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 the publication 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 that emerges from her appraisal of indigenous forms of listening as intricate to the cosmologies they take part of. In the text a reconsideration of the notion 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 to be 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 enables an account of 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 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 how their constitution plays a key role in how knowledge is produced. It challenges the habitual perspectives that appraise relationality in sound as merely produced between sound sources and listening agents.
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 challenged. The visitor-listener is invited to discover the different forms in which sound is perceptually organised and its spatial character perceived.
Imagen Sonora e Individuacion
Online
2018
In this text, written for a special dossier on the contemporary implications of the work of philosopher Gilbert Simondon and 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, the image is a mutable articulation that unfolds in the interaction between organism and medium. In this text, imagination is not conceived as a vast and neutral reservoir, but as a performative field informed by technological conditions. My sound installation Focus is presented as an art work explring the articulation of auditory imagination and listening technologies.
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 tools. In Simondon’s work, the image inheres a process of anticipation, reception, recollection and invention which articulate the interaction of an agent and its medium. Such a model is deployed to approach how perceptual instances of sound are diversely 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 particular regimes of the image possible. In each of these regimes, a diverse 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 address this work as an example in the production of crystalline regime of perceived 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 across the change of the century, a shift in focus occurred, from the creation of novel sounds, to the manipulation of sound inherent to an established culture of electronic sound production. This implied a value shift, in which the perceptual impact of sound is informed by the memories that a century of media practices has embedded in everyday auditory contexts. Such medial condition is then appraised as a confluence of criss-crossing traces and codes. The text concludes by proposing a compositional and aesthetic strategy whose core is defined by the problematization of such multifarious 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