of pain, and the soundscape of an autopsy. You’ll hear albums of a famous speech therapist and a coal miner with advanced black lung disease. You’ll experience the infrasonics used in pain relief, ballistocardiography, and seismocardiography; music heard through cochlear implants; and what it is like to have tinnitus. There is no multitasking. No distractions. Nothing to see. Instead, for one evening you will sit with others and reconsider human health and medical care through the overlooked sense of hearing. Program followed by a Q&A with show creators, Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.
Chris Hoff began his career as an audio engineer for public radio, and Sam Harnett was a labor and technology reporter. They have worked in public media for 20 years, contributed to national programs, won various awards, and in 2020 produced NPR’s most listened to story of the year. They came to realize everything they were making was starting to sound exactly the same… and felt like it had the same intent: to capture and capitalize on your attention. They wrote about this phenomenon in an academic paper titled “The Pabulum of Public Radio and Podcasting: Why It Is Bad and How Academia Can Help,” did a residency at Cornell University, created a podcast that broke conventions, and made another about humanities research. They then turned those programs into a series of live shows on topics ranging from birds to bodies, from time to transposition.
