Transversal Sound Studies Sonic Contagions and How We Breathe. Together

This is an essay that was a talk, which preceded a workshop that tried to make its participants experience the world as an interdependent environment generated by breath and sound and manifesting as a viral sphere. In this way it hoped to develop an embodied thinking, able to engage with the interdependent global and local challenges of today. The essay continues this intention and describes the relationality of current emergencies, outlining the connected reality between planetary and public health, scarcity of resources, consequent migratory pressures, growing population density, persecution, exclusion, violence and death. In response it acknowledges that the entanglements of these challenges necessitate the capacity to think and sense relationally. It proposes a transversal sound studies as the practice of a theory that generates the knowledge and sensibility of the world and of human and more-than-human beings and things with the world, as an entangled and responsible socio-geography that aims to know accountably from the connections and the in-between, generating a “response-able conviviality”: a being as being with, and an understanding of the inevitable contagion or contamination that this being with entails.