Abstract Prelude
I was there. I heard the Big Boom. I heard ancient cultures. I heard the sounds of the factories during the First Industrial Revolution. I heard two Eastern European boys in the 80’s playing folk-infused punk in a Budapest cellar. Four decades later, I heard the voice of only one of them, borrowed by an AI, for he was dead. I heard your birth, I heard your first inhale and exhale, your cry. I heard the printers, scanners and an espresso machine whirring in a design studio. I heard it all. Aengus G. is a mystic, thinker, spiritual devotee, a human body, but most importantly a listener, outside of our time-space reality, who has lived through Earth’s history. They’re now living in Europe in 2025, where—after a period of working in the commercial graphic design scene—they got frustrated with carrying on with the not-entirely-graceful legacy of graphic design, abstracting human relations into graphical signs, tweaking representations in money’s favor and solidifying power. One day, as Aengus reminisced about fragments of human history, they began to contemplate sounds. Along these memories, the mystic realizes one thing or two about sound and its affinity to vibrations and immateriality. They follow these sonic waves out of the audible spectrum, where the human ear is no point of definition, and where sounds crumble into vibrations. Following now a truer understanding of what they previously thought of as sound, a new world beyond physical effects opens up. Along these sonic adventures, Aengus’ listening becomes of great significance, making the differentiation between ins and outs, aboves and unders, the selves and the others completely irrelevant. In the end, it raises the question, what is a sound if we listen beyond our ears? And how does it change the role of listening?
Introduction
I heard the Ancient Romans say “spoken words fly away, written words remain”, and I heard later cultures recycle that saying. I heard the scratching of scribes’ quills and of ballpoint pens in 00’s offices, drawing glyphs of Order. And I heard the songs of enslaved people whose fate was decided by intricate stamps. Since the Light of Reason struck the western world in the 17th and 18th centuries, we remain haunted by the idea that knowledge is primarily accessed through rationality and science. That is, the positivist proclamation which posits that our infinite reality can be mapped out and quantified through the application of science and rational thinking. This established a modern universalism that organized reality in its entirety: histories, cultures, human nature, and biology, among others. As Edmund Husserl expressed it, “What is new, unprecedented [in modernity], is the conceiving of this idea of a rational infinite totality of being with a rational science systematically mastering it. An infinite world, here a world of idealities, is conceived, not as one whose objects become accessible to our knowledge singly, imperfectly, and as it were accidentally, but as one which is attained by a rational, systematically coherent method”1. I’ll hereafter refer to this set of Western socio-cultural tendencies formulated at that time as ‘modernity’.
Modernity has been tied to coloniality, as its ideas provided ideological justification for colonization and oppression, to become “masters and possessors of nature”2. In Rolando Vázquez’s understanding, modernity and coloniality are interrelated in a way that “modernity designates the affirmation of ‘the real’, ranging from the material to the symbolic, whereas coloniality designates the denial and disavowal of all that belongs to the outside of that ‘reality’.”3
To conclude, modernity and coloniality operate as an agenda, defining reality, and they do that “through the control of the production of that reality and over its visibility and intelligibility”4. This is a subject vast in scope, but what’s important as a starting point for this thesis, is one aspect of the discussed agenda: The role of graphics in reality production and representation. I find it important to first clarify what role graphical meaning-making plays in the definition of our reality, and additionally, to present why it is an effective tool for solidifying power.
“A design cannot be disconnected from the values and assumptions in which it was created, from the ideologies behind it. It can be difficult to see how visual communication and ideology are related because ideology is in everything around us, we perceive it as natural.” (Fry, as quoted in Pater 2)5
Graphics and their production are therefore subject to modernity’s assumptions of universality and objectivity, tools in making a rational and quantifiable reality. This designated reality removes everything outside of its own reality. Why this agenda is easily deployed through graphical means is because of the solidifying power of graphics. They abstract reality into documents, archives, maps, signs, digits and glyphs. Even before modernity, several cultures (such as ancient Mesopotamia, and the Romans) recognized the affinity of graphics in solidifying. What’s written down—or more indiscriminately, drawn—is official. To guide larger societies, and larger structures, a shift from oral to documented culture was necessary. To organize complex, diverse and organic systems, they need to become “legible”. To remain focused on modernity and coloniality, graphics help produce and represent a universalized and legible reality. To just name two examples, the distortion of maps or statistical infographics produced by governments.
