‘Sonicity’: Arguments for a modest neologism

Inquiries into sonicity should not be confused with Sound Studies. Acoustic sound is the section of the bandwidth of waves and vibrations mechanically transmitted through a physical medium that is audible to humans. Acoustic sound compares to the deceptive top of an iceberg visible above water, whereas electronically generated high frequency oscillations are of a different nature. These ‘waves’, which are familiar from radio transmission, correspond to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that animals immediately perceive as ‘light’. Sound in its generalized sense as temporal enunciation refers to continuous (‘analog’) and discrete (‘digital’) vibrational and frequential dynamics of all kinds. These range from the most precise (electro-)physical micro-mo(ve)ment related to the human affect of temporal perception, up to culturally emphatic modulations – similar to the so-called Projection Theatre in Revolutionary Russia of the 1920s, which grounded body movements in the epistemology of soundings: ‘The sound is not heard, but formed. Practice: independent Translation of muscular sensation into a body: A O U I E.’

Sonicity is where time and technology meet. Technosonic timemechanisms and their charming power to seduce the human sense of time deserve a study of their own. If time is neither reduced to an internal state of subjective consciousness nor to an external physical a priori but conceived as a complex layering of the imminent, of presence and of past(s), rich forms of temporal articulation can be identified in a chrono-tonal sense.

This study does not refer to time machines in the sense of H.G. Wells’s mechanical device for time travelling; sonic tempor(e)alities are everything but metaphoric. They can rather be expressed in terms known from the epistemology of the electromagnetic field.

Even the emphatic concept of cultural time – which in narrative writing is organized in the name of history – is affected by the sonic approach: