SONIC ANTI-INTIMACY
What, in Sonic Terms, Might Characterise the Opposite of Intimacy?
- Year
- 2025
- Context
- Mediating Intimacy: Space and Intersubjectivity in Recorded Music & Sound, BA Music, University of Oxford
- Length
- 16 pages, 3,670 words
If sonic intimacy is sound as touch, what is its opposite? This essay argues it is neither silence nor distance, which are passive, but something designed: sound used as an active force to break connection.
I propose the term sonic anti-intimacy, a conceptual cousin of the anti-hero. It describes sound technologies that simulate closeness while producing isolation, dominance and detachment, from personal listening devices to Muzak and its algorithmic descendants, and even silence, which can work as a signal of control rather than an absence.
the research, in short
the question
What, in sonic terms, might characterise the opposite of intimacy?
the argument
Anti-intimacy is not the absence of intimacy but its active engineering: presence without connection, built into infrastructures of surveillance, capitalism and soft control.
the approach
Piekut's Actor-Network Theory, with Attali's noise, Kahn's silence and Pettman's intimacy in dialogue, applied to isolation, dominance, detachment, Muzak and silence.
