How is space made in sound? Spatial mediation,critical phenomenology and the political agency of sound

Abstract

This paper examines some of the processes and practices that make sonic spatiality distinctive and sets out theoretical and conceptual resources that might better enable us to understand these processes. It draws on the notion of political agency in order to animate the processual making of sonic space as socio-material relationality. Developing an approach to sonic mediation compatible with a critical phenomenology of the auditory, the paper sets out four interrelated sets of sonic effects central to the making of sonic spaces. It shows how these address a politics of difference which engages affective and representational political processes.

Keywords

critical phenomenology mediation political agency sonic geographies sonic space

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