The project: a travelogue of attention

Engaging with Everyday Sounds is the product of a sabbatical year Cobussen took from his position as Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University. During this time, he travelled, recorded, listened, theorised and composed, although he avoids the latter term. The book takes the form of a literary travel diary, a travelogue that moves concentrically outward: from the kitchen and the breakfast table in Cobussen’s house in the Netherlands, through the neighbourhood, the home country and eventually abroad (Hong Kong, Montreal, Portugal, Ottawa, Beirut). The opening gesture is borrowed from Georges Perec: ‘question your tea spoons’, an injunction to turn sustained attention toward what seems self-evident and therefore rarely rises to the level of aesthetic consideration. Cobussen takes this as a cue to listen to what one ordinarily does not notice, such as the environmental, the barely audible, the domestically familiar. The central claim is that a reorientation of attention toward the quotidian carries ethical consequences. For Cobussen, the ethical and the ontological are inseparable: to hear the everyday is already to inhabit a ‘world as not organised into active subjects and passive objects, but constituted through affects, relations, and events’. This is the book’s main premise, and it underpins every subsequent chapter.

Form

One of the book’s most genuinely exciting aspects is its formal ambition. Published under a Creative Commons license by Open Book Publishers, it is freely accessible in digital form and integrates audio files, photographs and written text as co-equal elements of the argument. This multimodal format directly enacts Cobussen’s theoretical aspirations. The diary structure produces a real intimacy and situatedness that conventional academic prose systematically excludes. The tentative, note-taking, provisional quality of the text is one of its genuine strengths. Cobussen’s disclaimers and first-person perspective at the opening of the book establish a mode of writing that remains open to its own incompleteness.

After an introduction that establishes this personal and situated perspective, the book proceeds with a framing chapter that develops the conceptual and methodological apparatus. Cobussen terms his approach ‘sonic materialism’, a position in which sound is not contained by space but actively co-produces it. Next to space, place is a crucial notion for the entire book and is understood as unstable and performative, not a static container; identity is relational, and sound is one of the primary media through which social life happens. He advocates for ‘a sensitivity to sonic ways of knowing which is experiential, contingent, contextual, emergent and situated’. The subsequent chapters address the familiar and the unfamiliar in turn, interweaving audio recordings, photographs and theoretical reflection on domestic sounds, ‘aural lingering’, ‘poetics of belonging’, and forms of reframing and mediation, before a chapter on the ethics and politics of everyday sounds and a final coda on the status of his recordings as ‘acousmatic non-art’.

The book is richest in its most specific passages, where Cobussen attends to the sonic materiality of windows and doors, the sound of a trashcan, the particular resonances of a domestic ambiance. These moments lend genuine weight to the idea that the specific matters and that theoretical generalisation must be earned by contact with particular sonic situations.

Theoretical framing and its tensions

The theoretical framing draws heavily on Karen Barad’s new materialism and diffractive methodology. The audio files and microphones function, at the book’s most convincing moments, as Baradian apparatuses that co-constitute what they document. Cobussen also draws on a wide array of other thinkers: Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Tim Ingold, Brandon LaBelle and Salomé Voegelin, among others. He employs a Deleuzian vocabulary of the actual and the virtual productively to describe the sonic potential of places. He does not claim to offer a systematic account of materialism or its variants, nor does he differentiate his position from other thinkers of ‘sonic materialism’, such as Christoph Cox, for example. There is one overall conceptual move that runs throughout the entire book: the shift from the question of what something is to what it does, its agential performativity.

However, this wide cast of theorists is never actually brought into confrontation with itself. Barad and Bennett, Deleuze and Ingold, do not sit comfortably together without mediation, but their incompatibilities are never navigated. Large sections of the text reiterate, sometimes ad nauseam, the aim to attend to ‘human and nonhuman’ agency and care, without ever submitting the theoretical apparatus itself to any form of pressure or risk. Theory, on a genuinely materialist account, ought to do something, it should be enacted rather than restated. Cobussen clearly reflects on the form of his publication, but the feedback loop between his sound practice and his theoretical positions is never really closed. The theory remains, as it were, above and untouched, a kind of standpoint philosophy rather than the practice it claims to be.

