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In this article, I explore the auditory technopolitics of prenatal sound systems, asking what kinds of futures, listeners and temporalities they seek to produce. With patents for prenatal audio apparatus dating back to the late 1980s, there are now a range of devices available to expectant parents. These sound technologies offer multiple benefits: from soothing away stress to increasing the efficiency of ultrasonic scans. However, one common point of emphasis is their capacity to accelerate foetal 'learning' and cognitive development. Taking as exemplary the Babypod and BabyPlus devices, I argue that prenatal sound systems make audible a particular figuration of pregnancy and gestational labour that combines divergent notions of responsibility and passivity. Contra the equation of neoliberalism with self-control and individualism, I argue that prenatal sound systems amplify neoliberal capitalism's elision of personal, maternal and familial responsibility. As reproductive sound technologies, prenatal sound systems facilitate maternal–familial investment in the pre-born as future-child. Consequently, financialised notions of inheritance are substituted for biological inheritance. Drawing attention to the common rhetorical figuration of the sonic as womb-like, furthermore, I argue that prenatal sound systems exemplify what I refer to as uterine audiophilia. By treating the womb as 'the perfect classroom', prenatal sound systems imply an intense maternal obligation to invest in and impress upon the future-child, while also envisioning the pregnant person's body as an occupied, resonant space. Cohering with a fidelity discourse that posits the reproductive medium as passive container and a source of noise that is to be overcome, uterine audiophilia relies upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy. I thus argue that these devices mark the hitherto under-theorised convergence of auditory culture, technology and reproductive politics.

A case history of a hearing-impaired child is presented which covers a period in the child's life from 18 months of age to 13 years. A description of the original assessment and preschool program is provided, and the outcome of "mainstreaming" during the elementary school years is discussed. A position is stated which contends that the least restrictive environment for a given child should not necessarily imply "mainstreaming." Rather, decisions about school placement should be made on the basis of the individual child's needs and on the basis of the availability of continued professional support by qualified persons after the placement has been made.

A comparison was made between two methods of scoring the Gestural Approach to Thought and Expression (GATE), a communication assessment for young children with visual impairments. The first method was a standard system of "correct" versus "incorrect" for each item. The second method of scoring used was the graded multidimensional scoring system (GMSS). This system provided a graded rating of frequency of response, generalization of response, initiation of response, and fluency of response for each test item. Ten children were administered the GATE as a pretest-posttest measure. When the correct versus incorrect scoring method was used, no significant difference was found between pretest and posttest. When the GMSS was used, significant differences were found for the four factors of frequency, generalization, initiation, and fluency. This suggests that the GMSS is more sensitive to small changes in behavior.