Sound cover art

Sound

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 31 July, 2025 23:59 BST.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Sound

By: Bella Bathurst
Narrated by: Bella Bathurst
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July, 2025 23:59 BST. Cancel monthly.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

In 1997, Bella Bathurst began to go deaf. Within a few months, she had lost half her hearing, and the rest was slipping away. She wasn't just missing punchlines, she was missing most of the conversation - and all of the jokes.

For the next 12 years deafness shaped her life, until, in 2009, everything changed again. Sound draws on this extraordinary experience, exploring what it is like to lose your hearing and - as Bella eventually did - to get it back, and what that teaches you about listening and silence, music and noise.

She investigates the science behind deafness, hearing loss among musicians, soldiers and factory workers, sign language, and what the deaf know about these subjects that the hearing don't. If sight gives us the world, then hearing - or our ability to listen - gives us each other. But, as this engaging and intelligent examination reveals, our relationship with sound is both personal and far, far more complex than we might expect.

©2017 Bella Bathurst (P)2017 Audible, Ltd Physical Illness & Disease Funny

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Singular cover art
Pulphead cover art
Concentr8 cover art
The Unmapped Mind cover art
Resolution Way cover art
Crashing Through cover art
Lord of All Things cover art
Notes on Blindness cover art
Going on the Turn cover art
And the Land Lay Still cover art
Or Is That Just Me? cover art
Children of the Deterrent cover art
The Thing Itself cover art
After She Vanished cover art
The Last of the Greenwoods cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
This is a lovely memoir of the author Bella Bathurst, who lost her hearing when in her twenties and how that affected her. But within this memoir is also the story of what it’s like to lose your hearing, how it can impact on your mental health (more people commit suicide through hearing loss than through loss of vision) and your ability to interact with others. It covers themes including what sound is and how it can impact on people who have been exposed to both sound and its loss. Sound is a form of pressure that changes the molecules in the air and moves through the atmosphere but requires a receiver such as an ear and a brain to make sense of what we hear around us. But it can also be muffled and changed, think of how sound is altered by the acoustics of a room or the fall of snow on the floor (I love how it muffles sounds). We are born with an incredible voice recognition tool, we can detect the sound of someone's voice and who that voice belongs to, what they might be feeling, what they might be insinuating or meaning. Sound is full of wonderful properties and we can even fall under its spell as it becomes music. We can hear a ‘no’ or a ‘yes’ in many different ways and still determine its meaning.
The author talks about the deaf community and also of the power of visual communication such as sign language. By the end of the book, you will also have a profound sense of wonder at what sound is and its value in all our lives for those who are fortunate enough to be able to hear and the sad loss who don’t. Especially when you hear how notes can fall together as many instruments play and turn a range of notes into a full, rich cacophony that becomes a symphony. And every once in a while, close your eyes and really concentrate and listen to all the sounds around you. It’s a remarkable gift we should treasure, for those of us that are lucky and privileged enough to be able to hear.

The remarkable gift of sound and hearing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.