Sound Politics and the Ontology of the Audible
Revised 2024
If sound is real - if it vibrates, acts, and persists beyond perception - then its politics can’t be separated from its ontology.
Sound doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It circulates in power. It’s amplified or silenced. It’s heard, misheard, monitored, translated.
This chapter explores what happens when we move from sonic objects as aesthetic phenomena to sonic presence as a political condition. It connects the philosophy of sound to histories of inequality, systems of listening, and the material politics of being audible.
1. Listening Is Trained
Jennifer Stoever’s work in The Sonic Color Line makes this plain: listening is not a neutral act.¹ It’s racialised, gendered, classed. It’s shaped by culture and conditioned by technology.
She introduces the concept of the listening ear - a cultural construct that defines what sounds “right”, what counts as signal, and what is dismissed as noise.
This ear is trained to hear white voices as neutral, and others as marked. Trained to parse some forms of expression as music, and others as disturbance.
In post-digital contexts, where the artefact is foregrounded and voice is often absent, it’s easy to assume we’ve escaped this politics. But the system listens too. And it listens selectively.
2. Against Neutral Ontology
Marie Thompson critiques what she calls white aurality - the presumption of a neutral listener, a flat field of sonic perception, a universal experience of vibration.²
She argues that some strands of sonic materialism (especially those focused on “the nature of sound itself”) risk erasing difference under the guise of abstraction.
A glitch isn’t the same for every ear. A feedback loop doesn’t land in every space equally. What counts as aesthetic in one setting might count as aggression in another.
Ontology, here, isn’t abstract. It’s structured. It’s distributed across unequal bodies and uneven systems.
3. Technologies of Listening
Infrastructures of sound - from smart speakers to voice assistants to AI music systems - now actively listen.
But their listening isn’t passive. It’s extractive.
Voice recognition performs worse on racialised accents. Recommendation algorithms push sonic sameness. Police tech uses gunshot detection to surveil Black communities more intensely.³
These systems don’t just shape sound. They shape who gets heard, and how.
Post-digital aesthetics that foreground glitch and artefact can interrupt these systems - but only if they understand what’s being refused.
Not all friction is resistance. And not all noise is protest. The political work happens in context.
4. Sonic Counter-Forces
Sound is also used against power. As interruption. As disruption. As affective refusal.
Low-end frequencies at protests, manipulated voice in queer performance, sonic distortion as protest art - these aren’t just expressive gestures. They’re vibrational tactics.
Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare describes how sound is weaponised - by states and by artists.⁴
What matters is the force. Who controls it. Who it touches.
In feminist and decolonial sound practice, the voice is often cracked, disfigured, looped. It’s made strange. Not as novelty - but as a refusal of legibility.
Sound becomes inhabited friction. An insistence. A thing that won’t resolve.
5. Listening as Ethical Encounter
Salomé Voegelin proposes sonic cosmopolitanism - a form of listening that holds space for the unfamiliar without absorbing it.⁵
This is what political ontology demands. Not that we reduce everything to its context. Not that we abandon realism. But that we acknowledge how relation shapes resonance.
To say a sound is real is not to say it’s the same everywhere. It’s to insist that its being is entangled - with bodies, histories, infrastructures.
To listen is to hear those entanglements. To let them vibrate.
Conclusion
The post-digital isn’t just about glitch. It’s about what’s allowed to glitch, and what gets erased.
Sonic ontology, if it’s to mean anything, must account for the conditions of audibility.
Sound is real. But so are the systems that filter it.
In listening to the sonic object, we listen also to its exclusions. To its refusals. To its demand - not just to be heard, but to be heard differently.
Footnotes
- Stoever, J. L. (2016) The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: NYU Press.
- Thompson, M. (2017) ‘Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies’, Parallax, 23(3), pp. 266-282.
- Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity.
- Goodman, S. (2010) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Voegelin, S. (2018) The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening. London: Bloomsbury.