sonic materialism, via Thinking with Sound (CHI ‘24)
What it says
Sound is not a signal you decode. It is something physically in the room with you — it has mass, shape and direction, it displaces air, it hits your chest. The relation is not that you listen to sound. It is that you are inside it.
Does it hold for my work
Yes, and it gives me a lens I did not have. In Phosphor the audio is spatial — position drives panning, architecture selects reverb. I have been treating that as a technical property of the system. This concept says it is the experience itself: reverb is not information about a virtual room, it is a physical condition the listener’s body is placed inside.
That reframing matters for the thesis, because it means the audio is doing embodied work even for an audience holding nothing. The person without the controller has no agency, but they are standing in the same sound.
What the paper leaves open
In Thinking with Sound the sound is listened to, not played. Nobody causes it. My whole direction is that somebody causes it — which is the difference between their installation and mine, and possibly a contribution.
Related
Multi-modal epistemology is the argument for why this cannot be reduced to what the eyes already know.