Afterword: Vibrations After the Post-Digital

Revised 2024

This thesis began with a question: what happens when digital sound stops feeling new?

What emerges - in music, in art, in listening itself - is not a clean break, but a shift. From interface to infrastructure. From control to residue. From signal to artefact.

The post-digital doesn’t reject the digital. It refuses to be seduced by its promises. It listens to the gaps. The loops. The failures.

And in doing so, it makes room for a different kind of sound work - one grounded not in poiesis or precision, but in presence.

Sonic Realism Revisited

Throughout this work, we’ve moved from questions of style to questions of ontology.

What is sound, if it isn’t just what’s heard? What is composition, if it’s not reducible to process? What is a glitch, if it isn’t just a break in continuity, but an event with force?

We’ve described sound as object. As actant. As persistent and affective matter.

This isn’t to elevate vibration into mysticism. It’s to ground sound more fully - in its physicality, its relations, its resistances.

To say that sound is real is not to claim access to some universal truth. It’s to acknowledge that every sound - even the most digital, broken, or machine-generated - has consequences.

It touches. It shapes. It acts.

Listening After Explanation

The poietic fallacy tells us that to understand a sound, we need to know how it was made.

But understanding isn’t always the point.

Some sonic objects don’t want to be decoded. They don’t resolve. They persist.

Listening, then, becomes less about interpretation and more about encounter.

You don’t need to know the signal chain to feel the stutter. You don’t need to read the code to trace the collapse.

The glitch doesn’t ask to be understood. It asks to be heard.

Post-Digital Futures

As AI systems enter composition, as sonic infrastructures expand, as listening becomes machinic - the post-digital continues to evolve.

But its core remains the same: to make the system audible.

This means composing not just with sounds, but with frictions. With lags, artefacts, and limits.

It means listening for where things break - and what that break reveals.

The sonic artist of the post-digital moment doesn’t escape technology. They inhabit it. They bend it. They let it misfire.

What emerges is not perfect. But it’s real.

Final Words

This thesis has made a case for sonic realism, for vibrational materialism, for sound as resistant presence.

The sonic object is not a symbol. It’s not a metaphor.

It is a thing that vibrates. A thing that touches. A thing that persists.

Let our listening honour that persistence. Let our practices be attuned - not only to what sounds good, but to what sounds insist on being.