Makis Solomos’s Exploring the Ecologies of Music and Sound examines artistic shifts towards ecosophical issues and the notion of the commons. The author organises his material in three parts according to Felix Guattari’s concept of the three ecologies: environmental, mental and social. The scope of the book encompasses Western art music from the so-called common practice era to twentieth- and twenty-first-century composition (including acoustic ecology) and sound art. In social ecology (political register), Solomos studies social movements, against imposed neoliberal reforms in France, interrupted by COVID lockdowns and curfews; this is included in a concluding chapter that is intentionally left open (‘By way of conclusion’), so as to stress the main political imperative of the book: striving for real utopias through emancipation from dependence on alienating new technologies (236). This tripartite framework provides invaluable perspectives on the wide range of the musics explored, under an equally diverse range of theories: musicology (including ethnomusicology), sound studies, philosophy and aesthetics, political theory, environmental studies, anthropology, and feminism, to name a few, and further intersectional studies (such as sonic ecofeminism or decolonial ecology).

Under the overarching ecological themes of ecosophy, anthropocene/capitalocene or the living, the book explores a plethora of music/sound-ecology related fields, such as acoustic ecology, ecomusicology, bioacoustics, ecoacoustics, soundscape ecology, acoustemology, zoomusicology or tettiggology (the study of cicada sounds). Further, Solomos relates these to the sonic practices of soundscape composition, field recording, soundwalk, phonography, deep listening, reduced listening, audible ecosystemics or ecomimesis. The list could go on to include conceptual categories like the sound milieu, sound biotope, ambience and others. Such an approach is testimony to, and a statement in support of, the plenitude of possible ways to engage our environment(s) via sound. In this way, Solomos advances his arguments in favour of an ecosophical stance, where sound is conceived as a network of relationships, listening as a means of subjectivation and empowerment, resisting biopolitical control or instrumentalisation of sound, and promoting autonomy, degrowth, and the construction of the commons.

The English edition of the book, translated superbly from the French by Jennifer Higgins, was followed by the French edition two years later. This was not an update of the English edition; rather, the French is the original complete edition, but around one third longer, containing an expanded corpus of examples (while the English edition links to a supplement of online examples), deeper musicological and technical analyses, more topical French contexts, and more extensive philosophical commentary. It also includes an additional dedication to Antoine Freychet, Solomos’s doctoral student who passed prematurely in August 2022, just as the English version had been submitted (see Solomos Reference Solomos2025).

One basic premise of the book is the critique of sound as object. From the outset, Solomos posits that sound ‘is an event; synonymous with a form of energy and determined by its complexity, it is born of emergence; it presents itself as a holistic, immersive, and inclusive phenomenon’ (10). Such a complex definition goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production, as it implies an entire network of social relationships that sound indexes, at least if analysed properly. In this ecological approach, sound emerges as the result of the interaction between a subject or listener and a sound milieu, which crucially co-exists with the visual, tactile and other milieus, thus always involving, directly or not, other senses (28).

The plurality of milieus reflects the aforementioned plurality of ways of engaging with an ecology of music and sound. Solomos points this out by saying that ‘sound, in relation to its presence, additionally confers a feeling of plenitude. This characteristic undoubtedly comes from the fact that we listen with our entire body: it cannot be denied that sound has a haptic dimension. This dimension can be quite literal, if we consider sound in terms of vibration; it can be overwhelming in the case of very low sounds that can trigger serious discomfort. Otherwise, this aspect of sound is simply suggested, in a vast zone that stretches from touch to affect’ (23).

Solomos rejects the ideological use of the concept of resonance, as it fails to account for the reciprocity between listening and the milieu, through all of the sensorial registers involved. Resonance, he points out, has been co-opted by neoliberalism, assigning to this concept a private space protected against the commons. Instead, the author promotes the concept of feedback, precisely due to its capacity to incorporate the reciprocity between listener and milieu: a continuous loop that ‘allows full exploration of the nature of the sound milieu’ or even the emergence of sound in the context of ‘autocreation’ (akin to autopoiesis) and, ultimately of self-organisation (38–9).

