HARK

On the intimate art of listening well.

We raise girls to be good listeners in a world of men. As a music journalist, Vincent had made a career out of listening. She listened in clubs, at concerts, and to mostly male artists in her interviews. Music was omnipresent, essential to her life as a teen and young adult. Now in her 30s, she found herself surrounded by silence. “If I tried to unpick how I’d grown from a girl who thrived among the dissonance of a punk record into a woman who preferred to be in silence, I got caught in tangles,” she writes. Then, into that silence came her baby’s heartbeat from a monitor. Later, she heard his cry. In this moving and brilliant book, Vincent examines not just sound but what it means to listen. She explores the quiet sounds of domesticity, motherhood, and the quotidian—often overlooked, feminine sounds. She reflects on what she hears at Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, in the near-mythic sound of the aurora borealis—which has been described as sheets of paper rubbing together—from national security translators, and in the practice of Deep Listening. “I want to make the quiet loud,” she declares, and that is exactly what she does. Her quiet is populated by many brilliant women, including researchers and scientists of sound, while her own journey of motherhood makes vivid the ways in which a mother’s biology is rewired to respond to their child’s sound. Speaking with a deaf artist, Vincent challenges her preconceptions that “being without sound was to suffer,” instead learning “a different way of listening,” one rich in community and creativity. Though the book takes place in many quiet spaces, the reverberations are loud, and the author’s descriptions evocative. From excellent research on those elements of noise that are often overlooked yet build the fabric of our daily lives, Vincent weaves a tapestry of sound and understanding.

A profound lesson in how to hear the world anew.