Sound Encounters: Prelude

This book began with a discomfort I couldn’t quite name.

It came as a low hum – a residue left behind by texts that spoke of sound only as perception, as signal, as metaphor.

I found myself in seminar rooms where sound was always something else. Never itself. Always disappearing into interpretation, vanishing into the language of culture, correlation, or cognition.

But the sounds I knew – sub-bass, tape hiss, architectural resonance, voices through walls – didn’t feel illusory. They were insistent. Present. Solid.

This is my attempt to follow that intuition – to stay with the weird solidity of sound.

It’s not a comprehensive theory or a blanket rejection of other traditions. It is a movement: away from epistemology and toward ontology – not simply a shift in theory, but a reorientation toward sound as a participant in reality.

It draws from speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, Deleuze, experimental sound practice, and intersectional, decolonial, and ecological critiques of listening. It listens with artists, philosophers, machines, histories, and atmospheres. It resists method in favour of mapping and rejects mastery in favour of resonance.

What follows isn’t a theory of meaning, but a call to attend. To meet sound – not as symbol or signal, but as force. As object. As presence.

Most of all, it asks you – the reader – not to interpret, but to encounter.

To hear things again. Perhaps differently.