Main content

Listening without Ears

How do people with hearing loss engage with music? Performer Eloise Garland meets other deaf people to investigate. From 2017.

How do people with hearing loss engage with music? Performer Eloise Garland challenges assumptions.

Eloise began to lose her own hearing fifteen years ago. Now aged 23, she's a professional singer, violinist and teacher - and reveals her very personal engagement with sound.

She considers different ways of teaching and appreciating music - some of which might surprise people who aren't deaf - and shares her deep emotional connection to an art form and cultural activity that is so strongly associated with hearing.

Eloise also meets Tarek Atoui, a composer and sound artist who brings together deaf and hearing people to make music with special instruments designed to expand the experience of sound beyond the aural. If music cannot be heard, what are the other ways of listening?

Producer: Steve Urquhart

A Reduced Listening production for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Radio 4, first broadcast in December 2017.

(Image credit: Caroline Lessire).

Available now

30 minutes

On radio

Fri 1 Aug 2025 10:30

Broadcasts

  • Tue 12 Dec 2017 11:30
  • Sat 16 Dec 2017 15:30
  • Fri 1 Aug 2025 10:30
  • Fri 1 Aug 2025 16:30
  • Sat 2 Aug 2025 00:30

Featured in...

Seriously...

Seriously...

Discover more seriously interesting radio documentaries.