Keynote: Sonic Sense: The Meaning of the Invisible

‘Sonic Sense’, Keynote Chapter for Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, John Matthew, David Prior and Jane Grant eds, Oxford University Press, 2021.

This chapter introduces the notion of a sonic sense, of sonic sensing and a sonic sensibility, as an aesthetic, ideological and socio-political engagement with the world staged principally through philosophical contemplation and the consideration of two sound artworks. In this way it explores the particularity of a listened to work as a listened to world and engages in its invisible and mobile meaning and materiality, and it further considers how subjectivity is constituted in this sonic sphere. It does so not to oppose visual signification and identity, but to challenge their singularity and to pluralise their possibility. Therefore, sound and listening are not used to elaborate an essentialist or exclusionary position. Rather, the sonic sense, as it is developed throughout this text, presents the seemingly paradoxical strategy of focusing on sound to reach the multisensory, and to appreciate through the productive uncertainty of listening the co-dependence and interconnectivity of reality as an actuality that demands participation - listening, looking, touching and smelling - to grasp its complex plurality.