The audiometer and the medicalisation of hearing loss

Abstract

When I was around seven years old, we went on a family trip to Aberdeen Science Centre. My memory of that day has largely faded, but I now know that something significant happened on that trip. One of the exhibitions featured an umbrellastyle speaker used to demonstrate the normal ranges of human hearing. Human hearing is, as this book should have already made clear, a complicated topic. What we can hear depends both on loudness (decibel levels) and pitch (frequency levels), as well as a variety of other factors. This speaker was set up to gradually increase in frequency, so that it progressed from tones such as those you would hear on a standard piano, through to higher sounds like that of a microwave beeping, to end with barely audible tones of around 20,000 Hz. While Dad, my brother and I were laughing and joking about how long we could hear birdsong and so on, Mum was realising her hearing range had cut out long before ours. It was a strange way, no doubt, to find confirmation of one’s deafness. The kind of technology that was used in this display relies on the standardisation of electronic sound, which was perfected and pursued in the interwar years as the audiometer was embraced as an objective tool to define noise limits and thresholds. Its utilisation of fixed thresholds for the normal ranges of hearing were also, as I explain in the section that follows, fixed through ‘the telephone as audiometer’. The audiometer was elevated as a tool for testing both noise levels and hearing loss, I argue, because it provided an objective numerical inscription, which could be used to guard against malingering and to negotiate compensation claims for hearing loss. It was also as utilised in the prescription of hearing aids and, as I show in the section on ‘The telephone as hearing aid’, the interwar period featured an explosion of hearing aids based on