Solomos argues for abandoning the distinction between culture and nature, as well as the analogous one between humans and the natural world. As with many contemporary environmental thinkers, he prefers to speak of the living (world), a term intended to erase the distinction between the natural and the social. Nature is no longer viewed as an exteriority to be dominated, but as a complex web of organic relationships. Sound, as a bearer of such relationships, is thus also viewed as part of the living, with a ‘birth, a life, and a death’ (Grisey, quoted on p. 64), effectively making sound itself resemble an animal. By accepting non-human life, the term living opposes anthropocentrism and stresses how humans are ontologically linked to their environment (102). The book identifies several instances and methods that composers and musicians have sought to address the living, by attending to seemingly unreachable sounds, from microbes and underwater insects to digital silence, or by abandoning the attempt at representation (mimesis) in order to develop sound structures that mirror the dynamic organic complexity of the living world, thus exploring a ‘becoming-animal’ or ‘becoming-insect’ in sound (see 8–9; 11; 106).

Two typical examples of moving away from representation to presentation or presence are found in the work of Xenakis and the spectralists, in both of which Solomos is an expert (he is a distinguished Xenakis specialist and has also written extensively on spectral music). Both attempted to compose in a way that was described eloquently by Gérard Grisey: ‘I would tend to divide music very roughly into two categories. One is music that involves declamation, rhetoric, language. A music of discourse […] a way of saying things with sounds. […] The second is music which is more a state of sound than a discourse. [It is] the music which says, “This is the world”’ (Bundler Reference Bundler1996). Grisey places Xenakis and himself in the second category. Extending Solomos’s analysis, we can paraphrase Grisey by stating that it is as if the music says ‘this is the living (world)’, as both composers tended to compose sound in its organic complexity.

Solomos poses a question regarding Xenakis as environmentalist: to what extent can we say that Xenakis was a naturalist when it came to his compositional approach? In addition to offering an overview of Xenakis’s relevant work, the author makes a subtle distinction: while Xenakis himself did not identify as a naturalist (he was not trying to ‘recreate nature’ which was ‘far more beautiful’ than his own work – Xenakis, quoted on p. 65), his characteristic sound-world was achieved by transferring natural laws to his compositional methods. With reference to Xenakis, Solomos does not make a distinction between instrumental and electroacoustic music, as both developed under the same vision of sound-world. However, one aspect found in his electroacoustic music could be a precursor to the discussion of hacking that Solomos introduces later in the book, that is, Xenakis’s unconventional attitude to technology.Footnote ¹ Xenakis is known for rejecting Fourier analysis:

This is a case that chimes with Solomos’s imperative in the book, to guide the direction technology takes based on our own artistic vision and theory, as opposed to being controlled and alienated by it.

Although technology is not the central topic in the book, it seems to me that a lot of what Solomos is talking about is or can be reflected in today’s technological turn. The more technology invades the living, the more crucial it is to be able to control it towards purposes beneficial to our mental, social and environmental ecologies. This is especially relevant to Solomos, who advances the Benjamin-inspired thesis of the artist as producer, one who reflects deeply on the means of artistic production, thereby exposing the social relations those means induce. A contemporary pioneer of such use of technology is Agostino Di Scipio, whose work the book foregrounds and who also seems to be an influence on Solomos in engaging with the ecology of sound. The paradigm that Di Scipio researches is important also with regard to the modes of listening that it requires, with the aim of making both artist and audience aware of those social relationships that are sedimented in the work.

