Deleuze and the Encounter

Sound is unstable. It moves too quickly to be seen, too forcefully to be ignored. It arrives not as symbol, but as event. Not figure, but force.

Deleuze’s philosophy begins here – not with recognition, but with rupture. “Something in the world forces us to think”.¹ But this something is not familiar. This catalytic force is the difference between recognition and encounter. Recognition confirms identity; the latter confronts us with the new, the difference that can’t be reduced.

Sound arrives in this way – as a violence of sensation before meaning. We flinch at a glitch. We tense at a sub-bass swell. It’s more than a physical response. It’s the force of affect before schema.

For Deleuze, encounters occur when an intensity forces the faculties – sensibility, imagination, memory and thought – to communicate a violence that exceeds categories. An encounter is not an experience that confirms what we know but a shock that compels us to think differently.

And sound offers shocks: the euphoria of a harmonic chord, the crack of a sonic boom, the feedback in an improvised performance, or the silence after a power outage. Sound has the potential to break through and reorganise perception. To engage it is to be implicated in a process of differential becoming rather than to decode a hidden essence.

Deleuze calls this theory a transcendental empiricism – a philosophy grounded in experience but not in recognition. It’s not about matching input to memory. It’s about enduring what doesn’t fit.

This is where sound thrives. It doesn’t represent in the way language or image do. It unfolds. It builds pressure. It vanishes before you can hold it. The hum, the click, the absence – each acts without asking permission to be understood first. Sound doesn’t wait for you to know it.

Some sonic materialists misread this, as Iain Campbell notes.² They treat the Deleuzian virtual as a hidden substratum – a deeper reality waiting to be unveiled. But that’s not quite right. For Deleuze, the virtual is not a secret essence. It is difference itself – the dynamic field of potential that drives actual events.³ The virtual is real, but not reducible to any single appearance or state.

Sound, in this frame, is a vector – not a substance, but a directional force. It carries with it unactualised potential: shifts in intensity, tone, duration, space.⁴ Every sonic event is cut from a broader field of becoming. A field recording isn’t a document. It is an actualisation. A granular synthesis patch isn’t an object. It is a machine of difference.

To listen, then, is not to decode something. It is to be moved by what exceeds you. A Deleuzian encounter isn’t about insight. It’s about disruption. A moment where the object – or sound – breaks through. Not as idea. As pressure. As residue. As force. In this model, sound becomes real not by being heard, but by what it does. It forces, folds, unsettles, insists. It’s not there to be experienced. It’s there to act.

Yet in acting – the political dimensions of sound encounters can’t be ignored. Acoustic weapons demonstrate that sound can operate as a vector of coercion. Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) emit high‑pressure sound waves that remain painfully loud at distances up to a kilometre.⁵ These devices can reach volumes of 150-160 decibels and cause immediate pain, hearing damage and psychological harm. Used by police and military forces to disperse protesters or migrants, LRADs exemplify sound acting as force rather than signal, while remaining entwined with politics. They show that encounters are not neutral: they are shaped by infrastructures of power.

Sonic realism doesn’t offer interpretation. It offers orientation – toward force, toward rupture, toward sound encounters.

Notes

1. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. Translated by P. Patton. London, Athlone Press.

2. Campbell, I. (2020) ‘Deleuzian Sound Studies and the Problems of Sonic Materialism’, Contemporary Music Review, 39(5), pp. 361 to 378.

3. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. Translated by P. Patton. London, Athlone Press.

4. Thompson, M. and Biddle, I. (eds) (2013) Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. London, Bloomsbury Academic.

5. Goodman, S. (2010) Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 86 to 89.