1. Introduction: The Sonic Dimensions of Failure
The Earth’s inaudible soundscape presents a curious paradox of failure and resonance. Deep beneath daily human experience, our planet is continuously producing seismic acoustics, earthquakes, tremors, and constant ambient seismic noise, which are often below the threshold of human hearing. In a literal sense, our ears fail to detect these subsonic vibrations. Yet, this failure is precisely what compels an imaginative engagement with sound at the borders of perception. Instead of treating inaudibility as a dead end, this study approaches the unheard seismic realm as an opportunity to redefine failure in auditory terms.
This paper stems from my work as a composer and researcher, utilizing data to develop sound-based compositions that explore inaudible vibrations and affective resonance.1
The theoretical positions presented are grounded in this artistic research and will be situated through practical examples throughout the text. The core concepts — vibratory ontology, seismic sonification, archetypal forces, and the affective power of sub-audible frequencies — coalesce here in an ethics of planetary listening. It asks: What does it mean to fail to hear, and how might such failure be reimagined as a productive listening mode? ‘Failure’, traditionally cast as a malfunction or absence, may instead be understood as a generative concept in the context of seismic sound and listening. To articulate this, I unfold four conceptual pillars: (1) a theory of sonic failure grounded in perceptual limitation and vibratory excess; (2) the transformation of seismic data into speculative compositions using algorithmic sonification; (3) the spatial and corporeal ethics of sub-bass listening; and (4) a cosmology of seismic resonance informed by field theory, archetypes, and sonic fiction.
By bringing together philosophical notions of failure and sonic theory, the study reframes failure as a gateway to new modes of seismic listening. Resonance emerges because of breakdown, not despite it, within a theme that is traced through the seismic and sonic practices that follow.
1.1 Philosophical Foundations of Failure
Failure is often framed as a breakdown, lacking something, but here it may be understood as a productive instability. Deleuze and Guattari2 propose that systems generate through their very breakdowns. Their notion of desiring-machines that function by ceaselessly failing repositions malfunction as creative rupture. What seems like a collapse becomes the motor of transformation.
In Derrida’s theory of "différance"3, failure is intrinsic to language: every statement defers and distorts meaning, entangling the listener in an incomplete transmission. Here, the breakdown is not a technical flaw but the very structure of communication. As much as the sensory sun serves as a central metaphor in philosophical discourse, representing knowledge and the nature of existence, its metaphorical implications reveal the limitations of sensory perception in understanding truth4. I see the sensory earthquake as a metaphor for sensorial failure.
Together, these views suggest that failure can be a field condition: a dynamic of excess, friction, and incompletion. For sonic practices engaging seismic data, this opens the possibility of listening not as deciphering, but as dwelling in resonance, in what resists being pinned down.
This framing also resonates with critiques in environmental sound studies, such as Mark Peter Wright, who emphasizes that field recording and listening are never neutral acts5. Listening becomes an ethical and situated process of mediation, an encounter shaped by attention, technology, and interpretation, rather than a 'transparent' passage into a nonhuman world. These philosophical framings provide the conceptual groundwork for a theory of sonic failure, which is elaborated below.
1.2 Toward a Theory of Sonic Failure
Whereas traditional acoustic theory tends to prioritize clarity, fidelity, and legibility, the concept of “sonic failure” offers a countermodel grounded in ambiguity, rupture, and indeterminacy. In seismic listening, what fails to be heard becomes the very material of a different mode of attention: one based on surrender.
This theory unfolds with both physical phenomena and conceptual positions. Infrasonic frequencies produced by earthquakes and tectonic shifts are often pitched too low for human hearing to detect. When sonified or transduced, these frequencies do not yield stable or easily interpretable signals. Instead, they manifest as distortions, pulses, or uncertain textures that challenge the listener’s assumptions about what sound is or should be.
In this context, sonification6, becomes a speculative translation, less a transparent act of revelation than a human recon2figuration of data into perceptible form. The act of listening to seismic frequencies, once sonified, establishes a contingent relationship with vibratory material, shaped by algorithmic, cultural, and sensory filters. As such, sonic failure emerges as an acknowledgment that listening is always situated, never neutral, and that sound, in its escape from fixity, reflects the limits of representation itself.
Sonic failure is a philosophical stance, one that rejects fantasies of coherence and instead frames listening as cavernous, uncertain, and affective. It refuses the fantasy of full access to nonhuman phenomena, foregrounding instead the distortions, asymmetries, and constraints that structure all acts of listening.
Rather than assuming that sonification provides direct insight into the Earth’s processes, I treat it as a speculative gesture and a way of thinking with vibration, rather than controlling it. As David Toop writes, “-this is not so much listening to sound, but a becoming aware of sound, space, and movement in combination. Hearing allows us constant access to a less stable world, omni-directional, always in a state of becoming and receding, known and unknown. This is the world that surrounds us and flows through us, in all its uncertainty.”7
This awareness is a kind of failure and is of no sense, but instead serves a purpose of containment. In seismic sound practices, such failure becomes an opening: low-end acoustic energies operate near the boundary conditions of sensory registration, refusing to cohere into stable meaning.
In my artistic process, moments of sonic failure often appear as flickers, as shuddering pulses in the data that resist an aesthetic coherence. These are residues of something that exceeds systematization. These sonic events invite me to dwell in attunement to a vibratory world that escapes and sends me into an encounter with vibratory instability. I remain within their turbulence, where affect, confusion, and speculation converge.
Crucially, sonic failure does not signify silence or absence, but moments where the signal slips from comprehension and resonance exceeds semantic containment. Within seismic sound practice, these moments typically emerge through the use of sub-bass, dissonant resonances, and non-linear dynamics that evoke physical rather than cognitive responses. Under these conditions, listening becomes a speculative act and an encounter with vibratory fields. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman8 argues that bass acts affectively before it is processed cognitively. It is felt before it is understood. Thus, sonic failure engages the body as much as the ear, inviting a form of listening that is closer to vibration, pressure, or pulse.
This approach to seismic sound activates failure as a force. It disturbs perception, unsettles systems, and dismantles the false coherence of listening. It opens the ear to what lies beyond its grasp, offering a sonic model of relation that does not presume transparency or mastery.
In doing so, this project frames sonification as a recursive encounter, an unstable negotiation between signal and body, matter and perception, data and affect.
In practical terms, a logarithmic algorithm was used to convert earthquake magnitudes, ranging from 5.0 to 7.4, into a frequency spectrum between 100 and 1000 Hz. This audible range was chosen deliberately: while seismic events primarily unfold below the threshold of human hearing, their conversion into perceptible frequencies enables a sensory encounter rather than a symbolic one. The 100–1000 Hz window was selected for its capacity to transmit vibratory pressure in bodily form, privileging affective impact over illustrative accuracy.
To perform this mapping, I used the following logarithmic interpolation formula:
f = f_min × (f_max / f_min) ^ ((M - M_min) / (M_max - M_min))
Here, f is the resulting frequency in Hz for a given magnitude M; the minimum and maximum frequencies (f_min = 100 Hz, f_max = 1000 Hz) reflect a perceptible spectrum, while M_min = 5.0 and M_max = 7.4 bracket the recorded events. This logarithmic scaling respects both the exponential nature of earthquake energy release and the logarithmic perception of pitch in human hearing, preserving intensity relationships rather than literal translations. The result is a perceptual field in which each seismic event is rendered not as objective data but as embodied pressure, relational intensity, and temporal contour. This perceptual scaling technique has also been used in auditory display design and psychoacoustic research, where logarithmic transformations enable intuitive human engagement with exponential phenomena9.
Using a coding program, I composed with the subharmonics of these derived frequencies, focusing on spectral instability, phase beating, and pulsed dissonance to evoke the tremulous temporality of seismic disturbance.
The compositional method emerged from direct manipulation, where signal shaping, subharmonic layering, and spatial modulation created conditions of emergent instability. The algorithm here diffuses meaning, foregrounding affective ambiguity over representational clarity. Sonification becomes a recursive encounter, an unstable negotiation between signal and body, matter and perception, data and affect.
To spatialize this instability, I employed stereo panning techniques that simulate the imaginative movement of an earthquake, its lateral drift, its oscillatory wavefronts, and perceived displacement. This dynamic spatialization was designed for perceptual tension.