This is most acute when Cobussen formulates and does not resolve, what he calls ‘the trap’: the moment you deliberately pay attention to an ordinary sound, it stops being ordinary. This epistemological dilemma haunts the whole project and is never fully addressed. He seems to argue for a kind of cultivated porousness of attention, a receptive readiness at the edges of conscious perception, drifting in and out of a quasi-musical mode of listening, but the phenomenology of this mode remains underspecified.

The contradiction at the heart of sonic materialism

A central and recurring difficulty in the book is the tension between, on one hand, Cobussen’s stated ambition that ‘sonic materialism is less about the question of what we can know about sounds than what we do with sounds and what they do to us’ and, on the other, his persistent reinscription of this ambition into a discourse of knowledge and pedagogy. He takes seriously François Laruelle’s claim that philosophy tends to ‘dominate its object, subjecting it to philosophical rules’, and cites Jean-Luc Nancy asking ‘Hasn’t philosophy superimposed upon listening … the order of understanding’. And yet, having made these gestures toward the limits of logocentric discourse, Cobussen writes: ‘Engaging with and being immersed in sounds thus offers a possibility to explore and reveal new ways of knowing, to gain new knowledge of how human and nonhuman agents relate’. The radical challenge retreats almost immediately. Elsewhere: ‘conveying knowledge about a sonic environment is not always best achieved through writing … it might be more comprehensible to utilise aural tools’. However, ‘more comprehensible’ immediately reframes this as a pedagogical and communicative decision rather than an ontological one. Or again: ‘Sounds inscribe themselves in places’. Yet inscription is itself a metaphor of writing, and place is once more figured as a substrate that receives.

Cobussen states that ‘sonic materialism is not a noun but a verb; it is a practice rather than a theory’. One is tempted to ask: are not composers and sound artists precisely those practitioners who enact modes of sonic thought that remain genuinely open to the agency of the material, beyond knowledge production or subsumption under conceptual understanding? And yet composers and sound artists are largely relegated to the footnotes of this book, while theorists and philosophers (Barad, Bennett, Lyotard, Latour) take centre stage. When artists do appear, they tend to be cited as theorists, John Cage above all. This is not, finally, a materialism of practice.

A particularly insightful point that deserves much more than its marginal status is Cobussen’s observation that sound ‘is an agent whose potentialities only become audible while interacting with other agents’, and yet, simultaneously, ‘sound functions as the medium through which agents are able to interact with one another’. This double status, as both medium and agent, is one of the most genuinely productive theoretical moves in the book, with real consequences for how one understands both composition and listening. That it appears fleetingly and is never developed is symptomatic of the book’s tendency to bury its most interesting problems.

Affirmative ontology and the absence of negativity

With regard to its central ontological ideas, the book is wholly affirmative. The vibrational ontology that Cobussen develops, a world constituted through relations and affects, is never put at risk. Tensions, contradictions, and incompatibilities are noted, but they are dissolved back into an affirmative connectivity in which negativity has no genuine place. A position that is never tested cannot fully demonstrate its own necessity.

It is worth observing that there is another materialist tradition, from Marx through Althusser to Lacan and Žižek, and scientific cultures of experimentation (Rheinberger’s thinking of the experimental system, for instance), that places lack, absence, resistance, desire, and the problem at the centre of materialist inquiry. This strand is entirely absent from the book. Its absence is not merely academic. The everyday, as a category, might be productively understood precisely through what is not there, as a form of ubiquitous imperceptibility, as structured by absence and unacknowledged labour, as shaped by what cannot be heard rather than only what can.

