… trees have roots, but people have
mobile imaginations and bodies,
mutable interfaces for navigating the world.
(Roland Jean)
The senses with which we engage with the world shape the sense we have of the world. Sound affirms embodied experience, sensorial knowing, and the dynamic relations of sound and space. The listener makes sense of sound from within the transience and ceaseless fluctuation of sound. The materiality of sound raises questions about what was heard. The certainty of the visual – the stability of objects, the centred subject, borders, and logocentric knowing – is contested. Sonic materiality and temporality cause doubt.
How we listen to sound informs how we hear each other and the world. Sound connects the listener to others and to the world through embodied knowing, visceral sensation, and affect. The listener is in continual production with sound’s non-sense while making sense of its fluctuation. Sound, bodies, forces of energy matter, and the world intertwine in their becoming relations and transpositions. The different rhythms of sounding bodies affirm the diversity of the sounds of others, the subjective and intersubjective engagement of listening, and the present-ness of sound’s fluctuation. We hear the world as relations, interrelations, and transformation.
Small sounds draw me into their fluctuating tones and temporalities as if they are the beginning of language of the un(der)heard and (in)audible and of sound as a life force. The particularity of their soundings evokes the multiple subjectivities and pluralities of differences and otherness. Meaning is contingent, understanding incomplete. The listener constructs sense within the presence and absence, transience, and temporality of sound’s materiality. Listening and hearing intertwine in embodied relations of sense and nonsense, sonic materiality, and otherness as Voegelin’s sonic possible, an alternate world that reveals how the world might be and the social and political implications of this possibility.