Sonic Object Mapping

Revised 2024

This chapter presents two focused case studies from the post-digital field: Ryoji Ikeda’s data.convex and the collaborative work 10’30 by Shibuya, Möslang, and Nakamura.

These pieces aren’t analysed to reveal hidden meanings or poietic logic. They’re treated as sonic objects - things that vibrate, persist, and relate.

Rather than interpreting them, we map their behaviours: how they sound, how they act, and how they hold space.

This is a method of sonic object mapping - not symbol decoding or authorial archaeology, but a way of attending to the sonic thing as it appears.

1. data.convex - Ryoji Ikeda

Listening Description

data.convex is a track from Ikeda’s dataplex project. Its sound world is spare: high-frequency pulses, bursts of digital noise, silent frames. The piece is composed entirely from data-as-sound - a reductionist palette that feels clinical, even alien.

Sonic Object Behaviour

What emerges is a grid-object - a rigid structure of timed pulses that seem machinic, inhuman. But within that rigidity, there’s detail: shifting rhythms, ghost patterns, microvariations in intensity.

This is not music that develops. It rotates. It iterates. It pins the listener to its frame.

Affect and Force

The affect is architectural - not emotional but spatial. Listening feels like standing inside a data lattice, experiencing the resonance of structured interruption.

There’s an intensity here, but it’s not about loudness. It’s about persistence.

The sonic object insists on its shape.

Mapping Note

If we were to visualise it, data.convex would appear as a plane of micro-pulses, evenly spaced but fractally perturbed. Not a waveform, but a vibration map. Not a melody, but a system speaking itself.

2. 10’30 - Shibuya, Möslang, Nakamura

Listening Description

This work is a live improvisation built from unstable systems: no-input mixers, feedback loops, and circuit-bent gear. It hisses, pops, fizzes. It feels alive and barely under control.

Sonic Object Behaviour

Unlike Ikeda’s piece, this object is relational. It doesn’t exist prior to performance. It emerges through contact - between bodies, systems, electricity.

There’s no score, no centre. Just distributed action - signal passed around, picked up, transformed.

The sonic object here is not a fixed structure. It’s a becoming. A field.

Affect and Force

The force is unstable - threatening collapse, but holding tension. At times aggressive, at others quiet, the work hums with contingency.

What you hear is not just sound, but feedback - a system listening to itself.

Mapping Note

Here, the sonic object can be mapped as a mesh of interactions - multiple zones of emergent behaviour. It has no fixed coordinates. It has only tendencies.

3. Listening as Mapping

These analyses don’t explain. They trace.

To map a sonic object is to attend to:

• Surface - what appears, moment to moment
• Force - how it acts on space and bodies
• Relation - what it touches, reflects, excludes
• Withholding - what it refuses to become

This isn’t analysis in the traditional sense. It’s description without reduction.

Each object is real, but not transparent. Audible, but not symbolic. Present, but never fixed.

Conclusion

The two works examined here offer radically different post-digital gestures: one a compositional lattice of sonic code, the other an emergent field of live-system exchange.

Yet both resist interpretation. They don’t say - they act.

They are not containers for meaning. They are sonic machines that generate experience, vibrational presence, and constraint.

Mapping these objects reveals not what they mean, but how they insist.

In the final chapter, we extend this approach beyond the aesthetic - into the political, ethical, and infrastructural stakes of sonic ontology.