Toward a Sonic Realism

No theory of sound should move forward without turning its head. This chapter stages that turn – not to undo what’s been argued, but to listen more critically. To hear what’s at stake.

We’ve claimed that sound is real. Not a symbol. Not a metaphor. A presence that insists, affects, withdraws. But what does this realism entail? What might it obscure? Where does it need sharpening?

1. Naïve Realism?

One risk is that sonic realism seems to promise too much: that we can access sound as it is, outside mediation. From Kant to Derrida, correlationist thinkers argue that we never encounter sound directly. We filter it – through perception, language, culture, memory. To ignore that is to ignore power.

Response: Sonic realism doesn’t deny mediation. It denies that mediation is all there is. As Mandy- Suzanne Wong argues, sound’s refusal to submit to meaning is not a sign of unreality – it’s a sign of thingness.¹ Sonic realism asserts that something persists – across interpretations, distortions, encodings – something acts whether we understand it. This is not naïve. It’s ontologically modest.

2. Reverse Reduction?

Another risk is that realism simply replaces perception with ontology, turning listening into a passive function of objecthood. In doing so, it threatens to flatten the labour of listening – the care, practice, and context involved in following sound.

Response: Listening is not optional in sonic realism. It’s central. But not as decoding. As encounter. Sound is real, but listening is how we meet it – shaped by position, history, technique. A sonic realism that ignores this isn’t realism. It’s reduction in another register.

3. The Object Trap

Critics like Iain Campbell warn that speculative realism gets stuck in object talk – reifying what should be fluid, relational, processual.² Sound, they argue, is better understood as an event in time.

Response: Only if we treat “object” as a static noun. Sonic realism treats objecthood as operational: a structure that acts, not a thing that sits still. A sonic object is durational, emergent, embedded. To name it as object is not to freeze it. It is to say: this force has agency. It persists. Resists. Matters.

4. Is This Political Enough?

Why talk ontology when we need abolition, decolonisation, climate action? Is a metaphysics of the sonic object a distraction from what’s urgent?

Response: Ontology is never neutral. To define what’s real is to define what matters – and who gets to matter. As Dylan Robinson shows, colonial systems define sound in ways that erase Indigenous sovereignty.³ As Nina Sun Eidsheim reveals, voice is racialised long before it is heard.⁴ To affirm that sound is real – that it acts – is to insist that protest is not just communication. It’s intervention. A chant isn’t only a form of expression. It’s spatial claim. A racialised voice isn’t an aesthetic category. It’s a contested object, shaped by political power. Sonic realism doesn’t replace politics. It grounds it.

5. Whose Realism?

The word realism carries weight. It suggests objectivity, neutrality, truth. But that is also a fiction. Realism has a history – often used to universalise, to erase difference.

Response: This sonic realism isn’t universal. It is situated. Sonic realism is not only a philosophical stance but also a practice. It calls for modes of listening that cultivate attentiveness to sound’s agency while acknowledging our own positionality. One such practice is the soundwalk, defined by composer and acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp as an excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment.⁵ A soundwalk explores our ear-environment relationship without mediation from microphones or headphones.

It opens ears to the unique characteristics of a place and heightens aural perception, revealing entanglements between listeners and their social, political and ecological contexts. By leaving room for sounds to emerge and disappear without immediate interpretation, soundwalking embodies a situated realism: it attends to presence and withdrawal, surface and relation, without assuming mastery. Practices like this show sonic realism isn’t conceptual but a way of moving through the world, that invites reflection, care and responsibility.

So, what does sonic realism *offer? *A way to hear sound not as appearance, but as participant. It doesn’t ask what sound means. It asks: what does sound do? How does it move? Where does it act? When does it hide? It insists that sonic objects aren’t just heard. They are lived. They shape attention, space, memory, and power.

Graham Harman reminds us: objects exceed us.⁶ Sonic objects withdraw – never exhausted by any single hearing, recording, or inscription. A waveform is not the sound, nor is perception the object.

Withdrawal is not absence but remainder: sound endures and acts even as it slips from grasp. To treat sound as object is to recognise this doubleness – presence and opacity, action and refusal. It is not repetition of what came before, but insistence that sound persists in reality, though never fully given.

Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism insists on a world unshackled from human access – a reality that continues without us.⁷ For sonic realism, this means sound must be thinkable even when unheard. Donna Haraway, by contrast, urges us to stay with the trouble – to resist transcendent claims and instead remain with entangled, partial relations.⁸ Between these positions, sonic realism finds its orientation – acknowledging withdrawal and excess, but insisting on situated listening as practice.

Sonic realism isn’t a limiting doctrine, it’s an open orientation – and an ethics. It asks us to listen differently. To treat sound not as signal, but as neighbour. Not as noise, but as force, as encounter.

Notes

1. 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).

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

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

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

5. Westerkamp, H. (1974) ‘Soundwalking’, Sound Heritage, 3(4), pp. 18 to 27.

6. Harman, G. (2011) The Quadruple Object. Winchester, Zero Books.

7. Meillassoux, Q. (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by R. Brassier. London, Continuum.