What does “radical sonic futures” mean?
To me, it’s a term about what it means to consider or reach for radical outcomes as regards our relationships to sound and what we hear it offer us. Outcomes that are not yet present, but nascent, humming tones that are dimly sensed.
And through that listening, that reaching, we come to a deeper understanding of what it means to inhabit the world around us, now, in this present moment. That we seek a path to engage with our world as it is, not as something outside ourselves, but through being a part of it, in it.
And that the future is the place and time where they blossom. And the things they blossom into are radical, much more radical than our relationship to sound and each other in the present moment (and especially in the present moment).
And when I say “the future”, I mean the tick, the moment, the sample after this one.
I was recently commissioned to write an essay on the topic of “audible futures” for an upcoming publication – a massive project that will involve many current (and radical) voices in the field of sound studies. I thought a lot about what that word “future” meant. What did they mean by “future”? What do any of us mean? I thought too about what it might mean to be invited into this community of sound people, many of whom I knew as names on a page, writing ideas that drive the things I think about and share with you here. What can I offer as part of this gathering? What can I say that hasn’t been said before, and better?
To their credit (and my endless gratitude), the editors wanted to hear what I thought, rather than defining the term or the circumstance for me*. They were clear that they were asking me to imagine, and they spoke passionately about the community of thought they were trying to build. They urged me to reach for a fantastical dreaming of our aural future(s), something hidden or around a corner.
So I thought about it. What is around the corner, present but just out of sensing? What is hidden? How can I share it?
Thinking, I keep coming back to the thing I always come back to: that sound is a way for us to connect to the moment, to the reality of being, to being in relationship. It is a way to forge new understandings and openness. That to be open to sound, to receive it with all your senses, is to be attuned to the universe in a way that reveals the rich interconnectedness of atoms we call reality, that we call friendship, that we call the sunshine on our skin, that we call joy, that we call love.
You know: radical sonic futures.
*
We all know that defining terms can sometimes collapse them – see the beautiful “listening protocols” article from Dr Salome Voegelin et al’s project Listening Across Disciplines at the University of Arts London):
“…the aim to compile such a vocabulary soon collided with the desire not to stultify listening and hearing in a lexical definition. In other words, not to turn the heard into a visual object and not to deprive the sonic of its fluidity, ephemerality, and even unreliability, upon which, after all, its particularity and its knowledge gain relies. And so, while there was a desire to develop shared words, to improve a cross-disciplinary understanding and use of the sonic, there was also a caution against what words do or do not permit the doing of, once written down and lexically defined.” (Voegelin; link)