Fulden Arisan

Between Silent and Inaudible: some notes and observations about hearing rehabilitation center

Before one of my visits to my field, I am texting to Fulya , who has guided me all through my fieldwork. It
has been a long time since my last visit due to my illness and the other things that were keeping me busy, and
I was already feeling partly guilty, partly concerned for the possibility that my absence would cause a
emotional distance for her and she would be less welcoming of me. On the contrary. After I wrote her about
my intention to visit the institution the day after, she called me back to answer and told me in excitement
about how lucky I am, since that day there would be the monthly family meeting and they would watch and
analyze altogether the educational home videos shot by the parents. That one of was the greatest news I got
that week, something that would make me excited to wake up 7 in the morning next morning and take road
that lasts two and a half hours. I know how important it is for my work and moreover F. also knows how
important it is for my work. To our brief exchange of conversation, we brought the shared world we created
for some weeks, a common world in which we could already share an excitement.

Besides my observations and arguments informed by my fieldwork experience, this paper is also intended to
show how my frequent visits to a rehabilitation center specialized for children with hearing aids and cochlear
implants shaped my way of listening, hearing, how it created new ‘structures of meaning’ and feeling,
therefore this paper also shows my learning from my own field. Fundamentally what I now understand is that
the field is not a pre-given space for one to go and discover all the already constructed networks, but field is
something always in the making, something you make through interactions, relationships and connections
available to you, it is about chances that you have, trusts you gain and responses that you get to your
answers. My field was an re-reading in action of what we have read about different fieldwork experiences
and this paper is a first-hand testimony on the situatedness and reflexivity of the field experience and how
bounded it is to my subjectivity. Therefore this paper is about me on the way along.

I am sitting on the conference room and my task is to change the powerpoint slides as Fulya is going to do
her presentation to seven mothers and one father, to the psychologist consultant Berna Hanim, and to me.
Fulya starts her presentation with some remarks on the importance of education on children development,
and in one of the presentation slides, she shows an illustration the depicts the relationship between the child,
the teacher and the family as three cogwheels intertwined with sentence read: EDUCATION WORKS BEST
WHEN ALL THE PARTS ARE WORKING TOGETHER. Fulya makes the turkish translation of the
sentence, after a few slides later on her presentation, Berna Hanim stops Fulya and asks her and me go back
to that illustration, in order to take a picture of it, and then turns to the parents saying: This could be the
greatest summary of what we try to do here, in this institution.

The institution that I have done my fieldwork is one among two rehabilitation centers in Turkey that is
working with children with hearing impairment. Rehabilitation centers are private enterprises that get
inducement from the state and since their first implementation in 2004, they have become the main branch of
education of children with special needs. Between the years 2015- 2019, the money transferred from state
budget to the rehabilitation centers is claimed to be around 24 billion TL 1 and until 2018 the money was
paid to those centers per student with a official disability report (RAM report) who then can register those
centers free. Public controversy about some of those centers’ source of wealth and the close affiliations of
some with current government led the state take some measures to prevent corruption. As a result, now in
every rehabilitation center there are surveillance cameras installed for face scan of the children and the
teachers in order to check whether the registered student is actually attending the classes. Before the classes,
each children and the teacher should have their face showed up to the surveillance than they can start their
classes.

After finishing her short presentation about the importance of the family education and importance of regular
home practice for permanent knowledge acquisition, it is now time for the screening of home videos sent by
1 https://www.sozcu.com.tr/2019/egitim/rehabilitasyonlara-da-rehabilitasyon-sart-5451925/
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the parents to Fulya, an audiologist who has been working in the institution as private consultant of the
children for six months. Before working here, she did not have any experience with the children, she worked
them only when she did her internship in one audiology centers installing cochlear implants. “All my friends
and family would tell me that I am joking” she would tell me several times “if I had told them that I would
be working with children. Because, the thing is I cannot stand to children. Or I used to”.

There are four videos sent to Fulya by the parents. These home videos was an idea partly to include the
parents and offer them an active collaboration with the institution, and partly as one young teacher would tell
me, let the parents see for themselves “how easy just to stand behind and criticize everything”. What is
expected from the parents whose number is over thirty is a short video showing their methods of interaction,
communication and plays they have with their children. Among those thirty parent, now we will watch five
of them shot themselves and sent.