As someone having been educated in the field of graphic design, with experience in that field, as well as constantly meeting the pitfalls of our modern reality—even if I was born into a rather privileged part of it—I am deeply conflicted by this modern reality, and the role graphic design plays in enforcing it. I’ve seen many great examples of graphic designers trying to establish more ethical practices, but the global tendency of the field doesn’t seem to align with such utopias.
“[...] Modernity appears as a system that holds the monopoly of speaking, of broadcasting, the monopoly of non-listening. Modernity appears as a system that silences the other, or better that produces the other as silent, non-existent or as ‘pure representation’”6 If we wish to counteract silencing, sonic solutions appear intuitive. In the following chapters, I would like to discover the true potential of sonic matter, which may be able to help where graphical matter fails. I will concentrate on its vibrational property, its immateriality, its qualities in representing a human soul, and perhaps most importantly; its affinity to listening. The following text accepts its nature as a somewhat situated truth. My investigations are genuine but are inseparable from my person and my reality experience, from my body, mind and spirit.
One Minute Counter-Reality
I heard the slow ambient noise of the square, people drifting through the space peacefully. Suddenly I heard the burst of a loud sound, the start of a mocking melody. It was an Uber courier. I heard the engine roaring as the run-down scooter sped off, with the JBL Boombox mounted onto it. I heard the song rippling around in the air, I heard it reflecting back at us from the facades, breaking into a million pieces and pouring down on the bothered, involuntary audience. Quisqueyano Dembow by Pablo Piddy. 5212 Shazams until then and plus one on that day.
Once I was waiting in a square of The Hague—the self-proclaimed “city of peace and justice”, home to the Dutch Parliament, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and other important organizations. I slowly sank into the rhythm of the square’s public, when a sudden and loud music shook me up. The place completely changed. The sound was so loud, it created noticeable sonic reflections on the surrounding walls, making me aware of the previously unnoticed fact that we are encircled by the architecture. Everyone turned to the sound source, positioning the Dominican courier in the center of architecture and public. It illustrated well how effectively the simplest sonic gesture rearranged spatial and social relations of the space, for the benefit of a person who—one could argue—was the “outside” of the square’s reality a moment before. While the rest of the people were enjoying a weekend afternoon—consuming—this person was carrying out a task in the background of their reality, to facilitate that.
This experience drew my attention to the relevance and power of the sonic in the making of counter-realities. It is a rather direct way of doing so. Opposite to graphics, the sonic occurrence is taking place in the current time and space. The sonic occurrence happens. It has a certain quality of ungovernability. Sonic acts can be misused and weaponized for bad purposes too, as anything else, but that’s not the point here. This case is to illustrate the directness and openness of a sonic gesture.
The Sonic Matter
My life started with a vibration. My being started to vibrate and let the midwives and my mother know that I exist. They were listening to a vibration that became my heartbeat. I heard the whooshing sound of what they called the ultrasound device. Throughout the 40 weeks, that device periodically drew images of me out of sound. I heard my mother from the womb and learned her voice. I heard her heartbeat and learned that too. When the day came, my cry and my mother’s became one in the sound explosion of my birth, as I was pushed into the loud world.