A symptom of this difficulty can be seen in this sentence: ‘it is the mode of listening that makes sounds interesting rather than the sounds themselves’. This places all constitutive agency back in the human subject, a move that quietly reverses the entire ontological argument of the book. Such contradictions are numerous. The trouble is not that they are there, but that they are never articulated as the productive tensions they could be.

Ethics, politics, and the problem of displacement

The ethical and political ambitions of the book intensify toward its second half. Cobussen identifies his variable roles as those of ‘(aural) educator, explorer, mediator and/or (socio-political) activist’, and the project becomes explicitly pedagogical. It aims to cultivate in the reader a mode of attentiveness that perceives how sound encodes class, power and exclusion and to reframe listening itself as an ethical and relational practice. He draws on Glenn Albrecht’s concept of solastalgia, the distress of no longer feeling at home in one’s environment due to ecological change, to frame a kind of ‘caring for one’s habitat’ that has distinctly Heideggerian overtones of dwelling and rootedness.

The difficulty is that this ethical attunement tends toward what one might call a meditative indifference, a sensitivity to the sociality of the sonic that has no purchase on political decision. The possessive ‘one’s’ in ‘one’s habitat’ implies ownership, rootedness, an authentic belonging, but what of those who have no such habitat, the genuinely displaced, those whose suffering is not incidental to the everyday but constitutive of it? How can this account for or aim at transforming the structural violence of the everyday? Will an attunement to the vibrational connectivity of human and nonhuman sonic matter generate a direction for political transformation? The book’s reading of Rancière is particularly symptomatic here. Cobussen draws on the concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, but quietly removes its most essential element, the notion of political rupture, of the militant reconfiguration of what is visible and audible as a definition of the political itself. What remains is aesthetic experience without antagonism. Political rupture is absorbed into aesthetic attentiveness. Without a concept of resistance, absence or contradiction, the ontology risks collapsing into a generalised affirmation of relationality.

This is reinforced by the organisation of the travelogue itself. The concentric movement of the book, from ‘my kitchen’, ‘my neighborhood’, ‘my home country’, to abroad, maps the familiar and the unfamiliar onto a structure of political geography, belonging and cultural ownership. Hong Kong and Beirut appear as the distant, the foreign, the exotic from which ‘postcards’ are sent. One wishes that listening and sound had been allowed to enable a mapping that does not coincide with these coordinates, a practice that could remap aesthetic proximities and distances.

The status of the audio files

The coda raises the question of the audio files directly. Cobussen states: ‘I do not consider myself a sound artist, nor are my audio files intended to be works of sound art’. The choice of the term ‘audio files’ is itself telling. It is defensive, deliberately underdetermined, distancing the recordings from any claim to artistic accountability. He refuses the categories of documentary, composition, and radio play alike.

Yet the recordings are very noticeably composed. They are layered, carefully paced, containing piano melodies and acoustic guitar alongside environmental sound, shaped by cuts and polyphonic arrangements that are full of musical decisions. The evasive terminology – ‘postcard’, ‘non-art’, ‘audio file’ – does not so much resolve the question of their status as avoid it. Similarly, the photographs in the book receive almost no written attention. They have a snapshot quality but are clearly composed and aestheticise the everyday, yet Cobussen writes almost nothing about the choices of framing, juxtaposition, or interweaving that produced them. As much as the book seeks to liberate sound from instrumentalisation, the audio files and images are ultimately instrumentalised too, for ethical education, for pedagogical ends.

Engaging with Everyday Sounds is a genuinely unusual book, formally ambitious, intellectually generous and committed to the proposition that modes of publication and modes of listening can be thought together.

At the same time, the book’s most interesting problems tend to remain unacknowledged as such. These unresolved tensions, if articulated, could have made this a stronger and more problematising work. As it stands, Engaging with Everyday Sounds offers a thoughtful, if sometimes overly certain, contribution to sound studies and artistic research.