Sonic Romanticism
(2024 - ongoing) : text, sound, video, performanceThis theoretical and artistic research stems from my Master’s thesis “Sonic Romanticism”, which I wrote in 2024 at the Dutch Art Institute under supervisor Ana Teixeira Pinto. Emerging as a response to alienation under capitalism, sonic romanticism represents an attempt to recover an inclusive, immersive relational experience lost in the unfolding of Western subjectivity. I examine this tendency in three areas of contemporary theory: the “orality turn” of media studies, in vibratory new materialist ontologies, and in the “ontological turn” of sound studies.
At the core of these devlopments is the positioning of the sonic as a layer that sits underneath the literary and linguistic, at a stage that precedes meaning. This enacts a cultural splitting of the human sensorium into mediated and unmediated senses: vision becomes narrated as a mediated mode of experience, a container of cultural biases and prejudice, whereas sound is designated as uncoded and unmediated, and as such provides access to an authentic experience of life. This tendency is romantic in nature because the belief in sound as a way of getting around the problems imposed by vision is tied to an affective investment in the power of sound to both shape and create forms of human association and interaction that are not plagued by, and thus able to evade, racism, misogyny, and other forms of entrenched chauvinism.
By examining how the sonic is described in contemporary theory, I demonstrate that the same distortions and deflections that haunt the field of the visual are also at work in the sonic domain, but in a hidden and under-recognised manner. This work ultimately challenges the notion that sound, through imagined inherent qualities, can address or counteract the effects of Western culture on subjectivity. Instead, it calls for a more nuanced understanding of the role of sound within the broader cultural and theoretical landscape.
Since writing this work I have bee working artistically with this theoretical material: creating the video work Sonic Romanticism, and then using this as an element in a performative setting. Sonic Romanticism was performed in Centrale Fies (IT) in summer 2024, with a further elaborated version being presented in FUKK (DK) in October 2024. Through the layering of media and incorporation of technologies such as autotune, this work hints at how sonic forms are deeply embedded in systems of mediation and power. The performance challenges the notion of the sonic as inherently pure or resistant to distortion, highlighting the contradictions in attempts to escape cultural mediation and offering a layered exploration of sensory hierarchies.