Each video shows one parent, mostly mothers with one exception, engaged in different activities with their
children with an age range between 18 months to 7 years old each having different hearing loss and devising
background. After each video, Fulya asks the parents the comments and criticisms they have about the
methods applied in the video. One of them showing 2.6 years old Seyda and her mother playing with a doll,
is praised for frequent use of “ling sounds”2 and Fulya comments that they have been working on ling sounds
with since Seyda first came to the institution, and how Seyda is doing great in differentiating musical and
animals sounds despite she has her cochlear implant surgery quiet recently. Along with the appreciation to
her mother’s effort to integrate her in the play and her careful use of words with ling songs, there are some
criticism coming from the mothers in the conference room. One of them notes that Seyda’s mother should
have given her more space to talk, rather then completing Seyda’s sentences, she could have waited until her
daughter speaks, give her a space, after all, “it will be more satisfying for us to hear from them first, insallah
that will also be possible”.

During my field experience, I have witnessed some expectations about hearing and listening to, and those
expectations have not been only about improving hearing and perceiving skills of devised children. It has
also been expected from parents to develop special way to listen to their children, and their performances
have been implicitly analyzed and occasionally criticized. In one of the conversations that I had with speech
therapist Gamze, she complained me about how the parents are lacking in attention to notice the sounds that
their children are able to make or not, and as one example she told of a mother who had not realized for
months after her eight year old child was not uttering the letter ‘n’. “Then they come”, she continued, “and
always find something to tell about what you do”.

The cochlear implant surgeries is being applied in Turkey since early 00’s. For children under 3 years old,
RAM report stating that the child has a severe hearing loss is enough to have the implant surgery as the state
covers the expenses for surgery and the device. Since hearing tests are compulsory for newborn babies, early
diagnosis of hearing impairment is a regular thing, however disbelief is something also common. Both
teachers and parents have told similar accounts about losing time because of some parent or relative’s denial
of the child has hearing loss. “They would shout and call her name all the time. They would stand behind her
shoulder and making and some noises. And of course she was curious about all whirl so she was turning
back and looking. Then they would say, ‘ah, you see, she is hearing! They could not accept it and they did
not let me accept for a while” Ensar’s mother would tell. There has been an acceptance period for most of the
parents. The acceptance is related to an understanding that the hearing impairment is a form of disability, and
the disability is stigmatizing both for the child, and for the parents themselves. “My mother-in-law stopped
talking to me for a very long time after we found out that Zehra was not hearing. She told me that their
family never had this kind of thing, so it must be me who brought that to the family. She did not accept that,
even she did not accept Zehra in the beginning.”

Back in the conference room. I am impressed by the level of expertise that parents have in their comments on
each other’s videos. “The insufficient auditory input”, “more complicated auditory instructions”, “skillful
combination of two abstract concepts”, or “well integration of the concept and the practice” are some
criterion of analysis, and the parents are also very comfortable to suggest some concrete examples to support
their analysis. Overall, what they have been doing is a way of critical listening, assessing it, and giving a

2 The ling six sounds are the coverage of the possible audible frequencies that a child with hearing device or cochlear implant is
supposed to hear and perform.
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feedback based on their first hand specialized listening. This has been one of the moments crystallizing my
argument that this rehabilitation center is a place where a specialized way of hearing and listening have been
organized, not only with children but also with caregivers - including parents and teachers. This collectively
organized way of hearing and listening also speaks through a language, therefore communicates and calls
upon.

In his book How Musical Is Man?, John Blacking objects against the western centric classification of
musicality which is attributed to only a handful members of the society. Unlike taking the musicality as a
inherent genius and putting the instrument players on the main focus of the performance event, Blacking is
interested with the commonality of musical experience shared by everyone and it is ‘a capacity for structured

listening’ (Blacking, Tarih). An aural perception and distinguishing the sound patterns as the basis of hearing
and their cultural agreement are the prerequisites of musical communication, therefore every musical culture
primarily entails an organization of hearing.

Nearly all the mothers told me the great disappointment they had when they realized that after their children
got cochlear implant surgery and got the device, they would not immediately respond to what they hear, as
‘any other normal children’. On the contrary for most kids, having a new unfamiliar sensorium is frightening.
Dilan, one of the teachers told that it is not rare for most of the kids trying to throw their devices off their
head since they feel invaded by this new sensory input that is indiscernible and alien. “At initial stages most
children prefer to stay in silence, because hearing all of a sudden is too overwhelming”.

