5. Seismic Sound as Sonic Fiction: Toward a Cosmology of Vibratory Existence
Everything in nature can be understood as vibration, from the quantum scale to the tectonic. Seismic resonance, understood as this ground - shuddering during earthquakes, exemplifies this vibratory ontology.
The vibratory ontology mentioned above, which underpins this research, draws from Goodman’s assertion that sound operates affectively through vibration before cognition, and finds resonance with Catherine Christer Hennix’s harmonic cosmologies, where vibrational structures are not representational but ontological. In this view, vibration is relation: a field condition where being and knowing tremble in co-emergence. Listening becomes an act of entanglement in shared frequencies.
As Douglas Kahn observes1 , earthquakes have historically been understood as sonic and signal phenomena, emanations through which the Earth makes itself known. These vibrations are primary signals, disclosing the planet’s inner life through resonant articulation. In this sense, the Earth becomes an acoustic body, one whose capacity to emit, conduct, and transform sound links geophysical events with epistemic and aesthetic registers. To listen to seismic sound, then, is not simply to intercept data, but to attune to a planetary signal as a form of communication that exceeds language.
When the Earth trembles, it rings like a struck bell, imprinting the event into its material memory. Geophysicists have observed that a great earthquake can set the entire planet oscillating in discrete modes for days, as if the globe were a musical instrument momentarily alive with sound2. From this cosmic perspective, rupture is not an aberration but a fundamental gesture: each fault-line slip releases spectral traces of planetary history, echoes of pressures accumulated over eons. As Alan Watts once noted, our sense of solid ground is illusory; matter itself is a “fantastic pulsation of vibrations”, an illusion of stability.
Seismic vibrations reveal that the Earth is a dynamic, shaking being that remembers its past through resonant motion. In this view, seismic resonance becomes the Earth’s form of storytelling, a deep-time narrative inscribed through vibration. Every tectonic jolt is a memory trace, an imprint of the planet’s historical reconfigurations: the formation and breaking-up of continents, the rise of mountain chains, the yawning-open of oceanic basins. Present-day tremors in supposedly “stable” regions are often echoes of ancient trauma; faults weakened hundreds of millions of years ago still shudder into the present.
The planet carries these memories in its crust. When stress accumulates and is suddenly released, I imagine it becoming a quake that remembers. Seismic sound is thus a spectral imprint of the Earth’s unconscious, a persistent vibration that signals the long, unfinished story written into rock. Though mostly inaudible to the human ear, these very low-frequency rumblings testify that the Earth is in a constant state of revision. Planetary existence is unfinished and ongoing, and seismic resonance becomes its medium of disclosure, of becoming.
To engage imaginatively with these planetary vibrations, I turn to what cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun3 calls “sonic fiction”: a speculative mode that treats sound as both knowledge and narration. In a sonic fiction of seismicity, the Earth articulates thought through geologic sound. The grinding of tectonic plates, the infrabass of an aftershock. This listening stance invites a cosmology in which the Earth is sentient in a dispersed, vibratory way: it thinks in pulses, dreams in frequencies.
Artists and composers have begun to inhabit this space. In the 1970s, Gordon Mumma composed seismic music using earthquake data as generative material. Such works treat geophysical recordings as speculative soundscapes, portals into a vibratory interiority. Sonic fiction, in this sense, becomes a bridge between scientific realism and planetary imagination, a means to think with resonance and to hear time differently. In this cosmology of vibratory existence, I believe that failure events like earthquakes are crucial moments in the Earth’s ongoing composition. They are sonic inscriptions of a planetary memory in motion, audible traces of a world that never ceases to become.