Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition

From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands ‘possible world theory’ to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible.

Creating Sonic Possible Worlds, such a phenomenological modality offers a new analytical framework that listens across genres and times to hear the continuum between sound art and music and to grasp the plurality of the world.

This revised edition continues Voegelin’s exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to works by Áine O’Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds’ radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound. Thus, the word continuum in the subtitle of this book, Hearing the Continuum of Sound, which in the first edition stood principally for the continuum between music and sound art, is opened up to denote also another continuum that stands as principle for the body, while including that of sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies Breathing, between humans-humanoid aliens-monsters-vampires-animals-plants-things-and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call.