It is equally overwhelming for the parents to understand why their children constantly cries or tries to take
her device off in initial stage, or how absenting a sense can be preferable. It is also difficult for them to
conceive the relatively wide distance between hearing and perceiving what is heard, and there has to be an
outside intervention to child in order to close that gap between hearing and perceiving. “It is double
devastation” says the mother of 3 year old Ensar. “First when they tell your child is failing the hearing tests,
and then when you realize that your child will not talk to you by himself”. The fact the child might need to
follow an unconventional development determined by a prosthetic device and long time collaboration with
consultants, audiologists and speech therapists, all those “unnaturalness” of the efforts to regain such a pre-
given human sense, was at first frustrating and devastating for the most parents I have meet in the center.
“But then you come to an acceptance” says 6 year old Ada’s mother “You have to accept it for your child, to
be able to help her, first you have to accept and pull yourself together.”

The teachers and consultants in the institution do not evaluate the parent according to their level of
acceptance however. For them, there are either “sensible” (bilinçli) or “insensible” (bilinçsiz) parents.
Sensible parents are those who collaborates, who apply what they learnt at the institution and who closely
follows the child development. In other words, sensible parents provide an environment in which the child
gets “sufficient auditory input” and “feedback”, whereas the insensible parents those who is abandoning their
child to a world of inaudibility. “Because, speech therapist Asli tells me “It is not enough just opening the
TV or handing a smartphone to the child and leave all the work some youtube videos. Children can learn
through one-on-one interaction, they rely on feedback and repetition, and sometimes they need a physical or
eye contact. Sometimes you have to wait for minutes to make sure that the child is with you, he is listening to
you. Otherwise, no matter how loud it is, it is completely silent for the child.”

13 months old Yusuf’s mother are one of those sensible parents. They have come to the institution, right
after Yusuf got his cochlear implant surgery. For two months, in private sessions, Yusuf, his mother and his
three sisters have been practicing altogether the ‘a’ and ‘u’ sounds as part of the ling sound schedule,. In
order to that Yusuf’s consultant Fulya takes some toys from the classroom closet, one car (araba) and one
airplane (ucak). Araba makes aaaaa sound and ucak makes uuuuu sound. “I did not have any experience with
children before, therefore every solution I find comes with an intuition, or something we already took from
our mothers and grandmothers. From the lullabies for example, or nursery rhymes. You intuitionally come
up with a melodic or a rhythmic pattern.” Fulya’s and the other consultants teaching of the ling sound indeed
follow a coherent pattern.
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In the session Yusuf’s mother Saniye, cheerfully tells Fulya how she and her three elder daughter constantly
make this glissando ‘a’ syllable all the time: “Keys (anahtar), shoes (ayakkabi), hangers (aski) ... Everything
is flying in the air with an “aaaaaa” , we are a like a bunch of lunatics in the home. And she adds “ I know
nothing about lullabies or anything, we don’t have that kind of stuff.” Although at the first place this seems
like a casually added side note, it is also a call to an attention to the constructed silence that the mother has
inherited that challenges the “ubiquitousness of listening” (Kassabian, 2013). While that silence does not
mean being devoid of sounds, it connotes as it is the case in the lullabies , being devoid of an auditory signal
only meant for and addressed to the child. Saniye’s voice comes against to the lack of sound with an
addressee, and this voice is not hindered by a linguistic means, the paralinguistic quality of the voice is what
Saniye has to teach both her son and herself.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, the days when children between 0-2 and 3-4 ages visit the center, the
glissando sounds, rhythmic repetition of onomatopoetic syllables such as ‘tak tak tak’ or ‘cuf cuf cuf’ , and

also the applauses affirming and encouraging the child’s effort, become the soundscape of the rehabilitation
center. Once got accustomed to navigate through that soundscape, one can start to decipher the auditory
work is being in done even from behind the door. From the sounds that are heard, one can tell since when the
child is wearing her device, whether she has started the rehabilitation program recently, which frequency
ranges is being practiced with her, or what levels of auditory memory is attempted. This is the knowledge
that one can get through listening to “the social ecology” of this sonic environment. Similar to what Tia
DeNora theorizes of an ecological perspective that considers sound making as an ecological combination of
musical and extra-musical elements, and as a collective process of “making and emitting sounds” (DeNora,
2013), I perceive an embodied auditory ecology that is created within and between the rooms, and every
room is a sonic space in which each object, movement and gesture has a vocal equivalent.

