Sound acts: towards a sonic pragmatism

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article makes a case for a pragmatist approach to sound studies. My starting point is the ostensible lack of language for analysing the agentic, creative and expressive aspects of sound outside of domains of speech and music. At the same time, recent aesthetic and technological developments have brought about a plethora of sound practices that defy the apparatuses of musicology and linguistic as much as they do the listening-centred perspectives of sound studies. Discussing six examples of such practices taken from interactive sound art and participatory online cultures, I sketch out possible directions for a sonic pragmatism. In the first part, I put forward three possible premises for such a theory: John Dewey’s aesthetics, G.H. Mead’s ontology of acts, and actor-network theory. In the second part, I discuss three potential categories for the analysis of sound acts – affordance, perspective, and gesture – emphasising, respectively, their material, social, and pragmatic aspects. I argue that a pragmatist epistemology can offer substantial insights into both philosophical and cultural aspects of contemporary soundmaking, suspending the familiar dichotomies of perception and production, subject and object, human and nonhuman.