Sounds play a very important role in the creation stories of humans, many cultures around the globe derived existence from sound or vibrations. In Hinduism, ‘Om’, a sonic vibrational expression encapsulates cosmic consciousness. The creation of the universe starts with Om7. The holy spirit of God in Judaism is referred to as “ruach”, which means breath, wind and spirit at the same time.8 In Christianity, God’s word is life, a creative force.9 Serving importance in origin myths but also on an individual level, sonic vibrations are a crucial factor in shaping us into what we are. One of the very first signs of a forming life is the heartbeat, and one of the very first sounds the embryo hears is its mother’s heartbeat. The development of the inner ear structure (including the cochlea and vestibular system) starts from around the fourth week of pregnancy. Hearing develops before vision, and the general ability to perceive soundwaves—as a mechanical vibrational input—starts at an even earlier stage. During our life in the womb, sounds and sonic vibrations play an important role in wiring our nervous system. They affect us and we change through them, even before we are really humans.
If sounds and their perception (hearing) are essential factors in human development, we humans might be essential for the development of sound too. What does that mean? When I look up the definition of sound, the spoon-fed definition that immediately pops up on Google—provided by Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries—reads: “Continuous rapid movements (called vibrations) that travel through air or water and can be heard when they reach a person’s or an animal’s ear”10. Right before this definition, Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries lists an even simpler idea: “something that you can hear”10. The problem is, animals might not hear the same sounds as we do, since their hearing range is shifted compared to the human one. That means, a bat or a whale would probably have an entirely different opinion on what a sound is compared to a human. So whose sound is more “real”? To mention exact numbers, the human hearing range is between 20 Hz and 20.000 Hz11, that is, a “human-sound” is a vibration that consists of at least 20 complete cycles of waves per second but maximum 20.000 per second. Among humans, a sound of (for instance) 16 oscillations per second is referred to as infrasound, but for a humpback whale that can hear this frequency12, it would just be a sound. On the other end of the spectrum, a bat would probably have a ten times “better” idea of the highest pitch sound, than a human, since its hearing range goes up to 200.000 Hz13. In the case of plants, this auditory shift would be even more radical. They detect and react to sonic vibrations too14, however since they don’t have ears, their sonic perception might be described in terms other than sound and hearing.
Jonathan Sterne talks about sounds not only as a class of vibrations perceived by the ear, but that are at the same time “sympathetically produced”15 by it. It suggests that sounds are subjective not only to our hearing range but to our ears as organs. The functioning ear structure resonates with the incoming vibrations and our brain synthesizes them as “sounds”. What we hear is not simply a humanly available slice of an objective, natural phenomenon, but is a product of our body and mind, of our ears. If we took the human subject out of the sounding world, we would be left with vibrations (Müller, as quoted in Sterne 11). This can be understood as moving away from the (human) ear concept towards a vibrational one, in a horizontal way. To illustrate with a different movement, this approach zooms out of sounds, showing a wider picture of a vibrational reality. At this point, we could also extend “sound” to vibration vertically, or with a different movement, zooming "into" the picture. As we know from physics, on a quantum level everything is vibrating.16 All objects and beings are in constant movement at the level of their core components. What we see as solid and static is only so from a human perspective.
To conclude, whether we examine sound either from afar or close up, we discover its core and true potential as vibration. Steve Goodman—although in a slightly different context—imagined an ontology of vibrational force to refer to “the basic processes of entities affecting other entities”17. He says, “if affect describes the ability of one entity to change another from a distance, then here the mode of affection will be understood as vibrational”18. I’m going to borrow this very simple definition from him to direct us toward a non-anthropocentric thought of sonic potential, and additionally, to free the topic from having to depend on physical terms. If we think through vibration instead of sound, we don’t need a human spectator whose ear organizes and defines. We place the human subject in a relationality of vibrating things. Moreover, we don’t even need physics necessarily, vibrations can describe immaterial phenomena as well—if they refer to the processes of entities affecting other entities from a distance.
