Overview
As people age and experience hearing loss, listening is often unlearned, which can lead to social isolation and cultural exclusion. However, even though hearing capabilities might diminish biologically, insights from psychology, neuroscience, hearing physiology and acoustics have shown that senior citizens’ listening skills can in fact be activated, trained, and upheld. Elderly people can therefore especially benefit from improving their auditory skills.
These insights are valuable for a music geragogy practice. However, to date, auditory skills and the potential to improve them through specific listening activities have been neglected in this field. In response, this project practically and critically develops approaches that contribute to what we call a “listening pedagogy” with senior citizens. It thereby targets the largest possible group of elderly people, not only those with a musical education and former practice.
In the past decades, the field of sound studies and individual practitioners from sound art have developed and popularized promising approaches to listening (e.g., deep listening, ear cleaning, sound and listening walks, listening instructions and exercises) that besides others have the potential to comprise concrete practices for the development of auditory skills. With this in mind, the project will develop, test, and evaluate listening concepts for auditory sensitization through a design-based approach.
The project aims to create listening activities that benefit the auditory abilities of older people, serve their subjective well-being and social needs, and, ultimately, ensure their cultural participation. These and other effects will be explored using a multi-perspective and multi-methods qualitative approach. The result will be a guide to best practices that will be made openly accessible. Therefore, these activities can be easily integrated by different professionals, such as from music geragogy or sociocultural work, into their daily work with elderly people.
