Text page
The Ontology of Vibrational Force
"The Ontology of Vibrational Force" treats sound as force, showing how vibration, sonic fiction, or acoustic design reorganize affective and political space.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These texts argue that sound is not mere accompaniment to culture. Vibration, bass, and auditory design act directly on bodies, spaces, and publics, making sonic theory a theory of force.
They work by turning acoustics into logistics, atmosphere into pressure, and listening into environmental relation. Sonic fiction and sonic warfare describe how sound reorganizes situations before it is interpreted.
That matters because the section is trying to surface the archive's strongest account of affective mediation. Audio culture becomes a way of thinking force, mood, and coordination together.
How to read this text
Read for how the page moves from music or noise toward vibration, pressure, or environmental effect.
Keep an eye on where listening becomes spatial or political. Those moments usually carry the page's strongest claims.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
While the modeling of turbulence has become the computational engineering problem par excellence for control, within the domain of digital sound design, the generation of microsonic turbulence by the manipulation of molecular rhythms accessible only through the mesh of the digital has become a key aesthetic and textural concern. Each of these fi elds will be mined to construct a transdisciplinary foundation to the concept of sonic warfare and its deployments of vibrational force.
Definition · paragraph 3
72 STEVE GOODMAN agency of sound systems (the sonic nexus), their vibrational ontology (rhythmanalysis), and their modes of contagious propagation (audio virology). In its primary amodality and secondary affi nity to the sonic, a discussion of vibrational ecologies also helps counter ocularcentric (modeled on vision as dominant sensory modality) conceptions of cyberspace, contributing to a notion of virtual space that cuts across analog and digital domains.
Definition · paragraph 3
72 STEVE GOODMAN agency of sound systems (the sonic nexus), their vibrational ontology (rhythmanalysis), and their modes of contagious propagation (audio virology).
Definition · paragraph 2
Despite being endlessly inspired by intensive confrontation with bass frequencies, neither should an ontology of vibrational force be misconceived as either a naive physicalism in which all vibrational affect can be reduced scientifi cally. Such a reductionist materialism that merely reduces the sonic to a quantifi able objectivity is inadequate in that it neglects incorporeal affects.
History · paragraph 1
O UTLINING THE AFFECTIVE MICROPOLITICS of sonic warfare demands a specifi cally tuned methodology. Drawing from philosophy, cultural studies, physics, biology, fi ction, and military and musical history, an ontology of vibrational force can be pieced together that traverses disciplines.1 An ontology of vibrational force delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.