Sound and Thing
Aden Evens · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021
Abstract ‘Sound and Thing’ examines the tensions between the idea of a thing as stable, durable, locatable, and weighty versus the notion of sound as ephemeral, eventual, diffuse, and dematerialized. Considering recordings that focus on capturing the sounds of things (Resonance FM, ‘One Hour As ….’), composers and sound theorists who attempt to pin down the thingness of a sound (David Dunn, Pierre Schaeffer, Salomé Voegelin), and philosophers who articulate the surprisingly complex dynamics of things (Martin Heidegger, Dr. Seuss), this essay offers an uneasy rapprochement between sound and thing. But if sounds, finally, are things, they exhibit an unusual and dynamic thingness, a sonic vitalism, that resists the positivism of our age and of our leading technologies.