Sound
Bella Bathurst is a writer and photojournalist. Her books include The Lighthouse Stevensons which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, The Wreckers, which became a BBC Timewatch documentary, and The Bicycle Book, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011.
ALSO BY BELLA BATHURST
The Bicycle Book
The Lighthouse Stevensons
Special
The Wreckers
Sound
Stories of Hearing
Lost
and Found
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
PROFILE BOOKS LTD
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Published in association with Wellcome Collection
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www.wellcomecollection.org
Copyright © Bella Bathurst, 2017
The author and publisher would like to make clear that some names have been changed in the text to protect privacy.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN 978 1 78283 324 6
For Urièle and Marc, with love
In the 1981 census, a return was received from someone who described their profession as ‘sculptor of stone lions’. In answer to the supplementary question ‘Describe what your job entails,’ the responder wrote: ‘I chip away all the stone which is not lion.’
Contents
1. Sailing
2. Hearing
3. Aid
4. Loss
5. Conduction
6. Rock
7. Acoustics
8. Silence
9. Distortion
10. Sign
11. Vision
12. Surfacing
13. Listening
14. Music
Further Reading
Acknowledgements