Weird Horizons: Sound Research at the Sonic Brink

Today’s troubling trajectories, which are positioned as both threat and opportunity, are made navigable via specific conceptual apparatuses through which a projected future is folded into the present despite the inherent unknowability of what, exactly, comes next. One such conceptual apparatus is the horizon, which has become an automated, not to mention optimistic, term of choice for gesturing to the not yet, to the eventual, to that which is still to come. As a representational trope that mimics the linear perspective of human optics, the horizon not only points to particular (human) sensory-perceptory limits but also indexes vantage points tied to individual, static perspectives that obfuscate the complex realities that lie beyond our immediate optical reach. In this chapter, I further probe the horizon in order to explore how this conceptual apparatus has come to orient, in a very material sense, the way in which the unknown future is navigated. Extending the discussion of the horizon to the figure of the acoustic horizon, this chapter attunes to the sound intrusions, separating circles, and disorienting coordinations that emerge when the horizon is explored through its sonic limits and thresholds, or what is developed here as the sonic brink. The sonic brink is a speculative concept that is not simply against or counter to the optical horizon but is instead deployed as both site and apparatus for attending to the limits of and for sound research in troubling times. As developed in this chapter, the sonic brink experiments with the ways in which sound might intrude upon the limiting separations, common-sense navigational systems, and troubling hopes that have come to define the very horizons for doing sound research today.