What Is Sonic Materiality?
Back in 2010 I was lucky enough to get my first book reviewed. Cinesonica: Sounding Film and Video was my earliest attempt at writing about the materiality of sound. Thankfully the review was generally positive, but if I am honest there was one thing that irked me a little at the time. The reviewer had placed the word materiality in scare quotes, along the lines of “the author argues that the ‘materiality’ of sound …” etc. The message was clear: sound is not really material. It is immaterial, fleeting, insubstantial. To lean on a well-known metaphor, sounds are acoustic shadows cast by the objects that create them. They are no more material than shadows. The sources of sounds might be material – dogs, trombones, cars, flutes, noses, lips, hands, waves, insects – but the sounds themselves are not. Barks, parps, skids, tweets, sniffles, raspberries (aka Bronx cheers), claps, lapping, and chirps don’t seem obviously, straightforwardly material. It is easy to agree that they are events, carving out a chunk of space and time for themselves. And they are certainly things, in the same way, perhaps, that a smile is a thing, or a shadow is a thing – which is to say, some kind of perceptible phenomenon created by a particular arrangement or alignment of matter. But sounds do not feel like object-type-things constituted by material stuff. As philosopher and cultural theorist Christoph Cox puts it, “Invisible, intangible, and ephemeral entities, sounds have little in common with ordinary visual objects and substances” (Cox 2011: 156).
Cut to 2025, and it is clear that – at least amongst many members of the sound studies community – the notion of sonic materiality is, if not widely discussed, then at least generally accepted. Many of the recent discussions of sonic materiality can be understood as both contributing to and emerging from what has been characterized as a material turn in the arts and humanities. Here, attention has shifted from the role played by language and discourse within culture to that of objects, technologies, materials, and nonhuman organisms and processes. One of the critical moves that this focus on materiality enables is to think beyond the forcefields of signification and representation that have shaped aesthetic and critical theory in the wake of the linguistic and cultural turns of the last century. As Karen Barad puts it, “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore is matter” (Barad 2007: 132). For the sonic, this shift away from the discursive towards the material might mean thinking not only about what a sound signifies and how it creates meaning but also how its materiality relates to the ways in which a sound is heard, experienced, the ways in which it facilitates and enables, what it resists and inhibits – in short, not only thinking about what sound means but also thinking about what it does (where the creation of meaning is only one type of doing amongst many others). Hence, Mark Fisher’s beautifully evocative and thought-provoking proposal that the crackle of a vinyl record “renders time as an audible materiality” (Fisher 2012: 18).
While rarely concerned with sound, these new ways of thinking about materiality, prompted in particular by developments in realist philosophy, have raised important questions about the place of the material in arts and culture, nonhuman agency, the relationship between technology and culture, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Furthermore, as writer and artist Salomé Voegelin proposes, these ideas offer “new strategies to engage in issues of identity, sexuality, race, and feminism” (Voegelin 2019: 559). Thus, as this special issue proposes, if sound is considered material, it can rightfully take its place within a wide range of discussions: not only those highlighted by Voegelin but also those concerning climate change, bodies, genetically modified organisms, movements of global capital, population flows, waste, technology, and contemporary art practice – domains increasingly examined in materialist terms as part of the material turn.
Although consideration of the sonic has not always been at the forefront of these discussions, a number of writers working in sound studies, including Marcel Cobussen, Christoph Cox, Annie Goh, Marie Thompson, Salomé Voegelin, and others, have sought to think about what forms a materialist approach to the sonic might take and to discuss what might be at stake in the sonic materialisms that emerge from these interventions. Contributing to this debate, in 2018 and 2019 the Journal of Sonic Studies published two special issues on Materials of Sound, guest edited by Caleb Kelly. The current issue, guest edited by Lauren Redhead and myself, aims to build on the work done in issues 16 and 18 of the journal by asking the question, what is sonic materiality? It is this question that we have asked the contributors to this special issue to consider and, from this, to think about what is at stake in forms of sonic materialism built on notions of sonic materiality.
The articles collected in this special issue extend and develop discussions of sonic materiality in a range of different ways. Philosophy has been an important driver of recent work on sonic materiality, and in this issue Gabriel Paiuk explores the ways in which the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon might be applied to the novel notion of the sound image. Also drawing on the resources of philosophy, Ana Ramos examines ideas of nonhuman agency and sonic materiality through the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and how the concept of what Ramos terms “affective territory” might help us to understand the emergent qualities of both space and sound. The spatial and environmental aspects of sound are also examined in Marianela Calleja, Riita Rainio and Julia Shpinitskaya’s article on sounds created through reflection, focusing on the ritual sites of the Sámi people in the northernmost part of Europe.
