Introduction

My room

has sound behind its walls, under its floorboards and on top of its ceiling. They make it shrink and expand, move and be still. What is in the room is visible, present, objectively here. The sound is invisible, not here, but present all the same. It is generated in my subjective hearing of it: rushing into the objective and changing what I see. The walls are less stable in sound, wobbly even, permeable, letting things in and out; testing notions of intimacy, neighbourliness and safety. The visual room is the set on which sound plays invisible narratives: some sinister, some cheerful, some unnoticed. Unseen protagonists, who might really be there or just invented by me, play out fantastic scenarios that might be real, involving alien space ships, cats, dogs and microwaves.—Anything can happen.¹

SOUNDWORDS.TUMBLR.COM January 28, 2011, 9:00 p.m.²

My textual phonography³ produces not a recording of the heard but of listening, which produces another sound in the imagination of the reader that is not the sound I heard but the sound generated in her action of perception of reading about sound. The recording in words of what I heard does not invite the recognition of an object or a subject, but triggers a generative interpretation: the production in the reader’s auditory imagination of what it might have been that I heard, and what he might remember to have heard, or might go on to hear as a possibility of my words and her present auditory environment.

This phonographic writing notates not a solipsistic listening however. Listening is never separate from the social relationships that build the fleeting circumstance of hearing. Rather, listening inhabits that circumstance, and thus My room transcribes not the heard in isolation but composes its sociality: the hearing of myself in the social context of a room, my soundscape, a position and its consequence, which these words are trying to reflect on and share.

My writing might not achieve this sociality but the impetus of its practice lays in that aim: its motivation comes from the desire to share the heard without reducing it to the description of its source or the structure of a pre-given register. Instead, I use words to grant you access to sound’s present unfolding, for you not to hear the same, but to hear its possibilities.

Writing about the possibility of sound is a constant effort to access the fleeting and ephemeral, that which is barely there and yet influences all there is. Sound is the invisible layer of the world that shows its relationships, actions, and dynamics. To write about it is to write about the formless, the predicative, that which invisibly does what we think we see but which struggles to find a place in articulation while what we think we see slides effortlessly into language in the certain shape of the noun. Sound’s grammatical position as the attribute, the adjective and adverb, keeps it on the surface and holds it in a visual paradigm, when in reality its materiality is much more subterranean and mobile.

Sound is the thing thinging, a contingent materiality that is not captured as noun but runs as verb.⁴ It is the predicate that does what the world is and yet what the world is, as presumed actuality, is established in its description as nouns, as objects and as subjects, whose sound remains an attribute.⁵

Listening to sound not as the attribute of the visible but as the action of its production descends deep into the core of the visual world, reaching beyond its certain shape into a formless form that is neither object nor subject but the action of their materiality formlessly forming as liquid stickiness that grasps me too but leaves no trace.⁶ The sonic trace is mute. Sound generates the present from the memory of the past and through the anticipation of the future, but it is always now. To grasp this fleeting now in words and make it be significant, as this book aims to do, I need to find words that do not precede nor trace its passing, but generate it presently; and I have to prompt the reader to listen to the now of my writing with the same generative curiosity and unprejudiced desire.

My desire to write about sound and for it to be read in a way that triggers listening comes from the conviction that in its invisible mobility, in its sticky and grasping liquidity there is something that augments, expands, and critically evaluates how we see the world and how we arrange ourselves to live in it. This belief is what motivates my aim to make the invisible materiality of sound and our own sonic subjectivities accessible, audible, and thinkable through words—to practice a writing that comes from listening and works toward a sonic sensibility that renews and pluralizes philosophy and epistemology. Such writing has not only an aesthetic but also a social and political significance in that it has an impact on ideas about what the world and what the subject is presumed to be and what else they could be.⁷ Listening offers another point of view, an alternative perspective on how things are, producing new ideas on how they could be and how we could live in a sonic possible world, and how we could include sound’s invisible formlessness in a current realization and valuation of what we understand to be the actual world.

Listening we will not automatically get to a better world, or a better philosophy. Sound does not hold a superior ethical position or reveal a promised land. But it will show us the world in its invisibility: in the unseen movements beneath its visual organization that allow us to see its mechanism, its dynamic and structure, and the investment of its agency, which might well be dark and forbidding. A sonic sensibility reveals the invisible mobility below the surface of a visual world and challenges its certain position, not to show a better place but to reveal what this world is made of, to question its singular actuality and to hear other possibilities that are probable too, but which, for reasons of ideology, power and coincidence do not take equal part in the production of knowledge, reality, value, and truth.

