Post-Digital Aesthetics: Preface

Computer Music and Post-Digital Aesthetics, Sam Kendall, 2018

Revised Edition 2024: Sonic Objecthood and Vibrational Force

This revised edition marks a return - not to the text as it was, but to the questions that first animated it.

When I wrote the original version of this thesis in 2015, I was trying to make sense of something I could hear but couldn’t yet name - the tension between computer music’s technical obsession and its material presence, between its claims to control and the friction I felt in listening. I called that tension post-digital, and I framed it as an aesthetic stance.

In the years since, my own thinking - and the field - have shifted. What felt like a question of genre or style now strikes me as ontological. It’s not just about how computer music sounds. It’s about what sound is, and what it does.

This edition reflects that shift. It draws from object-oriented ontology, sonic materialism, and vibrational thought. It incorporates critical perspectives from sound studies, decolonial theory, feminist critique, and AI research. And it treats each piece of sound not as an artefact of authorship, but as a thing in the world - an object with force, persistence, and political resonance.

I’ve tried to balance the curiosity of the original with the clarity, caution, and conviction of a decade’s distance.

To those exploring the sonic object - whether by listening, composing, theorising, or resisting - I hope this work offers a vocabulary and a point of departure.

Let it be incomplete, if that helps it live.