Sonic Spectral Summoning

Abstract

Sonic Spectral Summoning was a participatory ‘correspondence course’ that took place as part of Queer Extension, a series of remote, artist-led experiments in alternative education that ran during the spring 2021 COVID-19 lockdown in the UK. The project was structured as a kind of game that set a series of imaginative provocations all based on the idea that some arrangement of sound might give access to secret knowledge related to the persistence of the dead among the living (ghosts). Sonic Spectral Summoning is also the title of an audio work for voice and occasional electronic sound that the author made in response. This account traces some coordinates of the project, across fiction, domesticity, structures for collective practice and the unknown. The project, and this account, contributes to a field of inquiry about sonic epistemologies that is concerned not just with producing knowledge with and through sound, but with using sound to re-configure what constitutes knowledge. If ‘hear-telling’ designates a space for utterance, discourse, theatrical representation, sonic attention, infrastructures for communication and miscommunication, and other verbal transmissions, Sonic Spectral Summoning tries to linger in that space, shuffling through meaning and association, sense and its others.