The listened to world is my actual world generated from what it is possible to hear and even some possible impossible things that I think I have heard but cannot be sure of, or that I might not hear but which nevertheless sound and thicken my perception. The world heard, its sonic space and time, forms not the solid infrastructure that exists with or without my presence. It is not a pre-formed container but is built continually as the fleeting timespace place of my present listening.⁸ It does not provide recognition but invites curiosity and even doubt, in the place perceived and in myself. Listening generates place, the field of listening, continually from my hearing of myself within the dynamic relationship of all that sounds: the temporary connections to other listeners, things and places, as the contingent life-world of my listening intersubjectivity that hears the actual, the possible, and even the impossible participating in the ephemerality of the unseen.

This book deliberates actuality, possibility, and the possible impossible, in the soundscape as well as in relation to sound art and music. It proposes some strategies of how listening reinvigorates ideas about reality, actuality, possibility, and truth, and how it can explore the soundscape, the sound artwork, and musical pieces as sonic timespace places, as sonic environments, which we inhabit as phenomenological subjects, listening intersubjectively and reciprocally: generating ourselves and the world we hear through our being in the world.

In many ways this writing is a continuation of the project initiated in Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, which was published by Continuum in 2010. It shares my previous book’s focus on listening as a generative and participatory practice that does not begin from a certain context and a priori knowledge about the work or the world, but suspends as much as possible ideas of genre, context, theory, and purpose, to instead listen to the place sound builds in passing. This text continues the aim of the last: to be about sound, about the world sound makes, its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. It aims to hear not the structure, meaning, and actuality of the soundscape or the work, but its possibilities and even its impossibilities, that which the work and the world is if we listen to its sonic materiality building the place of our contingent engagement, and that which it builds also but we cannot yet hear. In this sense this book starts where Listening to Noise and Silence broke off: explicitly and directly searching for the possible, the alternative view that the last book came across tentatively in its last chapter, where via Andrei Tarkovsky’s refrain it reached a sonic world below the surface of the visible: “The sonic refrain opens the film to the possible worlds at the blind depth of its images.”⁹

Tarkovsky’s refrain is not a repetition but an ever-renewed action of the body upon the material; it is the sensory-motor action through which the phenomenological subject faces and generates the world and himself being in this world. “It produces ever new layers, burying deeper and deeper into what we conventionally perceive as the real world to create it in its possibilities rather than recognize its perceived actuality.”¹⁰ This book starts with the possibilities a continual action of perception produces: possibilities for the subject and the material, the work and the world, and their relationship. It is about gaining access to this blind depth, to delve into it and rethink the work and the world from there. It works with the sonic sensibility established in the last book to explore and find an articulation for the new relationships, references, notions of truth, and reality that can be found at the depth of this sea of sound, and aims to discuss the consequences of this sonic possible world for our notion of actuality, possibility, impossibility, knowledge, and value.

Like my earlier publication, this writing too takes its form from Theodor Adorno’s idea of the essay as a formless form of text that makes no claim of being anything other than an experiment, a suggestion, a provocation maybe, and relies on the fact that as an essay it has no obligation to be all inclusive, “it does not begin with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to discuss,” and it does not have to come to firm conclusions either.¹¹ Instead, the essay can build a text from ephemeral thoughts that pass the object of exploration as thing and return the favor by granting it lightness and autonomy. It is an open-ended enquiry whose provenance is not established but whose future demonstrates the plurality of origins of thought that make neither an epistemology nor an ontology but encourage a desire to know the thing in knowing, in continually and presently moving toward it. It produces writing as experimentations, which at times might seem rather impossible but thinkable nevertheless, and which in their imagination can influence how we understand sound to affect the way we perceive the work and the world and how we live in them both in perception.

This is a project about sound, about a sonic aesthetics, listening and a sonic sensibility, but it is also a philosophical project, whose insights contribute not only to the discourse of sound art but also to philosophy in that it expands and augments the philosophical enquiry through the mobility of sound. It is a philosophy not about objects and ideas but about the transient ephemerality of sonic materiality and subjectivity. It aims to create a philosophical experience that might not convince in terms of philosophical orthodoxies and histories but through the reader as listener’s own present experience, her simultaneity with the heard, from where he struggles between language and listening, producing a philosophical place made of sounds and words.

