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Humanity’s current transitional phase, abandoning an old world (with old customs, beliefs and ideas), and stepping into a new unknown brings as many challenges as opportunities. Fed by modernity’s illusion of infinite progress, the techno-distopian worlds constructed in our minds start to collapse, and recent technological advancements challenge our ways of being in this world.
In the evolving discourse of radiophonic and sonic art, sound emerges not merely as aesthetic material but as a form of thinking and inscription.
As Christopher Williams argues in
Sonic Dramaturgy in Post-Radiophonic Art, speech, music, and original sound “enter into dialogue with each other,” forming what he calls a sonic writing or phonography: “writing with sound.” In this framework, the radiophonic space becomes a dramaturgical site where composition, performance, and recording interlace with processes of listening, interpretation, and embodiment. The result, Williams suggests, is a spatial mise-en-scène that organizes the conditions of hearing, transforming listening into an intersubjective act of co-authorship between artist and audience.
Seth Kim-Cohen, in
In the Blink of an Ear (2009), extends and brilliantly complicates this notion by calling for a “non-cochlear sonic art.” In contrast to traditions that isolate the sonic as pure material, Kim-Cohen insists that sound is always already entangled with the conceptual, social, and visual. “In the visual vernacular,” he writes, “concepts need to be brought to light. Thinking in terms of sound, in order to be recognized, ideas must be voiced, thoughts composed, strategies orchestrated.”
“The suggestion of an unadulterated, untainted purity of experience prior to linguistic capture seeks a return to a never-present, Romanticized, pre-Enlightenment darkness … if some stimuli actually convey an experiential effect that precedes linguistic processing, what are we to do with such experiences? ... If there is such a strata of experience, we must accept it mutely. It finds no voice in thought or discourse. Since there is nothing we can do with it, it seems wise to put it aside and concern ourselves with that of which we can speak.” (p. 112)
His argument that “a non-cochlear sonic art maintains a healthy skepticism toward the notion of sound-in-itself” directly challenges the modernist lineage of sonic autonomy, a lineage epitomized by John Cage’s silent compositions, such as
4′33″ (1952).
Cage’s work proposed that any sound, even ambient noise or the absence of intentional sound, could constitute music. Yet, as Kim-Cohen observes, this Cagean gesture toward “sound-in-itself” risks reaffirming an essentialism of listening, a belief in sound’s self-sufficiency detached from context or meaning. Against this, Kim-Cohen suggests that sound should not be mistaken for a pure object of perception; rather, it is always mediated, always already in dialogue with culture, language, and experience. “The ear,” he writes, “is always open, always supplementing its primary materiality, always multiplying the singularity of perception into the plurality of experience.”
Read alongside Williams, Kim-Cohen’s critique reframes the radiophonic and the sonic as arenas of writing, conceptual reflection, and collective voicing. Sound here is not only what is heard but also what is thought, inscribed, and performed across material, spatial, and discursive dimensions: a shared field where listening itself becomes a creative, critical act.
American folklorist Deborah Kapchan distinguishes between writing about sound and writing sound: “The first maintains the positivist separation between subject and object; the second breaks this duality, allowing the writer-listener’s body to mediate between word and sound” (Kapchan 2017).
Similarly, anthropologist David Howes observes that traditional anthropology has been “spectacularly stylized and centered on the individual ethnographer,” relying on visual and verbal metaphors that marginalize sensory knowledge.
In response, Holger Schulze’s concept of sonic thinking proposes an alternative epistemology—one that does not reduce understanding to textual interpretation but instead privileges embodied, affective, and spatial experience. As Schulze writes, listening is a corporeal act that situates the listener as a body among other bodies—hearing, producing sound, and being heard. Therefore, listening closely—especially in the framework of ecological crisis—“to what is heard, what is barely heard, and what is unheard” is becoming, first and foremost, “a strategy for survival” (Schulze, 2021).
Each sonic experience is deeply personal and unrepeatable. Every sound invites interpretation, always perceived differently and never fixed in meaning. The human ear perceives within a limited frequency range (roughly 2–4 kHz) (Fletcher and Munson 1933), yet modern technology extends this range, allowing us to access previously inaudible phenomena. In doing so, it repositions sound as knowledge, as a mode of orientation in the world.
Let’s try to imagine an expanded sensory intelligence capable of revealing aspects of reality that remain inaudible or overlooked. For instance, dogs navigate the world primarily through scent, their capacity to detect smells being estimated at 10,000 to 100,000 times stronger than that of a human (Jenkins et. al., 2018). Is it possible that humans too might learn to orient themselves differently through sound? If olfaction constitutes the dog’s principal mode of understanding its environment, can listening become ours?
