A real honour to be part of Hannah Kemp-Welch’s Listening Glossary, published in October 2026 by Spiral / Silver Press. The list of contributors is vast and inspiring in and of itself and the contributions, which all conform to an ‘X listneing’ format, represent a great mix between more established definitions and contemporary innovations, the latter pushing us more towards “listening as a critical method for understanding and transforming the worlds we inhabit”.
I contributed two definitions, “Electro-Magnetic Field Listening,” a riff on an element in my essay for Sonic Faction and “Cortisol Listening” below:
Hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution have equipped the hormone cortisol to release energy for fight / flight responses to anticipated peril. The auditory system might well provide early warning of such threats as twig snaps or floorboard creaks and trigger the production of cortisol but paradoxically stress responses may diminish rather than enhance hearing in the immediate term with prolonged cortisol secretion potentially impairing hearing and exacerbating both tinnitus and hyperacusis[1].
Martin Daughtry claims that in conditions of ‘wartime listening,’ the urgency of hazard reactions contract with the ‘passage of time, [as] fewer and fewer distant belliphonic sounds would trigger an adrenaline- and cortisol-fuelled “fight, flight or freeze”.’[2] However, Nina Krause suggests that although consciousness may indeed tune out “background noise,” cortisol can still continue spiking subliminally: “are we really tuning [stressors] out, or are we simply living our lives in a constant state of alarm?”[3]
In these contexts, alongside any physiological impacts of noise exposure[4], cortisol listening describes an auditory system triggering churning stress responses that have both shorter- and longer-term impacts on hearing itself, including when hormones are activated by sounds outside the thresholds of conscious perception[5].
[1] In addition to urgent reactions, cortisol production can be sparked by such psychosocial stresses as “malignant sadness and corrosive worry,” Robert M. Sapolsky, “Glucocorticoids, the evolution of the stress-response, and the primate predicament,” Neurobiology of Stress, March 20, 2021 (Volume 14), p. 5
[2] J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford: OUP, 2015), p. 78
[3] Nina Krause, Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021), p. 209
[4] See Kozo Hiramatsu, et. al. “A Survey on Health Effects” (1997) cited in Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox, “Skylarks: An Exploration of a Collaboration between Art, Anthropology and Science,” in eds. Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, Anthropology and Arts Practice (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) p. 124. And see Global Burden of Disease Hearing Loss Collaborators, “Hearing loss prevalence and years lived with disability, 1990–2019: findings from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019,” The Lancet, 2019, 397: 10278, p. 996
[5] Kale R. Scatterty, Dawson VonStein, Lisa B. Prichard, Brian C. Franczak, Trevor J. Hamilton and Rodney M. Schmaltz, “Infrasound exposure is linked to aversive responding, negative appraisal, and elevated salivary cortisol in humans,” Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, April 27, 2026 (Volume 20)