Powered by Affect: Affective Territories and Sound Materiality
(2025)
author(s): Ana Ramos
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article discusses sonic materiality through Alfred North Whitehead’s organicist materialism. The sonic materiality that is here outlined is not related to sound vibration. Materiality should here be understood in the sense of actuality and concreteness. Anything that produces an effect bears a qualitative difference. The actualization of qualitative difference is concreteness. It is in this sense that sonic materiality is developed in parallel with spatiality. The liveliness of this space emergence is that of affect; its concreteness is that of affect. It is based on Affect theory that we may understand its experience as an immersion in a concrete but abstract qualitative difference, an abstract materiality. Thus, the sonic materiality departs from a conventional conception of objects to foster a sonic object that constitutes itself through relationality and extensive connections. The empirical concept of affective territory speculatively attempts to grasp the spreading out of affect expressiveness through these connections to track its effects in experience.
Petromusicality. On the Sonic Culture of (Plastic) Material and Beyond
(2025)
author(s): Paula Bracker, Karl Salzmann, Samo Zeichen
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Petromusicality. On the Sonic Culture of (Plastic) Material and Beyond explores the fossil fuel-based history of music media, focusing on vinyl records and their environmental impact. This Audio Paper examines historical production processes, material consumption, and the resurgence of vinyl culture. Through artistic research projects and expert perspectives, it discusses the political and ethical dimensions of sound reproduction. By highlighting sustainable alternatives and exploring the connections between extraction, mass production, and materiality, the study encourages a deeper engagement with the physical aspects of sound and their global implications.
On the Sound Image and the Radical Plurality of the Audible
(2025)
author(s): Gabriel Paiuk
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay postulates a novel notion of the sound image that – rather than conceiving it as an artefact, a visual surrogate or an exclusively mental entity – defines it as an instance of a process or an operation, unfolding within material circuits, technical infrastructures, and collective protocols. Based upon the image theory developed by Gilbert Simondon in his book Imagination and Invention, this notion enables an account of the variable nature of the audible in a post-anthropocentric context as intrinsic to the forms in which sensorial engagement takes places in singular material constellations.
Materiality as a Creative Practice of Musical Instruments: Makers’ Perspectives
(2025)
author(s): Lauren Redhead
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This video essay discusses how contemporary artists might directly address some of the philosophical and political challenges of a material approach to instrumentality through creative practice. I present and discuss the practical approaches taken by musicians who create and collaborate with instruments as a central part of their work: Khabat Abas and Sam Underwood. In examining their creative practice both creating and working with musical instruments, I examine how these artists navigate the agential and material aspects of the instruments and systems they create, in parallel with the conceptual ideas that they bring to and derive from such systems.
Introduction
(2025)
author(s): Andy Birtwistle
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Andy Birtwistle’s introduction to this special issue addresses the question "what is sonic materiality?" by examining how both "new" and "old" materialisms offer productive frameworks for conceptualizing sound's material dimensions. Drawing on work by Cox, Voegelin, and Cobussen, alongside critiques from Goh, Thompson, and Campbell, the article proposes understanding sound's materiality through texture, temporal flow, and spatiality. By engaging with Structural/Materialist film theory and creative sonic practices, Birtwistle discusses how materiality intersects with aesthetics, agency, and ethics in sound. The introduction argues that exploring sonic materiality opens new avenues for understanding sound across environmental soundscapes, artistic practices, and cultural contexts.
Ray, where have you been today?
(2025)
author(s): Pietro Fanti
published in: Research Catalogue
Is the reality perceived by someone with dementia less real than our own? Can photography give authority to this alternate reality?
This research, sparked by my newfound relationship with my dementia-affected grandfather Raymond, investigates the family album - often perceived as an unquestionable document - in order to uncover its ambiguities and to question photography in itself as the most trustful record of reality.
The inaccuracy of a medium that aims for objectiveness and is perceived as the bearer of truth, leads me to focus on three different ways of approaching the family archive (collection, editing and manipulation) and the relationship between mortality and memory. By using a mix of photography and photogrammetry, Ray's distorted memories - as he recounted them during his illness - became new images in order to materialise his present parallel truth. Alongside this dreamlike everyday, what has survived of Ray's past is contained in a briefcase: 254 photographs that have been transformed into postcards, travelling keepsakes, ready to be sent. If photography is in itself unreliable, why should the reality of a person who has lost his memory be any less real than our own?