Within the frame of mental ecology, Solomos questions the conventional concept of listening as passive and individual. He invokes Antoine Freychet’s approach of the sound milieu as a ‘commons that is both constructed and constructive, [that] allows us to reinforce the idea of musical community and shared listening’ (125). Di Scipio’s work favours this idea of the work as a commons, and Solomos examines this under a section titled ‘The conditions of experiencing sound’ (35–43). Both artist and theorist, Di Scipio has advanced the concept of the ontology of sound as an event (not an object) in the environment of what he terms audible ecosystemics, a concept he has been exploring since 2002. Rather than simple interactive music, his works aim to compose these interactions directly, mostly with the use of feedback loops. Characteristics of his work are the processes of emergence and self-organisation. His use of technology is very precise and accounts for the organic complexity of his works; yet, he uses exclusively free and open-source software (e.g. Pure Data) combined with easily attainable hardware (often lo-fi). The kind of listening that his works invite is far from easy. Solomos terms this

Such listening also invites us to become aware of the social relationships the work exposes. A characteristic work by Di Scipio, mentioned in passing by Solomos, is the Modes of Interference (2005–2011) cycle of four live-electronics works, which explores composed dynamical systems and the structural coupling of machine, human and environment. The third piece in the cycle consists of three or more electric guitars and amplifiers connected through a computer. The guitars stand upright, and the strings are never plucked or rubbed by a human player. This work is characterised by the composer as a ‘constructivist gesture of deconstruction’ (Di Sciptio Reference Di Scipio2014), whereby the cultural connotations of the electric guitar are challenged. The upright positioning of the guitar invokes what Di Scipio calls the ‘techno-phallus’, which is undermined by leaving the guitars unattended and the sound produced by the ambient background noise of the room (including audience). The cultural deconstruction of the ‘guitar hero’ is also achieved by the use of feedback in a manner diametrically opposed to its use in rock: rather than a symbol of ‘revolutionary freedom’ (Di Scipio Reference Di Scipio2014: 100), feedback is used as a means of interaction between the components of the system via sound. Thus, Di Scipio constructs a double feedback loop (Di Scipio Reference Di Scipio2014: 88): an electroacoustic loop between microphone and speaker and a cognitive loop between sound perception and agent (human or, in this case, computer).Footnote ²

As mentioned, Solomos’s manuscript was sent to the publisher by August 2022. At that time, it was impossible to predict the spectacular changes that Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has since brought upon our lives. OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released in November 2022 and became ‘the fastest-growing consumer app in history’ (Hao Reference Hao2025: 2). Since then, the Big Tech companies have engaged in a kind of arms race regarding the capabilities of their AI products. Its ramifications are enormous: from endangering artists’ work to using AI products to threaten dissenting artists, from environmental deterioration to aggravating our mental and social ecologies, Big Tech’s success story has led to domination by a small elite of white men who influence and align with political power. Karen Hao reports that on the day that Sam Altman (OpenAI’s CEO who oversaw the release of ChatGPT) was invited to testify before the US Congress, Hollywood artists had arranged to also meet with congressional officers to fight for better protection against AI. One main issue of their campaign (which culminated in historic strikes, including writers, actors, and designers) was that ‘generative AI developers had trained on millions of artists’ work without their consent in order to produce billion-dollar businesses and products that now effectively replaced them’ (Hao Reference Hao2025: 303). The idea that AI is based on scraping content from around the internet is by now commonplace.

This review is not an attempt to update Solomos’s work (although he would be open to such suggestions – see 17). However, concluding this review, the explosion of Big Tech cannot be overlooked in light of the book’s closing remarks. What is remarkable about modern AI is that it relies on very old technology, that is, deep learning via neural networks, which until fifteen years ago were considered ‘merely an academic curiosity’, when research indicated that AI tools could work by scaling up (Williams et al. Reference Williams, Miceli and Gebru2022). This is relevant to the present discussion, as it is precisely this scaling up that is responsible for the massive ecological burden this technology places on us. Aside from the serious environmental concerns that large data centres raise, Big Tech’s harm on mental and social ecology has also been documented, for instance, in the exploitation of precarious workers in developing countries to help train AI models. According to Williams et al. (Reference Williams, Miceli and Gebru2022),

