‘Make audible the inaudible’ : Sound and Space as matters of concern

Kurzfassung/Abstract

During the past two decades, philosophy and humanities alike have seen an evolution in how to conceive sound, an evolution mirroring the growing interest for new materialisms in various disciplines. From an object of inquiry and the subsequent production of knowledge about it, sound became an entity (or an event) to think in, with and through (Cox, 2018; Herzogenrath, 2017; Schulze, 2018). As sonic materialism or sonic thinking, those philosophies, anthropologies, media and sound studies, were therefore attempting not only to challenge the ontologies of sound, but epistemic practices as well: how to com-pose with sounds in producing knowledge? In other words, practices of sounding and listening, as situated and locating, became themselves generative and valid ways of engaging with a multiplicity of human and non-human actors, and inviting a plurality of narratives, beyond hegemonic modes — in short, working with matters of concern (Latour, 2004).

In this paper, the importance of sonic thinking will be underlined as a mode of doing research in philosophy and social sciences, in phase with practices of research creation as thought in the act (Manning et al., 2018). In particular, this paper will be an attempt to understand reverberation and resonance in their relational qualities, as ways to create and modulate affective spacetimes (McCormack, 2013) with and through sound. In addition to a presentation of the aforementioned topics, the paper will also combine them with sonic narratives as an experiment towards different modes of knowledge production and distribution.