Sonic Romanticism

Sonic Romanticism (2024–ongoing) is a research and artistic project spanning text, video, sound and performance. It originates in my Master's thesis of the same title, written at the Dutch Art Institute under the supervision of Ana Teixeira Pinto.

The project examines a recurring tendency in contemporary theory to position sound as a mode of experience that precedes language, representation and cultural mediation. Across the "orality turn" in media studies, vibratory new materialist ontologies and the "ontological turn" in sound studies, sound is frequently imagined as providing access to a more immediate and authentic relation to the world. I describe this tendency as a form of sonic romanticism: an affective investment in sound as a means of overcoming alienation and escaping the social, cultural and political limitations associated with vision and representation.

By analysing how sound is theorised in these fields, the project argues that the exclusions, distortions and hierarchies often attributed to visual culture are also present within sonic discourse, albeit in less visible ways. Rather than offering an escape from mediation, sound remains deeply entangled with histories of power, subject formation and cultural representation.

Since completing the thesis, I have developed this research into a series of artistic works, including video, sound and live performance. Through layered media, vocal performance and technologies such as autotune, Sonic Romanticism stages the desire for unmediated experience while simultaneously exposing the systems of mediation through which it is produced. The work explores the tensions between immediacy and representation, intimacy and technology, authenticity and artifice.

Sonic Romanticism has been presented at Centrale Fies (IT), Hansabibliothek (DE), and FUKK (DK).