Rhythming: a manifesto

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rhythming is a practice of listening otherwise. Rhythming develops perspectives that enrichen how the situations, the actions and the apparatuses that make rhythm in everyday life are understood to matter. Rhythming articulates sonic research that listens and thinks through doing, noticing, and intervening into rhythm. The rhythming manifesto calls for a multi-sensorial, performative, and critical practice of listening and sonic thinking through the following propositions: Rhythming is a practice of listening otherwise Rhythming plays with rhythm machines and tacit habits Rhythming reconfigures the rhythm machine of the future Rhythming cultivates listening as attunement Rhythming activates sonic-material respondings Rhythming reveals listening positionalities This rhythming manifesto speculates on the principal and particular roles that listening and sensing the sonic have in perceiving the material, physical, technological, and imaginary entanglements of situated experience, as well as their distinct qualities for communicating relations. In this way, the manifesto contributes to an ecology of affinitive relationships, which currently drives eco-political and decolonial movements. There is a current need to be able to identify our systems, and to grow from our practices and analyses new languages, concepts, and modes for understanding interspecies and transcultural relationships.