This special issue makes space for the voices of creative practitioners in Lauren Redhead’s collaboration with musicians Khabat Abas and Sam Underwood, which explores how two contemporary artists navigate the agential and material aspects of the musical instruments they create. Examining the current trend of vinyl releases by contemporary artists and musicians, Paula Bracker, Karl Salzmann and Samo Zeichen consider the political and ethical aspects of this oil-based material. Presented in the form of an audio paper, Bracker, Salzmann and Zeichen navigate their concept of “petromusicality” both through sound and in sound, enabling us to hear some of the chemically composed material textures discussed in the paper. Kristina Pia Hofer addresses the audiocentrism of recent work on sonic materialism through a close listening of the film Semra Ertan by artist Cana Bilir-Meier. Hofer analyzes how tape hiss and other sonic textures in the film challenge audiocentric conceptualisations of sonic materiality, revealing how material sonic qualities can carry historical, political, and representational weight. Sound within an audiovisual context is also explored by Gabriele Jutz in her article on the ways in which experimental films and sound art have made use of sounds of the body. Jutz explores the political dynamics and agencies of bodily sound, arguing that although originating in the human body, these sounds have the potential to challenge anthropocentric ways of thinking. Finally, my own contribution to this issue, which takes the form of this extended introduction, seeks to sketch out one aspect of the background to these various discussions by focusing on the notion of materiality itself and how both “new” and “old” materialisms offer potentially productive ways of thinking sound in material terms.
Central to recent work on sonic materiality have been the ideas of New Materialism. The critical elements of this branch of realist philosophy have been well-rehearsed elsewhere, but it may be helpful to offer a quick sketch of some of New Materialism’s key moves, focusing in particular on those most pertinent to the discussion of sonic materiality. At the core of New Materialism is the proposal that matter is active rather than passive, stressing its vitality and agency. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost put it, “new materialists emphasize the productivity and resilience of matter. Their wager is to give materiality its due, alert to the myriad ways in which matter is both self-constituting and invested with – and reconfigured by – intersubjective interventions that have their own quotient of materiality” (Coole and Frost 2010: 7). In privileging language, discourse, culture, and values, the linguistic turn, and the subsequent cultural turn, foreground human subjectivity, even where radical poststructural theory declared the subject “dead” – in Fredric Jameson’s words, “something like an ideological mirage” (Jameson 1992: 15). In contrast, the proposition of New Materialism might be captured by what Cox has described as a levelling of the ontological field, “rejecting the ancient metaphysical hierarchy that elevates the human above the animal, the inanimate, and the mechanical” (Cox 2016: 23). In this way New Materialism critiques anthropocentrism, advocating instead a relational ontology where the human and nonhuman are understood to be not only interconnected but also mutually constitutive.
There has been some discussion about how flat that ontology should be, given that those calling for it (often privileged white males) would effectively be muting other humans whose voices have yet to be heard (Voegelin 2019: 573). Similarly, there has been discussion of the ways in which ontological approaches to sound need to be understood as cultural and political projects situated within gendered and racialized regimes of knowledge (Goh 2017; Thompson 2017). In this respect, then, the issue of sonic materiality remains a live debate rather than an argument that has been settled and, as such, remains open to discussion and challenge. Nevertheless, New Materialism’s critique of anthropocentrism serves to highlight the agency of nonhuman entities – or, to use writer and sound studies theorist Marcel Cobussen’s preferred term, “actants” (Cobussen 2022: 12). Drawn from the work of Bruno Latour (2005), this notion of the actant stresses the agency of nonhuman entities and helps to level the ontological field in the sense that humans are simply one type of actant, interacting with other nonhuman and human actants. A rethinking of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, nature and culture, subjectivity and materiality, are but some of the ways in which New Materialism is understood to challenge dualistic modes of thinking and, in so doing, to propose an ethics and politics based on the fundamental interconnectedness of actants.
