[Commlist] CFP: Journal of Sonic Studies - Sonic Materiality

The last decade has witnessed what has been characterised as a material 
turn in the arts and humanities, which has shifted attention from the 
role played by language and discourse within culture to that of objects, 
technologies, materials, and non-human organisms and processes. New ways 
of thinking about materiality prompted by developments in realist 
philosophy, including new materialism and speculative realism, have 
raised important questions about the place of the material in arts and 
culture, nonhuman agency, the relationship between technology and 
culture, anthropocentrism, and the environment. However, consideration 
of the sonic has not always been at the forefront of these discussions – 
perhaps because sound has been understood to be immaterial or addressed 
in ontological ways that privilege its sources. In this way materialist 
approaches to the sonic raise the possibility of rethinking the nature 
of sound itself, and thereby what is at stake in it.

In this special issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies we will explore 
how new ways of thinking about materiality might contribute to our 
understanding of sound, and at the same time how sound might contribute 
to developing ideas on materiality.

This special issue continues and builds on the journal’s discussion of 
sonic materiality in its two ‘Materials of Sound’ special issues edited 
by Caleb Kelly (2018 and 2019) and focuses on two fundamental questions: 
what is sound’s materiality and what is sonic materialism?

We welcome proposals for both articles and sound artworks that 
specifically address the issue of sonic materiality. Proposals may 
engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• What is sound’s materiality, and what is at stake in a critical 
engagement with sonic materiality?

• How can notions of materiality politicise and historicise thinking 
about sound?

• What are sound’s material dimensions? Do these relate only to the 
objects, technologies, bodies and organic and inorganic forms of matter 
that create, preserve or respond to sound? Or are there ways in which 
sound (as event, energy or change) might be considered material?

• What new perspectives on the cultures, technologies, politics and 
ethics of sound are opened up by a consideration of sound’s materiality?

• How do notions of nonhuman agency relate to sound’s materiality? What 
is at stake in the idea of sonic agency?

• In what ways might creative practice in sound represent a form of 
‘material thinking’? How do technological and material processes 
challenge established forms of creative practice?

• What is a sonic object?

• If the notion of sonic ecology points to the ways in which sound is 
situated within environments, what does a consideration of materiality 
bring to this?

• What are the ecological and biopolitical dimensions of sound’s 
materiality? How might ideas about materiality prompt a reconsideration 
of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman?

• How might sonic materialism function as a form of nonideal theory, 
through direct engagement with material objects and practices rather 
than idealized models of sound?

• How might a critical engagement with sound address the gap between the 
philosophical and theoretical approaches to materiality and the 
experienced materiality of sound and sound-related objects and processes?

• How can we create a language of materialism that emerges directly from 
the materials of sound?

• What might sound contribute to the material turn’s shift to objects, 
technologies, materials and nonhuman organisms and process? How might 
this relate to the anthropocentrism inherent in what has been termed the 
‘sonic turn’, in which recent discussion of the politics of listening 
have focused on the human subject.

• How might indigenous perspectives on matter and sound challenge and 
problematise the so-called “new materialism”?

We would particularly welcome proposals for articles that address these 
topics from Global South and/or Global Majority perspectives.

Please send your abstract (300 words) and short contributor biography 
(100 words) to Andy Birtwistle (andy.birtwistle /at/ canterbury.ac.uk) and 
Lauren Redhead (l.redhead /at/ gold.ac.uk) by 30 July 2023


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