Immaterial Interlude
“Whilst also praying to heaven with all desire I took heed, on what manner I wot not suddenly in me noise of song I felt; and likingest heavenly melody I took, with me dwelling in mind.”19
Richard Rolle was a hermit, mystic and religious writer 700 years ago, but most importantly he was a listener. Reading about his spiritual experiences, we see a character who was listening beyond his ears and perceived more than just sounds or physical vibrations. He is a vibrating entity, however, the vibrational effect in this case is rather immaterial than physical, "the celestial melody was heard by him with the outward as well as with the inward ear".19
The Sonic Ghost
I heard two Eastern European boys in the 80’s. They called themselves Niskende Tewtär, they played for some years. The silence of this band I heard after, for decades. In 2024 I heard news, they were about to step on stage, after 30 years. I went to a pub’s cellar, where they performed what became likely the most influential, spiritual sonic experience of mine; “Hádész”. By then, only one of the men was alive, the other’s voice was borrowed by an AI.
Just before the 2024 edition of UH Fest—an experimental music festival in Budapest— Attila Kalóczkai suddenly passed away. Sándor Vály, with whom Kalóczkai was going to perform, decided to still play during the festival. On the night of the gig, the words of the deceased half were shouted into the darkness of the room via an artificial intelligence voice. The performance that night was a beautiful and intimate ritual. To me, it was the most genuine instance of a memorial, and definitely first of its kind in my experiences. The original intent of our group attending was to see a performance, but we ended up at something I would call a funeral. Albeit it was actually quite the opposite; we summoned the dead. What made my palms drip with sweat, my eyes fill with tears, and my nervous system so overcharged that my body began to shake was not primarily the fact that a human had just been perfectly substituted by an AI—we have already seen more advanced AI interventions in the 2020s—the essence of this experience was what the AI had also merely borrowed: the sonic power. Similar to the Uber courier in the city square.
This half-hour sonic resurrection was composed of two vital aspects: Firstly, the physical power of the soundwaves that struck me so strongly my whole body experienced a shock, and the second was the presence of Kalóczkai through voice, his sonic ghost. His existence/essence was transmitted through vibrations to me. I could say, if I saw a deepfake, visually reanimating him into the space, the “realness-experience” still wouldn’t be of the same quality as in the case of that sonic recreation.
Roland Barthes—in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography—talks about the photograph as a ghostly matter. To better understand where the uniqueness of the sonic ghost lies, I’d like to compare it to a (photo)graphical one. Barthes argues that photography is different from other systems of representation,—as in painting or other graphical reproductions—since photography’s “referent” (the subject of the image) has to really exist and be placed in front of the camera. In painting, for instance, one can depict a reality without having seen it. Or even if the painter saw the depicted subject, they could transfer it onto the canvas days, weeks or years later. However, a photographic depiction requires its subject to be in front of the camera and the depiction therefore has a certain quality of ‘realness’ to it. It is “not a question of exactitude, but of reality”20.
What a photograph shows is a subject stuck between past and present, a (photo)graphical ghost. However, the sonic ghost’s existence is tied to the current reality of the person who summoned it. It is so because of the ghost’s physical and immaterial vibrational properties, its sound waves are hitting the “summoner’s” being and resonating in them.
If you see a ghost, there’s a distance between the two of you, but the moment you hear that same ghost is when it truly becomes alive: What you see in front of you is outside of you, but what you hear is already inside of you. As the human ear picks up sonic vibrations and by resonating with them “sympathetically (re)produces” them as sounds, the human being—as a vibrational entity—picks up the vibrations of the sonic ghost and sympathetically reproduces them, physically and metaphysically.
While the (photo)graphical preserves, the sonic acts. The latter is not merely a reflection of a reality but it is reality itself. The sonic ghost is alive—at least if 'alive' refers to a vibrating entity bound by time and space.
