Sonic Ecology: A Call to Sound-Together

Experience yourself as modes of melody and rhythm, and experience with each sense the inherent musicality of life as is sensuously unfolds. I invite you to extend your sonic awareness into the natural world around you, resting completely in the soundscape of your environment… Now, turn your awareness inward by following your breath towards an inner stillness… Imagine yourself, hear yourself as multiplicities of harmonic resonant nodes. What kind of melodies and rhythms do you hear? Now listen deeply to your family, friends and social collectives. What songs or compositions do you hear? From this perspective we can see how we inhabit an ever flowing plurality of interwoven sound-worlds in which the collective container becomes an ecology of resonant sound-bodies. The Greek root word of symphony, sumphonos, means sound together, and I would like you to think of life as an experimental symphonic ritual of integrally sounding-together. How can we reframe our daily sonic territories and musically re-enchant our sound-worlds where each individual attunes itself in a cosmic musical entanglement of becoming-symphony. 

Can we sonically re-enchant every sublime nuance of the cosmic becoming as a musical tone-poem of the Divine-poet? If we can think of the essential nature of all bodies in motion as vibration, can we extend this way “seeing/hearing” to all becomings as inherently melodic and rhythmic? 

Melody and rhythm therefore become the essential body of all-becoming. The ancients from the East and West discovered this. In ancient Greece, Pythagoras discovered the harmony of the spheres, based on insights into the universal nature of harmonics based on their underlying mathematical resonance. In the Upanishads of India, Nada Bramha is a metaphysical doctrine of Divine manifestation as pure vibration, revealed in these scriptures as the seed mantra A.U.M. An undifferentiated unstruck sound/noise is the canvas from which the cosmic being creates and assembles sonic structures of becoming for the pure joy of experiencing itself in duration.

Sounds can be seen as nutrients, melodies like loved ones, songs like archetypal wisdom figures, all of which are necessary to nurture holistic ecologies of becoming-sound. These interpenetrating spheres of individuating musical resonances are sound-worlds; the cosmic quilted canvas of our psycho-somatic experience. 

Sound-worlds are at once individual and spiritual, yet collective, social and political, all of which form nodes in the unfolding cosmic symphony. The organization of sound into pitch and rhythm is therefore always political and ethical. Music can be used as a weapon to surround and enslave one in a sound-world of machinic production-consumption, or it can be a revolutionary cry of liberation harnessing the sonic technology of resistance, carving out an independent territory from hegemonic noise.

A contemporary problem of becoming can thus be framed: How can one find and develop the poise of an inner silence deep enough to truly “hear” the constellation of the sound-worlds that we inhabit? Furthermore, how can we assemble our own unique sound-mandalas that will allow harmonic individuation across all modes of becoming? It is time to reclaim and reframe our sonic territories, and through exploration and experimentation, it is time we re-imagine humanity in an ecology that can be holistically nurtured into a global symphony, or sounding-together.

By Jonathan Kay, EWP PhD Student

Extracted from Sonic Mandalas of Becoming: An Experimental Sono-Poetic Arts-Based Inquiry