I Can no Longer Hear the Crickets : On Heterosonic Sounds, Noises and Silences

Abstract: This essay engages in a reflection on my degree project for Art in the Public Realm Jag kan inte längre höra syrsorna / I Can no Longer Hear the Crickets which is a spatial sound work, an installation or “auditorium” that consists of what I in this text will call “heterosonic” audio. Heterosonic sounds are limit-phenomena of audition that cannot be defined as belonging to either the audible (sonic) or inaudible (infra- and ultra-sonic) parts of the frequency spectrum, nor to the sonorous or strictly physio-acoustic side of sound. Not heard nor silent, it designates sounds that (most often very high in pitch) – like the chirping of crickets, electro-acoustic “teen deterrents”, some screeching train breaks or ringing byproduct noises of electronic equipment – disappear with age, and that is perceivable by one individual's sense apparatus but not by an other's, audible to one ear and inaudible to the other and vice versa. The heterosonic is a displaced phenomena that refuses to act as an external and mediating object between different experiences, in other words not belonging in the empirical and shared world. At the same time it is a moment in everyday events that fractures the intimacy of my own immediate experience and discloses a relational but contradictory (heterological) dimension of individual human perception; asymmetrically intersubjective, social and even interspecific aspects. The heteros – the anonymous “other” – of this hearing has no proper place in or outside my own limits but haunts me as what is otherwise in the same. It is a background noise of silence, discordance of the multivocal, a transformative listening to a sonic dimension of potentiality.