On Phonosophy

Abstract

With phonosophy, we are investigating a platform to disembark from the vehicle of the long-travelled logos. The once organic and flowing aspects of Logos (Heraclitus) have all but succumbed to the current scientific, materialistic, mechanistic, quantitative and spatially centric epistemology of the last century – one or all of which perspectives define most of the serious theoretical and critical approaches to organised sound, sound art, music concrète, acousmatic and electroacoustic music in our time. Phonosophy will address that which goes beyond or parallel to the logos, or the logocentric. Adrienne Janus’s discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening and the sonic turn looks for conditions of an epistemology based on ‘listening as a mode of attending’ to the resonances of sense, ‘where sense touches upon and resonates with all registers of sensual perception as well as intellectual perception … insofar as they resonate’. Suzanne Guerlac points to Bergson’s theory of real duration (durée réelle) that is the vital energy of animate experience and consciousness as opposed to the entropic energy (thermodynamic) of physics. Together these two overlapping discussions consist of the method (listening/sensing) and field (resonance/duration) of the phonosophic investigation.