ABSTRACT
Modern approaches to hearing impairments, or non-normative hearing, tend to medicalise the presentations and to favour the prescriptions of pharmaceutical or device interventions to control the manifestations. If one considers medieval paradigms, voice or sound-hearing and even deafened states could be viewed very differently from modern medical interpretations. This chapter focuses on medieval theological, philosophical, biographical and literary examples in addition to stories collected during modern clinical research. The essential difference between contemporary and earlier accounts of voice and sound hearing are the manner in which they are interpreted. The diverse nature of hearing and humans' relationship to sound indicates how restrictive current medical models of hearing and deafened states can be, given their emphasis on interventions. The human relationship to sound is more complex than just the facility to hear and interpret auditory stimuli. The sensory world of sound encompasses a cornucopia of human subject positions where agency can lie with persons or with the resonances.
