Drawing from ancient Chinese acoustic thinking and contemporary Western philosophy, this article re-interprets ‘the throbbing crowd’ (the kind of crowd organised by a certain kind of rhythm) once described by Elias Canetti (1963). Through the philosophy of qi that defines things as correlative, changing and responsive, I try to suggest that the acoustic milieu generated by groups like Chinese dancing grannies that emerged in late 1990s when the nationwide movement of laid-off workers took place, should not be reduced to a background sound. Instead, an acoustic milieu is produced by and at the same time produces creative and embodied co-relations, that is, new modalities of being-together.
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