It produces writing, reflection, and criticism that comes from my simultaneity with the work and the world in listening. Its experimentation is based on listening and writing about the sound thus heard and it comes to theoretical propositions from within the work, from within the environment the work produces, rather than from ideas that precede its experience. Theory always lags, but that is only a problem when we expect it to lead. It is the work, the material, and my listening engagement that lead language into a struggle with what it has to describe, and in this effort it evaluates the heard as well as its own articulation. It is through the discussion of works and the acoustic environment that I meet philosophy and theory, whose words I use to make my experience shareable, acknowledging right from the start that we might well misunderstand each other and that it is only through the effort and desire to be understood and to understand that temporarily with a lot of good will and timing in moments of coincidence, shared understandings will be found, while the rest remains experience.¹²

This writing promotes the sonic sensibility articulated in my last book to infiltrate and illuminate the thick surface of the visible. However, this is not an essentialist stance; the text does not negate nor berate visuality, vision, or a visual literacy. Rather, listening is practiced as an actual and a conceptual pursuit that augments the way we see the world.¹³ The critique of the visual is not a critique of its object but of its practice, the way we look rather than what we see. There is the option of listening to the visual, listening to the thick layers that mobilize our view if we take care to confront it with a sonic sensibility. What is sought is not a blind understanding, a shutting down of what vision brings to seeing; rather, the aim is a sonico-visual understanding of the world that knows its surface but also appreciates the hidden mobility beneath.

The ideas and aims of this book are developed over five chapters. The first two chapters propose and try the logic of Sonic Possible Worlds as a tool to access and inhabit the acoustic environment and the sound artwork, respectively. The following three apply and develop this idea and method, and pursue the notion of a Continuum of Sound through a sonic materialism into music and finally into the inaudible.

The landscape as sonic possible world listens to the landscape’s singular vista and hears the dense multiplicity of its mobile production in sound. This first chapter introduces the methodology and aims of the book through a focus on listening to the soundscape—the everyday acoustic environment, field recording, phonographic works, as well as soundscape compositions and installations—and debates possible world theory as a strategy to access and compare sound as acoustic environments, as sonic worlds, while inhabiting them in phenomenological reciprocity. This engagement allows us to challenge the singularity of the world’s actuality and articulate an alternative sense of how things could be, augmenting a visual actuality through invisible possibilities.

This chapter introduces key theoretical ideas and makes some initial propositions on how we can challenge and add to the actual with slices of the possible, and how in turn these possibilities open listening to the invisible mobility of the world and enable us to debate the aesthetic, social, and political consequences of inhabiting alternative worlds in sound.

The second chapter moves the “phenomenological possibilism” articulated in relation to the landscape Into the world of the work and extends the metaphor of the environment to the artwork, to reach The possibility of sound art: accessing the work as a possible world and inviting the listener to inhabit it as a sonic environment, as a sonic possible life-world. In this way, this chapter employs the plurality of sonic possibility and the concomitant phenomenological engagement established in the first chapter to develop and challenge sound art theory and criticism from within, from an invested engagement within the heard, and proposes new ways to listen and hear the work in relation to the world of art discourse and the everyday.

The third chapter tries to grasp the mobile invisibility accessed in the first chapter and theorized in the second by delving into the depth of the work to pursue the notion of a Sonic materialism and hear The sound of stones. It moves from the world of the work into its materiality, into the complexity of its possibilities, to consider its experience and how it guides us into meaning, truth, reality, and language. This chapter moves across sonic bridges, voices, and chapels on the way to establishing the idea of an “aesthetic possibilism” to make a contribution, from the invisible materiality of sound, to the development of a contemporary materialism.

Re-emerging from within the unseen depth of sonic materiality, the fourth chapter invites the reader to listen for the possibility of sound in the musical work, to inhabit it as a musical world. The listener is encouraged to abandon the boundaries between sound art and music, to disregard the restrictions of the disciplines, their differing context of performance and exhibition and their separate critical languages, to access them comparatively, in the environment they build within a universe of sonic worlds: Hearing the continuum of sound. This continuum offers not an unproblematic, linear, or homogeneous history, however, but pursues a folding, unfolding, and refolding of each practice from the possibility of sound, to inhabit musical possibilities rather than to theorize musical actualities.

Finally, Listening to the inaudible to hear The sound of unicorns does not conclude or finalize the idea a phenomenological possibilism introduced via sound, but extends its possibility beyond the threshold of the audible into the possible impossible, the inaudible, that which sounds but remains unheard because we cannot or do not want to access it. This inaudibility makes us aware of the social, political, cultural, ideological, and aesthetic prejudices through which we discriminate what we hear from what we listen to, and what we listen to from what else there is to hear. It lets us reflect on the rationale of this inequity and hints at everything else there might be to listen out for still.

This book is written in my actual possible world, the world that I inhabit and which therefore is real for me: my contingent position from where I participate in the reality of a presumed actual world, trying to bring my possibility to a shared conception, and hoping to make it count. The shared particularity of our present time and space that hovers in the background of this writing is the current political, economical, and intellectual crises of value and validity, which is pressing hard on notions of reality, truth, and power. In this context, the question of who holds authority and influence over the actuality of the actual world engages listening and a sonic sensibility on a socio-political frontline: they are employed to discover the rationale and the objectives of a current actuality, their investments and ideologies and are asked to illuminate alternative possibilities below reality’s visible surface in the dark depth of sound.