Wooldridge (Reference Wooldridge2026a) defines modern AI by distinguishing it from ‘sound’ and ‘complete’ reasoning algorithms: what makes modern AI possible is the enormous volume of data used for its training. The result is something that approximates rationality or human empathy. Bender et al. (Reference Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Shmitchell2021: 618) argue that these AI language models are ‘stochastic parrots’ whose lack of communicative intent can potentially lead to real-world harm.Footnote ³ While modern AI’s capabilities are remarkable, they cannot be trusted as rational agents (Wooldridge Reference Wooldridge2026b). They consist of tools that present themselves as highly-confident agents, although they very frequently make mistakes that they cannot recognise themselves (‘hallucinating’). Yet, ‘users are interacting with an adaptive, conversational voice to which they have revealed their most private thoughts. People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems and their beliefs about God and the afterlife’ (Hitzig Reference Hitzig2026).Footnote ⁴

Solomos examines Big Tech under the methodological framework of cognitive or, in Zuboff’s terms, surveillance capitalism, and points out that already before the explosion of AI, the progress of Big Tech had been ‘ruthless’ (234). He criticises Zoom’s censorship of the well-known Palestinian activist Leila Khaled (234) and builds the case that capitalism has reached a state of biopolitics. In the closing section of the book, Solomos further suggests that terms such as ‘digital capitalism’ would better be replaced by technofeudalism, denoting a turn to an economic system where profit is replaced by rents and predation, and competition, as was theorised by classical economics, is destroyed by dependence on a ruling minority (235). The concept of technofeudalism was used around the same time by economists Cedric Durand and Yanis Varoufakis (Reference Varoufakis2023). According to the latter, the system that this term signifies establishes a hierarchy between cloud-capitalists or cloudalists (the ruling minority of Big Tech), over cloud proles, waged workers controlled by algorithms to their extreme physical limits, and cloud serfs, the general population who provide their data and attention, thus reproducing cloud capital to the benefit of the ruling elite. To Varoufakis, art can potentially escape this hierarchy via what he calls experiential value, which is ‘intangible, unquantifiable, subjective, quicksilver’ (Varoufakis Reference Varoufakis2023: 286). Although this value has been frequently co-opted by capitalism, its ‘resistance has not been in vain. Each time the onslaught of exchange value has overcome its defences, experiential value has gone underground into the catacombs of our psyche’ (Varoufakis Reference Varoufakis2023: 463).

Solomos urges us to strive for ‘real utopias’. The way to such localised alternatives in music can take many forms: from carnivals of sound and shared or community performances, to practices that focus on degrowth (the attitude against valuing the growth of the economy to the detriment of ecosophy). The latter instance frequently involves technology, combined with a materialist attitude of exposing the means of artistic production and the social relationships sedimented in the artwork (see p. 235). In light of the preceding discussion on technofeudalism, one concrete form of such music-making is hacking or DIY. Among others, Solomos invokes the example of Nicolas Collins, an artist who has also authored a practical guide on the matter, Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking (Collins Reference Collins2020). By deliberately avoiding theorising, the book’s mission seems to be to encourage artists to resist Big Tech and reclaim their freedom. This work shares some similarity to Di Scipio’s work in two aspects: the potential of lo-fi hardware and of free or open-source software. The latter is a particular case, as it exposes the hierarchical relationship of control between user and owner. The Free Software Foundation, founded by Richard Stallman in 1985, promotes freedom in the use of software in very specific ways. Avoiding ‘open-source’ as a purely technical term, free software requires four freedoms: to use the programme for any purpose; to study and to change how the programme works; to redistribute the programme; to improve the programme and to release its modified versions.

Exploring the Ecologies of Music and Sound is an essential book for students and scholars in the arts and humanities. By choosing the framework of ecosophy (encompassing three and potentially more ecological registers), Solomos has been able to shed light on historical examples, contemporary practices, and, crucially, to foreground his political and moral imperative for the future. To Solomos, the artist needs to be re-imagined as a producer, so as to reflect both the current power structures and potential real utopias. In the face of the current spectacular advances of technology, Solomos calls for an affirmative biopolitics, ‘a new notion of the ‘commons’ (235) against Big Tech, in favour of a global solidarity economy, to which the art world may lead the way.