This sonic ecology built with voices is embodied and affective. When Azra finally made her first “u” sound
after weeks of private sessions, it was a moment celebration of a long and effortful strenuous process making
“uuuu” without a response. When Fulya found me after the session and told me in excitement that she and
Azra’s mother’s finally were able to hear the first ‘u’ sound from Azra, her excitement and joy immediately
passed on me, but along with a feeling that I have missed something very special, something I was too
anticipating ever since I started to attend to much of Azra’s sessions.

This sonic ecology is at the same time pedagogical. It teaches different endurances to sound and silence.
“When we first learnt that our child was not hearing, I started crying, I used to have this typical dreams that
mother has for their children that she will get married, she will have her children, then I was thinking that my
child was not able to do any of them, and I got into depression. But then she taught me not to worry, she was
all healthy, she was very smart, smiling, loving kid and I made a radical decision to move to outside of the
city, away from all the relatives, just to be alone with my daughter. I closed myself to what others told about
me and my daughter. I did not listen to them I learnt the shut the other voices off, so I could listen to my
daughter and talk with her. I talked with so much, I talked with her for hours, that is how I became a very
talkative person.” Ozlem, mother of 4 year Eymen nods her head to these comments in agreement and adds:
“We mothers are very sensitive to what others say we care too much about other voices. I was also caring
about what the others will think about my child, but now I do not hear anyone. I do not see my child as
disabled or anything, I believe in the future in which we will not even care about the size of the devices or
batteries, I think our children will not have any difference from others. I feel myself very powerful, I learnt a
lot. I learnt how to take care of myself and my child, without listening to any one. I have a great hope for
future, both for myself and for my child.”

What this sonic ecology is teaching differs from the cogwheel illustration of family, teacher, child
cooperation thar I described above, because it does not only entail harmonic voices in unison, voices of
dissensus, voices that mark their class, education, ethnic and family differences. Within that dissensus it
encourages everyone to pose their own “sonic subjectivities” and to listen with a sonic sensibility that reveals
the invisible networks of mobility and immobilities “below the surface of a visual world” (Voegelin, 2014).
it tunes the ears of parents, teachers, and mine, to hear different “possibilities and impossibilities” as
Voegelin defines, of the world in its sonic materiality through our collective engagement. In this ecology, a
different mode of care, what I call as an audible form of care is taught to practice. This is a care which is a
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process as Annamarie Mol argues, and something that involves following all the medical, legal procedures
and paperwork, navigating through technical, audiological know-how, maintenance of hearing devices, a
knowledge about battery life etc. But this sonic and audible form care also entails a particular, attentive mode
of listening of the sounds that the child can or cannot make, and making sounds that the child is in need, it
entails a sonic form of communication sometimes requiring to make all other voices inaudible. As Ferhat,
only father that I have met in the center told me, it requires to “open up the volume of the inner voices”.

In this paper, I tried to explain what I have learned through listening to a particular sonic environment. The “
listening to and with” that I have been practicing for weeks, have made social and material and experimental
nexus of sensations” , also connections, relations and meanings audible to me as an acoustemological
knowledge (Feld, 2017). However I have realized that it is not only about sounds and audible, but also about
the silences and inaudibility. In this gendered realm of care, mothers have to learn how to make sounds for
their children against the silence and listen to their children against the myriad of voices. Along the lines of
audible and inaudible, I learned to listen to a complex negotiation of voice, sound and silence in
“composition of personal voice” (Veena Das,1991) and a form of listening which, in Deborah Kapchan’s
words, is a form of struggle to restructure the hegemonic distribution of the sensible” (Kapchan, 2017).

References

Blacking, John. 2000 . How Musical Is Man?. Seattle: University of Washington Press

Das, Veena. 1991. Composition of the Personal Voice: Violence and Migration. In Studies in History.
Vol.7(1). Pp.66-77.

DeNora, Tia. 2013. Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing

Feld, Steven. 2017. Acoustemology. In Perspectives On A 21st Century Comparative Musicology:

Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening : Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Los
Angeles: University of California Press.

Kapchan, Deborah. 2017. Listening Acts: Witnessing the Pain (and Praise) of Others. In Theorizing Sound
Writing . Ed. Kapchan, Deborah. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press

Voegelin, Salome. 2014. Sonic possible worlds : hearing the continuum of sound. New York: Bloomsbury
Academic