Sound Itself: The Materiality of the Sonic

• In Event: 33.052 - New Materialist Education 1: Cultural Studies and the Power of Things

Abstract

What are the boundaries of materiality? Can the liminal also be material? If the sonic is haptic enough to vibrate objects, bodies, and processes, is it not also material? There are also objects that are intentionally designed to make sounds, and, conversely, sonorous objects. While it has been argued that there may yet not be a “sound itself” (see, for example, Kim-Cohen, 2009), sounds nonetheless are intentionally utilized as weapons in warfare (e.g. Goodman, 2010) and deterrents in schools and public spaces (Sterne, 2005). Sounds are also educative, not only prosody or the content of language but also the intentional and incidental sounds of objects, from sound-emitting walk/don't walk signs to rustling trees in the wind.
This paper takes seriously the possibility of sound as material. That sounds are liminal temporalities that are necessarily to some degree lost even (or especially) when they are captured through processes of recording is not in question here. Rather, the question is what happens when we consider sounds to be a form of materiality in general and its cultural and curricular implications in specific. If music literally hits us, sounds send us into ecstasy or pain, and a voice can bring us to tears, what does this mean for our understandings about ourselves, processes, objects, events and animals?
Such a path requires attention as much to the radically phenomenological as it does to the immanently concrete—because sounds are simultaneously events, experiences, and resonances, their examination requires an equally complex examination and explication. In order to do so, this paper moves from the cultural to the curricular, from an ontological understanding of sounds as ways of being to the ways in which the sonic impacts educational expressions and understandings. It is also a theoretical move from the consideration of sounds as vibrational affects to the ontological significance of the sonic as a thing unto itself.
Conceptualizing the sonic as material is significant for at least the following three reasons. First, it provides a means for recognizing a central pathway for communication between objects, animals, and processes. Second, such recognition can work to decenter human sounds as central to the soundscape while simultaneously creating a means for humans to attend to myriad sonic communications that affect us in our everyday experiences. Finally, sound materiality is—affective and ontological, liminal and haptic, temporal and concrete.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University