Sonic Fiction: The Study of Sound
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Overview
Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound. Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction.
In 1998 music critic, DJ and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed this concept in his book “More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction”. Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. His argument, his narrations and his explorative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell.
This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and political theory. Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.
The first academic overview of one of the most advanced and controversial approaches to sound studies, offering insight into its background, history, the present discourse surrounding it, and its likely future impact.
Provides an introduction to one of the most advanced and also most contested approaches in sound studies and within cultural theory and cultural research more generally
Represents the first comprehensive publication on the recent history and academic and artistic discourse surrounding the concept of sonic fiction
Serves as an essential and instructive companion to the new edition of More Brilliant Than The Sun
Extradition: What Is Sonic Fiction?
A Force of Liberation
Enforced Landianisms
More Like a Group of Otoliths
1. Sonic Thinking: A Mixillogic MythScience of Mutantextures
The Mythscience of Sonic Warfare
The Mixillogics of Sonic Epistemologies
The Mutantextures of Sonic Possible Worlds
What Is Sonic Thinking?
2. Social Progress: Sensibilities of the Implex
Dath’s Mixillogics
The Dialectics of the Implex
Valéry’s Sensibilities
Even Wrong Ideas Can Be Made True
3. Black Aurality: Alien Sonic Nontologies
Black Aurality
The Diffraction of Mythscience
Alter Nation, AlterDestiny & Autohistoria
Decolontologies
4. Sensory Epistemologies: Syrrhesis and Sensibility
The Body of the Researcher
Syrrhesis Fiction
Beyond the Idiosyncrasy of Logocentrism
Multiplying Epistemologies
5. Acid Communism: A Haunted Utopia of Sound
Anticipation and Compulsion
Ghosts of Our Times
Theories That Are Embodied
Acid Communism
6. NON: Ultrablack Resistance
Ultrablackness
NON
Rhythmight
Ultrablack Resistance
Inconclusion: Six Heuristics for Critique and Activism
Sonic Fiction as Activism
Sonic Fiction as Critique
Heuristics of the Sonic
Notes
References
Index
A rich and timely meditation on a concept central to sonic theory.
Sonic Fiction touches on relevant issues concerning contemporary popular culture in a globalized world, while presenting innovative research and fresh theoretical ideas.
The main benefit of Sonic Fiction is to open up the particular approach of Kodwo Eshun’s ‘Sonic Fiction’ to a broader public and outline the several fields of discourse that have built upon his concept. Informed by sound anthropology and the newly emerging transdisciplinary field of sound studies, this volume identifies and explains the specific contribution of the ‘Sonic Fiction’ approach to an epistemology of sound.
A thoughtful introduction to some of the most vital tendencies in 21st-century auditory arts and cultural theory. Sonic fictions are generative systems: synthesizers of ideas, recomposers of politics, collective transducers. Schulze’s book offers a timely and a forward-looking appraisal of Kodwo Eshun’s work and its proliferating influence.
- Title: Sonic Fiction
- Author: Holger Schulze
- Series: The Study of Sound
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 192
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501334801, 9781501334795, 1501334794, 1501334808
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501334801
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:03:03Z
Holger Schulze is Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. He is the author of numerous books including Sound as Popular Culture (2016) and The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury, 2017).