The Politics of Sound

If sound is real, it must be accounted for. And accounting cannot happen outside politics. A sonic realism worth defending must go beyond metaphysics. It must ask: who gets to sound? Who is heard? Whose sonic presence is silenced, denied, or extracted for the benefit of others?

In Western philosophy, truth has long been linked to vision: distant, detached, rational. Sound, by contrast, is coded as immersive, emotional, unstable – and as such, suspect. The visible is mapped. The audible is endured. This division isn’t innocent. It has been weaponised to marginalise. Sound has been racialised, feminised, criminalised. It has been marked as excessive or irrational.

As Brandon LaBelle writes, acoustic politics are spatial politics.1 They govern who may speak, who must be silent, and which sonic behaviours are permitted in which zones – architectural, legal, digital. Noise complaints, stop-and-search tactics, sound ordinances – all reveal how sonic space is managed unequally. Meanwhile, sound is also romanticised – framed as pure affect, or unmediated truth. This, too, is problematic. It mystifies materiality and erases the structures through which sound operates as a system.

A sonic realism must resist both errors – reduction and mystification. It must account for sound’s objecthood without universalising its availability. Some sonic objects don’t consent to be heard.

Let’s return to our sonic object mapping with a political lens:

A Protest Chant

Surface: Rhythmic, collective, shouted, often fragmentary; repetitive but unstable – not polished, but embodied.

Behaviour: Claims space, signals presence, disrupts normalcy; its force lies not in melody but in amplification of political presence.

Relationality: Situated in crowds, tense spaces, and legal risk; it interacts with police, press, livestreams, and bystanders – all part of its sonic infrastructure.

Withholding: May carry coded meanings or irony – not always for outsiders; some chants are deliberately resistant to full interpretation; not every sound wants to be understood.

Power: Acts politically not because of what it represents, but what it does – it occupies.

A Public Alarm

Surface: High-pitched, repetitive, stripped of variation; designed not to be enjoyed but to override all ambient sound.

Behaviour: Forces action – evacuate, pause, respond; its force is directive, command-like; it doesn’t invite listening – it demands reaction.

Relationality: Tied to state infrastructure: fire alarms, curfews, security systems; intersects with institutional protocols and is interpreted differently based on context (e.g., worker, refugee, citizen).

Withholding: Offers no context; meaning is implied, not explained; presumes legibility – that everyone knows what it means; that is political.

Power: Coercive – built to act with authority, regardless of who’s listening or how they hear.

A Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD)

Surface: A focused, high-intensity beam of sound, often described as a piercing alarm; LRADs can remain painfully loud up to a kilometre from the source device.

Behaviour: Coercive – it forces compliance by causing pain, disorientation and fear; can reach volumes of 150-160 decibels and are designed to disrupt bodies and compel movement.

Relationality: Deployed by police, military and private security forces during protests, border patrols and maritime conflicts; the LRAD’s effect depends on the listener’s position – those nearest suffer the most harm.

Withholding: Framed as “non-lethal,” its violence is often minimised or denied; the apparatus is hidden within vehicles or on rooftops; the target may not know what is happening until pain arrives.

Power: By weaponising sound, LRADs expose how sonic encounters are conditioned by authority; they exemplify hungry listening’s critique: all sound is available to be used, consumed or inflicted.

A High-Frequency Deterrent Device

Surface: A shrill, high-frequency tone audible to people aged between about 13 and ²⁵.

Behaviour: Functions as a repellent; its unpleasantness drives bodies away and claims space without words.

Relationality: Installed by property owners, municipalities or police to deter youth; interacts with age‑related hearing loss and public assumptions about who belongs.

Withholding: Masks its discriminatory intent under the guise of safety; those who can’t hear it may be unaware of its presence; hides behind fences and corporate trademarks.

Power: The device’s indiscriminate deployment raises human rights concerns, critics arguing that inflicting acoustic pain breaches fundamental rights to physical integrity and freedom from discrimination.

Entwined with power and surveillance.

To listen is to engage power. Dylan Robinson’s theory of hungry listening exposes the extractive impulse that underlies settler-colonial relations to sound – the desire to capture, interpret, and make consumable that which was never offered.²

For Robinson, this mode of listening perpetuates a colonial epistemology, one that assumes entitlement to Indigenous expressions and encodes meaning within Western aesthetic and academic frameworks. His call is not for better listening, but for different listening – for settler subjects to encounter Indigenous sound as sovereign, and sometimes as withheld. This refusal is not silence. It isn’t absence. It’s a presence on its own terms.

Tanya Tagaq’s throat singing, for instance, often resists Western expectations of tonality, legibility, or narrative.³ Her work channels the guttural force of the body – breath, pulse, snarl – in a way that asserts both cultural specificity and sonic autonomy. Raven Chacon’s pieces operate similarly, often presenting partial, fragmentary, or temporally disrupted sounds that resist interpretation.⁴

These practices don’t seek inclusion in existing sound ontologies. They confront them. They say: not everything is for you. Listening, then, must sometimes mean not hearing. Or more precisely, not claiming. In refusing the desire to decode or assimilate, sonic realism encounters sound as political. Not only in its content, but in its structure of presentation and withdrawal.

Indigenous soundscapes often articulate this through what Robinson calls “aesthetics of interruption” – pauses, loops, spatial dislocations that unsettle Western formal norms. Some sonic objects resist access not metaphysically, but politically. They don’t want to be heard by everyone. To insist on their legibility is a kind of epistemic violence.

Nina Sun Eidsheim applies this critique to the racialised voice.⁵ She shows how timbre – often treated as a neutral texture – is coded through race, class, and gender. What is heard as “too emotional” or “too loud” often reveals more about the listener’s prejudice than the sound itself. Sara Ahmed reminds us that perception is always oriented.⁶ Some sounds are foregrounded, others dismissed. Listening isn’t a passive intake – it’s a directional act. Milla Tiainen argues that intersectionality must enter ontology at a foundational level.⁷

Sound doesn’t exist outside of gender, race, disability, class, or ecological relation. Its object-hood is shaped by these forces. A siren sounds differently to someone undocumented. A lullaby carries different meaning across generations and trauma. A field recording in a rainforest is not just aesthetic – it’s entangled in extractive histories.

This is why sonic realism must be situated. Not because sound isn’t real, but because its realness is entangled in contested ground. To affirm sound’s reality is to take responsibility for its effects. To listen politically is to trace how sound is shaped, heard, ignored, or erased. And who pays the cost.

Notes

1. LaBelle, B. (2010) Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. London, Continuum.

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

3. Tagaq, T. (2014) Animism [album]. Toronto, Six Shooter Records; see also Tagaq, T. (2018) Split Tooth. New York, Viking.

4. Chacon, R. (2021) Voiceless Mass [composition], on Works for Organ [album]. New Focus Recordings.

5. Eidsheim, N. S. (2019) The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Durham, Duke University Press.

6. Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, Duke University Press.

7. Tiainen, M., Fast, H. and Leppänen, T. (2018) ‘Vibration’, in New Materialism Almanac - Voice/Nature/Vibration. Available at: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/v/vibration.html (Accessed: 26 July 2025).