3. Seismic Dialogues: Sonification, Archetypes, and Vibratory Fields
To sonify seismic waves is to become attuned to a world already speaking in force. What I call sound becomes a mode of co-participation, a transductive thread between body and crust, affect and matter. Framed thus, sonification is exposure rather than extraction.
David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order offers a conceptual foundation for this section and helps name this deeper entanglement. In Bohm’s terms, the explicate order, the world of discrete objects and events, emerges as the unfolded face of a deeper implicate order: a reality in which all phenomena are interconnected, enfolded in a dynamic unity. And I believe that seismic waves, as acoustic manifestations of tectonic shifts, offer a rare glimpse into this enfolded field. Sonifying them enacts a philosophical gesture rather than a representational one. The listening that follows is of aligning and of tuning into a non-symbolic material intelligence.
Three conceptual anchors sustain this speculative framework: field theory (after Bohm), archetypes (after Jung), and the notion of vibratory forces made audible. These are necessary anchors for understanding seismic sonification as a speculative and ontological practice, a way of staying-with the world’s own modalities of expression. Seismic sound becomes a relational force: something between body and planet, consciousness and substratum. Sonification arises as exposure, as a step back into resonance itself. It is a sounding of what exceeds symbolization while insisting on vibratory presence.
3.1 Earthquake as Archetype
Carl Jung understood archetypes as psychic matrices, as forms through which instinct crystallizes into a symbol. They emerge as affective patterns, recurring across cultures, epochs, and unconscious strata. Within the context of seismic resonance, these patterns vibrate as well as represent. Earthquakes are both geological events and archetypal fractures, embodying in motion the Destroyer and the Mother Earth.
The Mother Earth archetype, in its ambivalence, nurtures and reclaims. The tremor, fracture, and subsidence each speak a mythical syntax etched into the planet’s lithosphere. The Destroyer archetype clears and opens space for the unformed. Earthquakes dismantle the visible to disclose what lies underneath: a dynamic, hidden order, always unfolding, perpetually in motion.
These motifs reverberate through sonic practices tuned to instability, vibration, and elemental force. Iancu Dumitrescu’s spectral compositions, such as Eruptions or Pierres Sacrées, treat sound as matter in constant flux. His works channel seismic force into sonic form, as vibratory embodiment. Dumitrescu speaks of “sound as a living organism,” a phrasing that aligns with both Jungian archetypes and Bohmian fields: dynamic, generative, excessive, alive.
This way, seismic sound emerges here as a medium of archetypal resonance, a force rising from noise itself. Archetypes, like infrasound, operate below the threshold of language. Their effects are visceral, affective, physiological, even vestibular: a sub-auditory trembling of meaning. Sustained bass, infrasonic waves, and subharmonic patterns all evoke the unconscious through embodied mythos rather than representation.
Works by Éliane Radigue (Trilogie de la Mort) or Harry Partch, with his microtonal systems rooted in ancient tuning, similarly invoke archetypal architectures. This sonic excavation digs beneath Western harmonic systems to uncover resonances that traverse time and tradition.
Listening in this way might be an invitation to participate instead of decoding what I hear. Seismic resonance, understood archetypally, invites a vibratory form of mythopoesis. Here, sound enacts transformation and earthquakes become more than events because they manifest as psychic tectonics, mythic pulses of a planet dreaming in cycles of rupture and return.
3.2 David Bohm’s Field Theory
In David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order, reality unfolds as a continuously evolving whole: an unbroken field where apparent separations are surface phenomena. Central to this vision is the concept of holomovement 1, a dynamic, undivided flow from which both matter and consciousness emerge. Seismic resonance, in this view, is not simply an acoustic signal because when I map it, I hear it as a sonic articulation of the Earth’s entanglement with itself. This is something I feel in my chest before I register it in thought. These waves, drawn from deep within the crust, are information-carriers that also voice a relational process, resonating with the flux and fold of all that moves.
To sonify these waves is to enter into a dialogue already in motion, rather than rendering representations. Seismic sound becomes a revelation of the implicate: a field-event that resists containment, where the boundary between signal and noise breaks down. Bohm’s assertion that “fields alone are real” resonates here. What I hear is a phase shift within the planetary field, audible only because it trembles, briefly, at my frequency.
Bohm’s implicate order displaces the dichotomy between form and flux, showing a cosmos woven from the pleats of a generative continuum, an all-enfolding field where difference arises through differential movement. Reality emerges as an involution of itself, like virtual quanta shimmering.
The implicate is not a hidden background but the world’s very manner of self-disclosure, folded within it. Within this cosmogenetic logic, seismic resonance appears as a tremor of the real vibrating its own immanence, the Earth thinking in frequencies before cognition, prior to presence.
This field-based ontology reverberates across sonic practices that reject stability in favour of process. Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort offers slow tonalities that mirror tectonic drift—sound as continental shift. Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room dissolves speech into resonance, allowing architecture to rewrite language. David Tudor’s Rainforest transforms material objects into resonant agents, while Catherine Christer Hennix’s just intonation drones unfold harmonic structures that resist final form. These sonic fields are recursive, relational, and alive.
The infrasonic frequencies of earthquakes create an immersive sonic experience, mapping geophysical movement onto human perception in ways that defy conventional linear interpretation. Just as a hologram contains the entirety of an image within each fragment, seismic resonance encapsulates vast planetary processes within each vibratory pulse. Sonification, here, becomes an ontological tuning.
I listen through the Earth and what unfolds is a mutation of hearing, a threshold that enfolds sound and silence in a shared vibratory space.