When did you last experience total silence? In Hark, the author Alice Vincent goes to extreme lengths to eradicate noise as she spends time in an anechoic chamber, a heavily soundproofed space designed to swallow up sound waves. There she becomes aware of the noises of her own body, from involuntary swallowing to the soft, high-pitched ringing in her ears. But rather than feel unease, she is “confronted with a comfort I couldn’t have imagined – and a familiarity with quietude I didn’t realise I was living in”.
Hark is a book about listening, being heard and the author’s shifting relationship with sound in the early years of motherhood. While working as a music journalist in her 20s, Vincent had been surrounded by noise. But now, in her 30s and plunged into domesticity, she finds herself craving quiet. She also examines how others experience sound, investigating misophonia, an acute sensitivity to everyday noises; deep listening, a practice that ensures the speaker feels heard; and the concept of “deaf gain”, which turns the notion of “hearing loss” into something positive and empowering.
The actor Fiona Hampton is the book’s narrator, though her reading is interspersed with voice notes from Vincent in which she shares reflections and asides not available in the printed edition; ahead of a chapter entitled Ghosts, she recalls her mother talking about the “baby in the head”, her expression to describe the phantom crying often heard by new mothers. The audiobook also concludes with a wonderfully warm conversation between Hampton and Vincent where they discuss their experiences of motherhood and the ways it fundamentally changed how they listen.
Available via Canongate, 8hr 44min
Further listening
Loot
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Maanuv Thiara narrates this epic tale constructed around the real-life theft of an 18th-century wooden tiger from Mysore in India by British soldiers.
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Thatcher Stole My Trousers
Alexei Sayle, Bloomsbury, 10hr 14min
The comedian reflects on his time at Chelsea School of Art, his early years on the comedy circuit and the rise of Thatcher. Read by the author.