| This project is about bodily encounters with low-frequency sound and the under-theorized traffic between sensation and culture. Bass is the musical term for those deepest registers that hold such wide fascination for their capacity to hum organs and physically move us. Infrasound is the term for more nebulous vibrations that evade audition even as they produce synaesthetic anomalies and half-perceived presences. In either event, we are dealing with something more than just meaty vibration or its mediation by ideas. This is sound as an incitement to the imagination, a conceptual event that unfolds in a string of questions: "What is that? What's happening? How will I work with it?" We can use the term sonic body (Julian Henriques) to describe this sonorous dimension of flesh in all its relational contingency and generative potential. This view affords us a glimpse of low-frequency sound's material and asignifying participation in culture - the ways it can unsettle conceptions of self and surroundings, thereby catalyzing developments in thought and collective organization. These are the beginnings of what will be called a myth-science (Sun Ra), understood to encompass accounts of vibratory experience, speculative tales or "sonic fictions" (Kodwo Eshun), and intuited sonic-sensory strategies (which are variously aesthetic, spatial, technological).;This project follows the sonic body across many sites that are ostensibly unrelated when considered mainly in cultural terms (including dancefloors, laboratories, organ workshops, art experiments, hauntings, The Hum), but which turn out to be kindred when viewed from the perspective of frequency, force, and affective tone. Tracing these various lineages means working at the intersection of music, sound studies, and sensory studies, but also drawing from fields as varied as acoustic science, anthropology, visual arts, and religious studies. As an intervention in the predominance of culturalist analytical models in the humanities, it also requires a theoretical orientation that is more attuned to matters of affect, sensation, and materiality. For this it draws on the work Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and William James, with the ultimate aim of bringing the sonic body and the materiality of sonorous experience more meaningfully into our understanding of sonic culture. |