This composition does not seek to mystify seismic data or fetishize instability, however. It was conceived, in part, as a kind of lament where a sonic expression is meant to mirror an internal human logic of grief, disorientation, and irresolution. However, this affective impulse is held in critical tension with a refusal to sentimentalize. The aesthetic is not a metaphor for Earth’s power; it is a tension field where listening becomes a critical act, a tension field of refusing intelligibility as domination. If the stereo field disorients, it is not to simulate a natural disaster but to expose the fragile frameworks by which perception stabilizes meaning. In this sense, sonification is a practice of epistemic disturbance, where ethics lie in restraint.
1.3 Sonification as Speculative Composition
In a recent project entitled The Sound of a World Coming to Terms with Itself, I translated seismic data from earthquakes in Romania into sound using custom algorithmic formulas, as seen above. These formulas process magnitude, depth, and temporal patterns into compositional elements. Rather than striving for scientific legibility or representational fidelity, the method emphasizes transformation and interpretation.
Each data point is approached as a catalyst for vibration, with the translation process foregrounding instability and affective potential over the communication of scientific content. As previously explored, sonification here becomes a way to render failure audible, not the failure of the Earth, but of interpretation, representation, and epistemic control.
What emerges is a speculative composition rather than a sonification in the strict empirical sense. Unlike empirical sonification, which aims at data transparency, speculative composition foregrounds perceptual ambiguity and aesthetic interpretation over informational clarity. Frequencies are shaped by the internal logic of resonance, temporal displacement, and psychoacoustic pressure, rather than mapped literally to seismic metrics. The result is an affective field of vibration that unsettles the listener’s cognitive orientation and invites somatic perception.
This method does not arises from a fixed compositional lineage (though many algorithmic traditions could be cited), but through direct engagement with data and signal. The speculative element lies in the refusal to treat seismic sound as representation, affirming it instead as a site of instability. The frequencies are approached as pressures to be shaped, uncertain, affective, and destabilizing.
The speculative nature of the composition does not obscure its stakes10. It critically resists the urge to aestheticize catastrophe or romanticize the "voice" of nature. Instead, it insists on failure as an ethical position: the refusal to claim mastery over what exceeds us, and the invitation to listen otherwise.
1.4 Spatial Ethics and the Perceptual Field
The spatial dimension of this work extends the project’s core proposition: that seismic sonification is not a representation of geophysical reality, but a means of challenging how sound, space, and perception are organized. The spatialization is not immersive in the sense of enveloping or transporting the listener elsewhere; rather, it introduces subtle vertigo, a micro-instability in the stereo field that induces a perceptual tension. This disorientation is not merely affective but epistemic; it unsettles the presumed stability of listening itself.
Psychoacoustics plays a crucial role in grounding this perceptual disturbance. As the study of how sound is sensed and processed by the human body, psychoacoustics clarifies why seismic signals, often infrasonic, escape conscious hearing. Human perception typically excludes frequencies below 20 Hz, meaning earthquakes are usually not registered as sounds but as bodily events. Recognizing this threshold is essential. It frames the composition’s speculative approach as one based on the tangible failure of sensory access rather than on metaphors or transcendence. It is precisely this limit of what can be sensed, not heard, that defines the ethical tension of listening.
Instead of filling in what cannot be perceived with symbolic meaning, the piece stages that gap. Here, the speculative is methodological rather than mythopoetic, the mythopesis angle, which I will explain in Chapter 3.1. Sonic fiction, as articulated by Kodwo Eshun (1998), informs this approach only insofar as it opens a frame for listening as deviation, rather than narration. The work does not construct a myth of the Earth's voice but rather tests how vibration might unsettle the coordinates of intelligibility altogether. The fiction, if any, lies in the listening act itself, a sonic experience that refuses to stabilize space, time, or causality.
Building on these tensions, speculative listening is approached here not as an invitation to imagine the Earth's interior or to dramatize data, but as a method to probe the perceptual edges of environmental sound. This symbolic meaning is not neutral; they are shaped by tools, thresholds, and the assumptions we bring to sound. The translation of seismic data into audible frequencies does not offer access to planetary truth; it produces an encounter that is interpretive, situated, and partial.
Environmental sonification, particularly in the arts, has been criticized for its tendency to aestheticize data into emotionally charged experiences. As Mark Peter Wright (2022) cautions, this can result in sensory dramaturgy that smooths over interpretive gaps. The affective power of sub-bass may evoke the Earth, but it also risks becoming an auditory cliché, one that performs proximity while masking subjectivity.
