Reconsidering Aural Imagination through Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s “Aurality”
Link to Journal
2025
This paper is a contribution to a written symposium celebrating the ten years of Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s Aurality – Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Colombia. The text builds on Ochoa’s contribution to an understanding of the radical diversity of listening emerging from her appraisal of indigenous listening forms intricate to the cosmologies they take part of. In the text, a reconsideration of aural imagination is proposed that, rather than describing it as the capacity of a subject to imagine sound, conceives it as a condition of possibility for the audible as a site of engagement with the world.
On the Sound Image and the Radical Plurality of the Audible
Online
2025
This essay postulates a novel notion of the sound image that – rather than conceiving it as an artefact, a visual surrogate or an exclusively mental entity – defines it as an instance of a process unfolding within material circuits, technical infrastructures, and collective protocols. Based upon the image theory developed by Gilbert Simondon in his book Imagination and Invention, this notion accounts for the variable nature of the audible in a post-anthropocentric context in which the sensorial is produced across diverse material constellations.
Sound Relationality Anew
Link to Journal
2024
This text is an Introduction to the Kunstlicht Journal issue titled Reverberant Ecologies: On the Relational Impact of Sonic Practices, edited by Manuela Zammit. The text sketches a reassessment of how relations are constituted within sound and their role in how knowledge is produced. It challenges those perspectives that appraise relationality in sound as merely produced in the encounter between listening agent and sound sources to draw attention to the plural constellations sounding and listening take part of.
On Sound Images, Relationality and Forms of Sensorial Engagement
Book
2024
This contribution to the Listening as a research method reader published by the Design Research department of the KABK in The Hague draws attention to the strategies I implemented in my sound installation Focus. In this work the homogeneity of the virtual spaces created by common audio reproduction systems is distabilized. The visitor-listener is invited to discover the diverging forms in which sound’s spatial characters become perceived across different technical conditions of sound reproduction.
Imagen Sonora e Individuacion
Online
2018
In this text, written for a special dossier on the contemporaneity of Gilbert Simondon’s work edited by Pablo Rodriguez, the notion of image and imagination Simondon developed is applied to the domain of sound. Simondon describes the image neither as a fixed entity nor as a content in the mind. Rather, it is a mutable articulation that unfolds in the interaction between organism and medium. In this text and following this starting point, imagination is not conceived as a vast reservoir, but as a performative field informed by technological conditions of the auditory.
Imagination, Perceptual Engagement, and Sound Mediation
PDF
2017
Applying French philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s concept of image to the domain of the sonorous, this text tackles how imagination is constitutional in our grasp of sound and how this grasp is informed by the technical protocols and affordances of sound mediation. In Simondon’s work, the image inheres a cycle of anticipation, reception, recollection and invention which shape the interaction of an agent and its medium. This model is deployed to descrive how perceptual instances of sound are produced.
Thinking Sound through the Notion of the Time-Image
PDF
2016
Within the Time-image and Movement-image books, Gilles Deleuze exposes cinema as a practice of thought that renders different regimes of the image possible. In each of these regimes, a particular status of the image is produced. In this text I apply Deleuze’s notions to composer Luigi Nono´s work “No hay caminos… a Andrei Tarkowskij”, for 7 instrumental groups. I argue for an understanding of this work as operating on a crystalline regime of sound, comparable to Deleuze’s crystalline regime of the image.
Tactility, Traces, Codes – Reassessing Timbre in Electronic Media
PDF
2013
This article starts from the claim that in diverse approaches to electronically-produced sound at the turn-of-the-century, a shift in emphasis took place, from the creation of novel sounds to the manipulation of sound already inherent to a culture of electronic sound production. This implied a value shift, in which the perceptual impact of sound became informed by the memories that a century of media practices had embedded in everyday auditory contexts. The text concludes by proposing a compositional-aesthetic strategy defined by the problematization of multifarious traces and listening habits.
Acerca de la relacion con el entorno
2007
A contribution to the volume “[Un]common Sounds - Experimental Music Practice in Argentina” edited by Xabier Erkizia