But if we are to give materiality its due, as Coole and Frost suggest, then we might ask: What is it exactly, in terms of sound, that should be given its due? What is sound’s material dimension? Where is its materiality? What is its materiality? Of course, we can begin by paying attention to the materiality of a sound’s source: nickel-plated brass trumpet, compact cassette tape, organs of speech, leaking gas pipeline, the physical infrastructure of the internet. But while this might be an important dimension of sound’s materiality, how do we resist the gravitational pull of the sound’s source and keep an ear on the sound itself? As Voegelin writes, “the material of the sound is not only the measure of its source” (Voegelin 2019: 563). Similarly, Cox proposes, “while sources generate or cause sounds, sounds are not bound to their sources as properties. Sounds, then, are distinct individuals or particulars like objects” (Cox 2011: 156, emphasis in original). Alternatively, we might think about sound’s materiality in terms of its relationship with the environment in which a sound event takes place and is experienced: cave, cinema, uterus, urban street, rainforest, ocean bed, apartment block, squatter settlement, refugee camp. But then, does this not create a similar problem to thinking materiality in terms of a sound’s source, in that sound is heard as an expression, signifier, or effect of the material environment in which it takes place? Of course, the source and the environment can play productively through discussions of sonic materiality. But at the same time, leaning on Cox and Voegelin, we might ask if there might be other dimensions to sound’s materiality that relate to their distinct individuality as things that are not simply the measure of their source.
One of the resources that offers a means to pursue some of these questions is the foundational work on sonic materialism that has been done by Cox, Voegelin, and Cobussen, from which my own thinking on sonic materiality has benefitted greatly. Other authors – including Annie Goh and Marie Thompson – have also made important contributions to the debate on sonic materialism. While this work has challenged, revised, problematized, and developed emergent thinking on sonic materiality, its primary focus, I would argue, remains the philosophical debates from which these new ideas have emerged. However, my aim here is to consider the intersection of ideas originating in philosophical enquiry with alternative frameworks for conceptualizing sound’s materiality: that is, how the broader project of sound studies might draw on developments in realist philosophy while not necessarily being bound to a locus of philosophical debate.
In “Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism” (2011), “Sonic Materialism: Hearing the Arche-Sonic” (2019) and “The Sonic Turn: Toward a Sounding Sonic Materialism” (2022), Cox, Voegelin, and Cobussen, respectively, draw on the ideas of New Materialism and other related resources – including object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, speculative realism, and agential realism – to consider what forms sonic materialism might take. As the titles of these articles make evident, the primary concern of these authors is to propose a form of materialism for sound rather than to define the nature of sound’s materiality. Yet, at the same time, these works make repeated reference to materiality, upon which the authors’ sonic materialisms are presumably predicated. Before thinking about how this body of work might help us think about materiality, it is perhaps helpful to outline the difference between these two terms.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the suffix -ism as proposing “a form of doctrine, theory, or practice having, or claiming to have, a distinctive character or relation” (OED 2024). What is clearly in evidence in these articles is an attempt to set out new ways of thinking about sound, by thinking through sound, that break with established and sometimes habituated modes of thought – whether this be the focus on signification that has dominated aesthetic theory for many decades (Cox), the dominance of visual regimes of knowledge (Voegelin), or thinking about what a sound can do rather than the ontological pursuit of what it is (Cobussen). In this way, each of the articles proposes what sonic materialism might be in terms of an approach or attitude towards the sonic and how thinking about sound in new ways – and thinking through sound (thinking sonically) – can contribute to philosophical thought. In contrast, the suffix -ity suggests a state or condition – as in plasticity, superfluity, fluidity, morbidity, simultaneity, invisibility – with materiality being defined by the OED as “the quality of being composed of matter; material existence; solidity” (OED 2024).
So, what might be the necessity or value of thinking about materiality as distinct from materialism? While Cobussen (2022: 18) may wish to shift from the question of what sound is to what it does, it is clear that the question of what sound is – certainly in terms of its materiality – is not yet a “done deal.” In this respect, the issue of materiality provides a productive field in which we might continue to explore the question of what sound is, since this is inextricably bound to what sound does or might do. Asking ontological questions about sound does not necessarily need to be an essentialist endeavor.[1] Instead, it offers a resource for enriching and diversifying sonic materialism, opening it out from philosophical discourse into broader areas of sound studies, including creative practice. In short, thinking about materiality offers a means of generating materialisms rather than bolstering or refining a singular doctrinal materialism – an underlying principle for this special issue. If the ontological concern with sound’s materiality does not need to be a search for a defining essence, it might instead take the form of something like a tuning-in to a particular dimensionality of sound, taking its place within a broader set of strategies by which we might engage productively and creatively with sound. In this way, there is no necessity to separate matter and meaning, nature and culture, in an absolute fashion, but rather, as New Materialism proposes, to consider how they are interrelated and play through one another.[2]