Sound Words and Sonic Fictions: Writing the Ephemeral

To write about sound and sound art, a sounding art, 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, keep it on the surface and hold it in a visual paradigm, when in reality its materiality is much more subterranean and mobile. This chapter considers the relationship of sound to its theorization, discussing efforts of de-codification, attempts to reach what can be said about the heard; as well as retracing phenomenological endeavours of generation, using words as portals to share in listening. Between musicological histories, canons and rules and the visual discourses that frame much sound art, a language is thought that produces words, the material of articulation, to grasp the material of sound and build itself through the heard a new all the time. This is an attempt at tracing and producing a language that is aware of the philosophical traditions that it carries and which brought it forth, and which it still expresses deliberately and inadvertently through the structure and hierarchy of its words, and that is ready to subvert these traditions, neglecting good grammar and correct expression to find words that generate sound rather than render it mute.

Kodwo Eshun’s ‘sonic fictions’ meet Hélène Cixous ‘écriture feminine’ to between them articulate the subversion of composing sound outside theory.

Between language and listening, between theoretical approaches and practical investments a philosophical place is made of sounds and words.