Sonic Object Mapping

If sonic objects are real, if they emerge, act, and withdraw, then how do we listen to them? Not as symbols. Not as metaphors. But as things – as forces – that shape the world.

To attend to sound this way, we need a shift in orientation. Not toward control, classification, or capture. But toward mapping: a way of tracing what sound does, rather than what it means. This isn’t a method in the scientific sense. It’s not supposed to stabilise, measure, or reduce. Instead, it offers a practice of attention grounded in sonic realism.

This approach draws from object-oriented ontology (withdrawal), Deleuzian affect (force), intersectional critique (embeddedness), and decolonial and feminist epistemology (partiality). It listens across surfaces and systems without claiming full access. It maps how sonic objects emerge, behave, relate, and withhold. Each dimension reflects a different orientation toward sound’s reality:

1. Surface (appearance)

Sound’s phenomenological interface – what it seems to be. How does it present itself, moment to moment? Is it smooth or jagged? Continuous or broken? What materials does it suggest – glass, breath, metal? This reflects the sensory threshold – what the object lets us notice. Of course, it never tells the whole story.

2. Behaviour (tendency and force)

Sound’s operational profile – what it does. Does it cut, sustain, agitate, lull? What kind of movement or response does it provoke? What systems or conditions does it act upon? This echoes Deleuze’s focus on affect – how a thing acts rather than the categories we assign to it.

3. Relationality (context and interaction)

Sound’s embeddedness – where and how it operates. What technologies shape it (microphones, speakers, software [e.g., Logic, Ableton, Max])? What social, political, or cultural structures does it interact with? What bodies, histories, or spaces are entangled with it? This aligns with intersectional listening: sound doesn’t emerge in a vacuum.

4. Withholding (opacity and refusal)

Sound’s withdrawal – what it resists. What remains inaccessible, ambiguous, or opaque? What does the sound refuse to reveal or stabilise? Does it evoke absence, ambiguity? This honours object-oriented thought: no object is fully given. To map a sonic object this way is not to pin it down. It is to move alongside it. To trace its operation across sensation, relation, and refusal. To follow, not capture.

Let’s test this by mapping a few common but radically different sonic objects:

A Snare Drum Hit

Surface: Sharp transient, quick decay; piercing, midrange burst.

Behaviour: Punctuates rhythm; asserts presence; can startle or drive.

Relationality: Shaped by mic placement, mixing choices, genre norms.

Withholding: Evokes militarism or jungle breakbeats, but resists fixed meaning.

A force-event shaped by history and technology.

A Thunderstorm

Surface: Rumbles, cracks, hiss – textured and layered.

Behaviour: Disrupts routine, commands attention, suspends activity.

Relationality: Mediated by architecture (walls, windows), media (film, recording), memory.

Withholding: Defies location or ownership; origin is diffuse; scale exceeds capture.

Acts through scale, risk, and immersion.

A Voice Note

Surface: Breath, glitch, cadence; compressed and intimate.

Behaviour: Interrupts digital silence; conveys care, urgency, or delay.

Relationality: Tied to social platforms (WhatsApp, iMessage); framed by sender-receiver dynamics.

Withholding: Pauses, hesitations, tonal ambiguity; unsaid content shapes interpretation.

Relational: partial, affective, and situated.

Note: Archival Echoes

Every sonic object arrives mediated. There is no unfiltered transmission – only inscriptions across layers of technology, memory, and decay. A field recording is not the field. A voice note isn’t the voice. They are encodings. Material traces. Reproducible yet always partially withdrawn.

This is not to diminish their reality. Quite the opposite. A cassette’s magnetic hiss, a MiniDisc’s digital warble, the compressed sibilance of a low-bitrate MP3 – these aren’t degradations of some ideal sound, but part of the sound itself. A sonic object is always entangled with the medium through which it comes about and persists.

When we speak of “sonic realism”, we must acknowledge that formats are ontological. They don’t just store sound – they participate in its becoming. A recording made on shellac is not the same object as one made on magnetic tape. Not merely in fidelity, but in how it inhabits time. One degrades with each play; the other erodes magnetically in storage. Each carries its own temporality, its own archive of friction and fade.

This is where media archaeology meets sound philosophy. As Jonathan Sterne and Wolfgang Ernst argue, mediating formats are not neutral containers but ideological and material frameworks.¹

The MP3, for instance, emerged from a history of bandwidth scarcity, psychoacoustic modelling, and perceptual compromise. Its sonic ontology is one of absence – what can be removed without being missed. It’s a format of compression and disposability, attuned to capitalist efficiencies of storage and speed. And yet it is real. It structures how we hear, what we save, and what is lost.

To map a sonic object, then, is also to trace its media substrate. Not just what it is, but how it came to sound the way it does. How it was shaped by microphones, cables, codecs, speakers, and silences. Every echo is an archive.

And the archive, too, is an encounter. Not with pure origin, but with persistence. With the material memory of sound as it resounds, mutates, and endures through the media that carry it.

Mapping as Practice

This framework is not a checklist. It’s a posture. It draws from traditions that resist extraction and over-coding. Donna Haraway reminds us that to map is never neutral.² Dylan Robinson warns of hungry listening – the settler impulse to grasp and consume sound.³ Mapping must resist that hunger.

We need to acknowledge that some sonic objects don’t want to be heard – or don’t want to be heard by you. Mandy-Suzanne Wong argues that sonic objects remain partially hidden – always escaping total access or comprehension.⁴ Camilla Peeters describes sonic mapping as improvisational: not total representation, but partial trace.⁵

Mapping is not mastery. It’s an ethics – an ethics of following. To map sound is to stay with its motion, its emergence, its opacity. It is to ask: What does this sound do? Not just to us, but through us.

What does it touch? Where does it go? What does it refuse? And what might it become?

Every mapping risks extraction. Sonic realism must confront not only ontology, but politics.

Notes

1. Sterne, J. (2012) MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, Duke University Press; Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

2. Haraway, D. J. (1988) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14(3), pp. 575 to 599.

3. Robinson, D. (2020) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

4. Wong, M.-S. (2020) ‘The Thingness of Sound’, Sonic Field, 11 September. Available at: https://sonicfield.org/the\-thingness\-of\-sound\-essay\-by\-mandy\-suzanne\-wong/ (Accessed: 26 July 2025).

5. Peeters, C. (2021) ‘On Becoming a Sound Object: Noise Music as a New Materialist Practice’, Forum+, 28(3).