This year, Electronic Beats and 032c commemorate 25 years of shaping sound, culture and consciousness with a collaboration titled “All Is Sound, All Is Transformation.”
The accompanying text is a meditation on listening as a mode of attunement, exploring how sonic experience shapes memory, embodiment and relation in a visually saturated world.
All Is Sound, All Is Transformation.
All Is Sound, All Is Transformation.
1.
Everything that is, vibrates.
Even the inanimate waits—poised to be struck, touched, stirred.
Its rousing brings resonance: a penny dropped, rings. A lighter flicked, clicks.
Subtle touch summons natural frequency—innate and inevitable.
Threshold crossed, vibration becomes sound.
2.
Composer and sonic thinker Pauline Oliveros spent her life exploring the body’s relationship to sound.
One hears repeatedly that we live in a “visually-oriented society,” she wrote.
even though the ear tells the eye where to look.
A sudden noise startles the body stiff.
Or jerks it into instantaneous motion.
Hearing, she explained, is involuntary.
Listening is a choice.
For Oliveros, listening was a fully embodied act: a process of mindful attunement. Combining meditation, performance and acoustic awareness, she pushed for deep listening:
Take a walk at night, she suggested. Walk so silently that the bottom of your feet become ears.