4. Sub-Bass as Affective Field
If seismic resonance reveals the planet’s deep-time movement, sub-bass renders that resonance palpable, making planetary motion inhabitable. Sub-bass frequencies, often felt more than heard, are particularly accentuated in headphone listening, where the isolation of the ear-canal enclosure translates vibration into heightened bodily sensation and introduces a corporeal dimension to the experience of seismic sound. When derived from seismic data, these frequencies, become affective vectors that bypass linguistic cognition and engage the body directly. The low-end vibrations activate a sense of bodily resonance, eliciting such visceral responses as vertigo, disorientation, and tactile awareness. In this sense, sub-bass frequencies accompany the experience of listening; they become the experience and a sonorous contract with the body.
This phenomenon aligns with the psychoacoustic effects of infrasound, where frequencies below the threshold of human hearing provoke physical and emotional reactions independent of conscious auditory processing. In seismic sonification, the body itself becomes an instrument of perception, resonating with the Earth’s infrasonic movements in ways that transcend conventional auditory experience. Loudness, in this context, becomes a sculptural force that is carving thresholds, saturating space, and displacing breath.
The overwhelming presence of sub-bass immerses the listener in a vibratory field that mirrors tectonic density. These frequencies collapse the boundary between external and internal, producing an acoustic topology where sound is not merely perceived, but physically inhabited. Seismic resonance enacts a mode of listening that is spatial, affective, and embodied, mapping pressure and release across the body's architectural structures.
As Steve Goodman notes in Sonic Warfare, “In the overpowering, almost totalitarian sensuality of bass materialism, it also illustrates the mobilization of a sonic ecology of dread: fear activated deliberately to be transduced and enjoyed in a popular musical context.”1 This complicates the pleasure of vibration with its quasi-militarized, affective undercurrent, exposing that low-frequency sound operates not only as sensation but as strategy, as psychoacoustic manipulation, as power felt beneath the skin, a mode of control and ecstasy.
But vibration is not only an external imposition; it is also a system of internal relays. In any encounter with sound, the microrhythmic entanglement of sense modalities is what constitutes the event. Listening is not confined to the ears; it happens across the skin, the gut, the joints, the viscera. The body becomes a rhythmic transducer, sensitive through its exteroceptive openings (sight, sound, touch), but through interoception: the felt sense of internal intensity that reacts before a sound even registers as a signal. Before consciousness, there is consequence. A low frequency touches the stomach and the body adjusts; a sonic pressure presses against the chest and the diaphragm shifts. The body's sensorium becomes a polyrhythmic synthesizer, a mesh of synesthetic responses that anticipates perception. This is where sound and the virtual intersect, in the almost-audible, in the pre-phenomenal. The “unsound”, as Goodman describes, marks a zone where the sonic operates outside representation, as a force still in formation. It is the sonic’s virtual edge: rhythm without timbre, modulation without message, vibration as incipience. What is heard becomes a part of and through the body.2
This engagement with vibratory presence builds on psychoacoustic investigations by artists such as Stephen O’Malley, Emptyset, and Maryanne Amacher. Emptyset, for instance, often employs bass pitched an octave above the deepest sub-bass, a psychoacoustic strategy that renders the low end more perceptible while preserving its visceral intensity. This octave displacement lets the body register bass as pressure and weight rather than as an inaudible rumble. These practices harness bass density and drone temporal suspension to probe the listener’s perceptual and physical thresholds. In earlier works, Maryanne Amacher’s exploration of ‘ear tones’ already mapped this territory, tracing how low frequencies elicit physiological response through direct bodily intrusion.
These frequencies carry an ancient practice of initiation: gong rituals, sub-aural ceremonies, vibrational therapies; they all signal that to listen is also to be acted upon.
There is also an ethics to this encounter. Sub-bass performs a kind of failure; it is a distorting frequency response, overwhelming space, refusing capture by notation, and it exceeds the score. It teaches limits, and it reminds me that sound, at its most elemental, is not language but contact. What I hear is the force of being-with, of resonating, collapsing, and trembling. And in this trembling, I am implicated.
When I speak of vibratory ontology, I mean it as a condition and mode of becoming through which matter, force, and perception co-compose the world. This draws on what Goodman describes as a vibrational ontology, where vibration is understood as a substratum of existence, irreducible to signal or representation, preceding language and cutting across sense modalities. Here, vibration is not what sound becomes after processing, but what underlies the conditions of its possibility: modulation without stability, movement without fixed form.
Such an approach resonates with David Bohm’s notion of the holomovement, where the universe is not composed of objects but of enfolded flows, as vibrational fields in ceaseless articulation. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh of the world 3offers a profound phenomenological parallel: perception is not a detached act but a reversible entanglement between the sensing body and the sensed world. The flesh of the world, he writes, is not simply matter nor mind, but a pregnancy of possibles, a dimensional fabric that is sensible but not sentient, giving rise to perception without itself perceiving. It is through this elemental flesh, this chiasmic fold, that the body is both perceiving and perceived, a modulation within the world it touches.
In this light, I understand seismic frequencies as invitations to participate in a field of resonance that unsettles the separations between listener and event, content and force. To engage with seismic sound is to join a vibratory praxis that disorients epistemic habits and compels a different kind of sensing. Sound becomes a gesture of attunement toward relational turbulence; it insists on being felt.