Let me give another quick example of the sonic ghost, this time specifically regarding voice. The example is about how I made friends with Kodwo Eshun. As I was writing this work, I was simultaneously reading Kodwo’s book More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. The back cover of the book shows his photo, upside down. I’ve previously heard of him and I knew his work is something I want to dive into at some point, but I didn’t really know who he was professionally, especially not as a person. I kept reading the book, seeing his face on the back every time I picked it up. While I was sucked into the book for its content and writing style, I found it hard to fully comprehend certain ideas. I was annoyed. One day while biking somewhere, I thought I wanted to hear him talking about his ideas, rather than reading about them. I searched for an interview with him in the music app I’m using, hit play and let him explain things himself. I kept biking and listening. By the time I arrived at the destination I had a very good idea of who he was as a person. Not because he talked about it, but because his voice carried his personality.
Listening
“‘INSTRUCTION TO THE PEOPLE OF EARTH. You must realize that you have the right to love beauty... You must learn to listen, because by listening you will learn to see with your mind’s eye. You see, music paints pictures that only the mind’s eye can see. Open your ears so that you can see with the eye of the mind.”21
If we recognize the true sonic potential that’s rooted in the vibrational cosmos, we can understand the world around us as a world of vibrational relationalities, physical and immaterial ones. We enter this new world where we are not spectators in the middle of it all, but rather entities constantly affecting and being affected. Here, listening becomes separate from hearing. If we were just hearing, we would perceive sounds only, but our listening concerns all vibrational effects, audible and non-audible, physical and immaterial. “Listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing,”22 as Pauline Oliveros expressed it. She was an avant-garde composer and theorist and most importantly, a deep listener. For her, listening was rather a practice and a way of existence.
Through the perspective of vibrations, political and social mechanisms can also be thought of as vibrational power structures. A system of oppression has a figurative vibrational property. In a reality overshadowed by modernity and coloniality, Rolando Vázquez suggests a critiquing role for listening, to listen away from modernity and coloniality, to listen to the vibrations of counter-realities.
“'Listening as critique' is not the artifice of a critique that judges and prescribes a utopia, nor the arrogance of a critique that denies hope; it is a critique that opens, that humbles, a critique that builds understanding in and through listening. It implies the recognition of the confinement of modernity, the finitude of its universalities, of its total validity claims. Such a critique strives for the dismantling of the mechanisms of negation, disdain and disavowal of the other. The question of listening is a direct challenge to the processes of silencing and oblivion. Can modernity listen to the other side of the colonial difference?”23
To listen is to be tuned in, to be in tune. Our listening needs to be unassertive, modest, and open, however, we need to acknowledge that our listening (physical and beyond-physical) carries a subjectivity with it. Therefore our listening shouldn’t always result in immediate decoding or counter-action. Listening shouldn’t be about filling in the gaps. It can be beneficial to insert a respective distance between the subject of our listening—or our environment—and ourselves in our listening practice.
To listen really means to be a believer. One must become the opposite of rational. However, to counter rationality, I would like to use Iris M. Yob’s sharp wordplay, and claim that the opposite of rationality is rather “unrationality”24, not irrationality. To listen is to have faith in the invisible: To await what one can’t yet see, to be patient. However, it shouldn’t imply the idea of passiveness. Indeed, listening is an action. To receive—and to be able to receive—is an effort. To listen is to be ready to be moved, ready to vibrate with the input, and to reflect incoming vibrations.
Outro (Conclusion)
Modernity produces its own reality and consequently defines what isn’t reality. To counter modernity’s agenda, sonic solutions aren’t the only ones, but can be one of them. If we wish to dismantle the borders of our current reality and open it up to the outside, we must resist existing, entrenched universal truths and solutions. We must challenge what’s solid, what has been solidified as our reality. Instead of solid, we must become vibrational entities, that is, to ‘vibrate out’ and to resonate with incoming vibrations. In other words, to sound and to listen.
To sound is to act, to disrupt the solid, to make others aware. To sound is to vibrate—even immaterially—to affect others. To listen is also to act. To direct our being toward our environment and be receptive on as many levels as possible, to try to listen beyond self referential representations of reality. Our listening is important because it is the silence before our act.
