2. Failure as a Process of Unlearning
2.1 The Paradox of Failure
Through the sonification of earthquakes, we may access the inaudible trembling of a world perpetually coming to terms with itself. When considered beyond its normative function, as diagnostic, conclusive, or legible, failure begins to reorganize perception. It may not signal collapse, but recalibration: a break that opens, a dissonance that resonates, a world articulating itself in pressure. What if failure does not close down a process, but thickens it? In this light, failure may be understood as a radical reconfiguration of epistemic, aesthetic, and even ethical boundaries. It may ask us not what we can make the Earth say, but how we might listen when it says nothing back.
What I have learnt is that the most enduring failures are not technological. They are affective: failures to notice, to stay with, to imagine otherwise. Not because data is lacking, but because the frameworks through which attention flows have grown brittle. They are invitations to recalibrate what it means to listen rather than epistemological defects. Because our frameworks falter every day, and not because the signal is absent. This failure is always intimate because it disarms the logic of domination and shifts toward contingent attunement.
For instance, ethical boundaries are reconfigured when the listener must confront the limits of extractive knowledge: when seismic sonification no longer serves to reveal, classify, or control, instead it sits with opacity, to dive into the resistance to appropriate.
It also asks: what if to listen is to unlearn? And what if this unlearning brings me closer to what one might call the Source, the ungraspable vitality that pulses through both thought and matter?
To listen in the presence of seismic sonification is to practice a mode of unlearning. It means yielding to a field of resonance that exceeds cognition, a field pulsing with the vitality of matter uncoiled. I might even say it draws me nearer to what Jane Bennett calls the vital material1: an immanent, animating presence that pulses through thought and substance alike.
The exploration of sonic failure is not speculative alone; it finds form in practices that navigate thresholds, interference, and excess. Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, for example, translate the imperceptible electromagnetic strata of the city into sound using specially developed, custom-built equipment. Yet the result is not transparency, because these walks are composed encounters, they are curated through aesthetic decisions that shape the vibratory field into patterns, rhythms, and textures rather than raw exposure. What we hear is a resonant transformation that is filtered through both medium and method.
Similarly, Maryanne Amacher’s Sound Characters explores otoacoustic emissions, frequencies generated within the inner ear2. These works displace the authority of origin, making the listener’s body the site of composition. Amacher's spatial architectures of sound challenge auditory expectation: a sound may arrive late, come from within, or never resolve. Listening becomes an act of instability, and sound escapes its source; it propagates, refracts, and folds inward. Meaning is no longer stable.
Spectralist composers such as Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram push this even further. Their compositions, such as Eruptions or Pierres Sacrées, work with sound as volatile energy in flux. Dumitrescu3 speaks of “sound as a living organism,” and captures the ontology at play: sonority as animate, excessive, capable of convulsion and stillness alike, and indeed his works often teeter on the edge of collapse. Here, failure functions as an overabundant generative force: the moment when form disintegrates and a new sonic field surges forth.
In this way, failure ceases to be something to overcome. Control, as a structure of predictability, prevents encounter. What Jacques Derrida describes as the instability of meaning, Amacher embodies in propagation and phasing waves: meaning that flickers, slips, and multiplies. Even neuroplasticity mirrors this logic, where the brain, confronted with disruption, rewires itself. Failure, then, becomes a condition for reconfiguration, not only in perception but also in cognition.
In sonic terms, failure could be the shimmer of an untamed resonance, the crackle of an overloaded circuit, the moment the world vibrates beyond recognition. To fail is to admit this excess and to remain with the tremor that resists resolution. Listening to seismic sound is to stand in the proximity of a pressure that exceeds the symbol. What I hear often resists containment, and I am failing to resolve it into signal, structure, or clarity. This failure is the condition of listening itself. To engage with such phenomena is to unlearn control, to move from decoding toward attunement. In this sense, seismic sonification may be understood as a method of rendering the inaudible audible as well as an aesthetic and ethical stance: one that meets the Earth in its excess and does not attempt to master it. I listen through failure, and because of it.
2.2 Seismic Activity as Adjustment, Not Breakdown
Seismic activity is frequently framed in engineering discourse and popular media as a form of failure, an infrastructural collapse, a geological error, or a rupture in natural order. Yet, I propose a different reading: one in which seismic activity may be understood as an adjustment. This is not to deny its violence or its consequences, but to reposition its epistemological valence. What if earthquakes are not malfunctions, but recalibrations, vibratory attempts to redistribute pressure across a system in flux?
Listening to seismic activity in this way reveals a planetary feedback loop: an ongoing negotiation between tension and release. Rather than signalling dysfunction, these events might be interpreted as necessary realignments, as sonic expressions of a world seeking balance. In this view, the earthquake is not a singular crisis but part of an ongoing vibratory dialogue.
It is here that Weltschmerz4 surfaces as a form of attunement to planetary exhaustion and as a planetary sympathy. This world-weariness is both emotional and ontological, and becomes a recognition that maybe the Earth, too, holds pain, and that its adjustments carry the residue of that burden. Earthquakes do not cry out, I hear them groan, shimmer, and shift, and their sonified traces are not signals of collapse alone, but of continuing under pressure, of systems adjusting towards some temporary holding.
This idea resonates with sonic practices that embed feedback and instability within their very form. Éliane Radigue’s extended works operate through microscopic modulation, producing change by recursive deepening, and her drones suggest endurance rather than progress. Similarly, David Tudor’s feedback-based compositions produce sound through self-regulating circuits, unpredictable, sensitive to pressure, and shaped by the thresholds of failure. Both artists offer sonic systems that evolve through tension, adaptation, and emergence, echoing the tectonic dynamics of seismic adjustment. To listen and frame seismic activity in this way is not to erase its danger, but to reframe its ontology: from collapse to transformation and from error to process. It invites me to consider failure not as the end of meaning, but as its slow, resounding reconfiguration.
