Sound Encounters: Toward a Sonic Realism
An exploration of sonic realism: sound as a real, autonomous event—not just perception, signal, or metaphor—but as a participant in reality itself.
Available in print and digital formats
Table of Contents
Sound Encounters: Prelude
A prelude to Sound Encounters, setting up the book's central argument: that sound is a real, autonomous event - not just a perception, signal, or metaphor. This opening chapter introduces the discomfort that animates the work: the gap between how sound is theorized and how it actually feels.
Against Manifestationism
The opening chapter of Sound Encounters, challenging the philosophical tradition that treats sound as dependent on perception. Starting with the classic thought experiment about the tree in the forest, this chapter argues against manifestationism and establishes the book's realist ontology of sound.
Finitude and Withdrawal
This chapter explores how speculative realism and object-oriented ontology provide frameworks for understanding sound as a real, autonomous object. It challenges the metaphysical tradition that privileges visual, stable phenomena and argues for sound's ontological reality.
Deleuze and the Encounter
This chapter explores Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the encounter and how it applies to sound. It argues that sound arrives as an event and a force - not as a symbol to be decoded, but as a rupture that forces us to think differently, before meaning takes hold.
Interlude: Beyond Human Ears
An interlude exploring how sound exists beyond human perception. This chapter considers the acoustic worlds of other species - from bat echolocation to whale songs - and what they reveal about sound as a vibrational reality that exceeds our ears and our understanding.
From Reduction to Realism
This chapter critiques how sound has been reduced across different traditions - from vibration to perception to symbol. It argues for understanding sonic objects as dynamic systems of emergence rather than stable, measurable entities that can be fully captured or explained.
Sonic Object Mapping
This chapter develops a practice of sonic object mapping - a way of listening to sound as real, autonomous objects that emerge, act, and withdraw. It offers a method for tracing what sound does rather than what it means, drawing on object-oriented ontology and Deleuzian affect theory.
The Politics of Sound
A critical examination of the politics of sound and listening. This chapter connects sonic realism to questions of power, asking who gets to sound, who is heard, and whose sonic presence is silenced or marginalized. It explores the racialized and gendered dimensions of acoustic politics.
Toward a Sonic Realism
A critical reflection on sonic realism itself. This chapter turns back to examine the limitations and potential pitfalls of the realist position, asking what sonic realism might obscure and where it needs refinement or complication. It stages a necessary self-critique.
Practising Realism
The final chapter of Sound Encounters, moving from theory to practice. This chapter explores what it means to practice sonic realism - to compose, record, and listen in ways that honor sound's autonomy and vibrational reality, rather than reducing it to perception or meaning.
Coda: Encountering Sound
The coda to Sound Encounters, reflecting on how sounds persist in memory and experience. This closing chapter considers the lingering presence of sonic encounters - how sounds we can't quite place continue to shape our understanding of the world long after they've faded.
About the Book
Sound Encounters: Toward a Sonic Realism explores the philosophical and practical dimensions of sound as a way of knowing the world. Through a series of interconnected chapters, the book examines how sound reveals aspects of reality that visual perception cannot access.
Drawing on philosophy, media theory, and sound studies, this work proposes sonic realism as both a theoretical framework and a practical method for understanding our sonic environment.