This work does not aim to resolve those contradictions. It leans into the interpretive tension between signal and story. The algorithmic composition foregrounds its constructedness, avoiding claims to revelation. What it offers is not fidelity to geophysical data. Listening here aims towards a practice of staying with doubt.
While seismic monitoring, acoustic ecology, and bioacoustics all engage with nonhuman sound, their epistemic orientations differ. Seismic monitoring often treats the Earth as a data- source; acoustic ecology has historically emphasized harmony and preservation; and bioacoustics privileges species-specific intelligibility. This work, in contrast, approaches sonification as an epistemic disturbance: a mode of attunement that foregrounds ambiguity, non-resolution, and the ethics of listening-with rather than listening-for.
1.5 Situating Seismic Listening in Environmental Sound Studies
The project resonates with modes of environmental listening, from R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape ecology to Steven Feld’s acoustemology, but not without critical distance. Schafer’s binary between natural and industrial sound has been widely critiqued for its romanticism, while Feld’s sound-as-knowledge framework presumes presence where seismic listening encounters latency.
In contrast, Brandon LaBelle frames listening as a relational and fugitive act, one that unsettles the spatial, corporeal, and psychic order rather than stabilizing it. Listening, he writes, is “intensely relational, opening onto the spatial, the psychic, and the corporeal,” revealing boundaries only to transgress them.11 Sound is operative in absence, as a “reverberation of the self across spaces of encounter,” leaking, overflowing, and refusing to settle into static meaning.12 It enacts “a displacement of the body’s coordinates,” disrupting normative spatial logics and loosening the listener’s embodied position.13 In this way, sound “contributes to a dynamic materiality of space, a continual drift,” one in which perception becomes a negotiation with instability, affective resonance, and the inaudible.14
Seismic sound disrupts the audible world. It invites to attend otherwise, hear less, to linger in the temporal and epistemic slack between vibration and meaning. Rather than amplifying the unheard, this project explores the disjunctions that emerge when attempting to do so.
Framed thus, failure becomes a method rather than an error, where disorientation, delay, and lack of resolution are openings for new perceptual engagements.
1.6 Listening Otherwise
To listen to seismic sound is to step outside the familiar bandwidth of human perception. This research argues that such listening is not merely a geophysical task, but a cultural and epistemological negotiation: a practice of tuning into vibratory events that fail to conform to established sonic categories. The Earth’s infrasonic murmurs do not yield to the ear unproblematically; they are translated, stretched, compressed, and ultimately reshaped by algorithmic processes into something we may recognize as sound. This transformation is never neutral. It is speculative, interpretive, and deeply entangled with human desire: the desire to make sense of what lies beneath.
“Listening otherwise” begins with the acknowledgment that sonification, especially of seismic or planetary data, is a deeply situated act. It may offer new ways of relating to the planet, but it also risks anthropocentric projection, treating the Earth as a signal source for human narratives. Rather than presenting seismic sonification as unmediated access to “the voice of the Earth,” this project foregrounds its provisionality: these sounds are not the Earth speaking, but the Earth interpreted, coded, and revoiced through artistic and technological imagination.
This listening is speculative, not because it abandons science, but because it moves alongside it, reaching into the crevices where sense fails, where signals do not resolve into meaning, and where resonance replaces representation. Technologies stretch human hearing toward the edge of perception, but it is the interpretive leap, the imaginative reconfiguration, that renders “listening otherwise”. It is in this leap that failure becomes productive as an opening toward new relational attunements.
My process unfolded within this gap. Working with seismic data, I found myself continually negotiating between the scientific accuracy of the waveform and the emotional ambiguity of its sonic rendering. The recordings refused to behave; the frequencies felt unstable, fragile, even disappointing at times. Yet it was within this instability, this imperfect transduction, that the work began to take form. Listening to these flawed translations, I was drawn to what failed to appear: the pauses formed in-between panning, the imaginary shaking of Earth’s crust, with a sense of something just beyond.
Listening otherwise, then, is to admit failure into the method itself. It is to recognize that the inaudible does not become audible in any simple sense, and that resonance is not a recovery of presence, but a friction between layers: technological, geological and perceptual. It is in this friction that new forms of sonic knowing may emerge as invitations to hear what eludes capture, and to stay with it.