Introduction

As we launch our seventh volume of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, in addition to our Original Research section, we announce two new special series that will be published within this volume: Too Great for Words: The Ineffable in Sound and Text and Considerations of a Sonic Continent: The Arts in Antarctica. As the disciplines of sound studies and practice advance, we endeavor to present innovative scholarship that compellingly situates the state of the art.Author Michael Jones’s “This Drum Is a Place: Instrumental Ontography, Decoloniality, and the Post-Instrumental Practice” frames percussion through recent anti-reductionist philosophies that seek to define the image of an instrument as that of a place. Jones considers the phenomenology of percussion through its state of objecthood and by including human aspects of intention that gather at the core of its ontology.One of the great mistakes of Western epistemologies, object-oriented philosophers maintain, is the tendency to reduce an object’s being to its smallest or largest associations. Though it is presented differently across the philosophies of Harman, Levy Bryant, and Tristan Garcia, among others, what seems uniform across their work is the irreducibility of objects—that is, that objects can never be reduced to their constituent parts nor to the larger entities (material or conceptual) that they may be a part of. They can be a part of these entities; in fact, they must be to some extent in order to exist, but they can never be explained wholesale by them. Harman frames this as the tension between “undermining” and “overmining.” The former denotes a reduction to constituent parts such as atoms, molecules, or matter more broadly, while the latter marks when objects are instead understood only by their relation to a larger conceptual whole.Also included in our Original Research section is a contribution by Caroline Preziosi, whose research-intensive interview, “Transmission, Not Translation: Conversations with Three Wave Farm Artists-in-Residence, Listening Past Disaster and Beyond Human Sound,” appears through Resonance’s partnership with Wave Farm, a nonprofit organization in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley, and its International Radio and Transmission Arts Residency and Fellowship Program. Preziosi’s writing is a compelling hybrid of sound-studies research and interviews with Lisa Schonberg, Lucy Helton, and Sally Ann McIntyre, each of whom were artists-in-residence at Wave Farm between 2019 and 2024.Each of these artists is contending with the infrasonic: the unheard, the cryptic, the invisible, the disappearing—natural voices and noises existing beyond the limits of our human hearing, stories we cannot listen to without the aid of technology. After my own visit to Wave Farm for ten days of research and exploration, thinking through the questions I wanted to ask, I had the chance to speak with each artist to learn more about their practices and parse through the correlations between listening and activism, between human and more-than-human sound, and between the act of transmission and the work that results.I was initially interested in the possibilities of transmission as translation—a means to create access and understanding between human and more-than-human sound. I heard the work these three artists are doing to create sonic bridges between ourselves and our environments. I had imagined that my entry point would be centered around the complicated task of translation, of carrying over, language to language. But, ultimately, what these conversations proved is that a transmission is decidedly not a translation—the two are related but distinct here, and at times at odds with each other.The relationship between literature and sound is an area of inquiry that we have been looking forward to examining within the pages of Resonance, and I would like to thank the team of Ilka Brasch, Abigail Fagan, Elena Furlanetto, and Phillip James Grider for their hard work in helping to bring this special series to fruition. In their introduction to the series, Brasch and Furlanetto present the ineffable as an aesthetic challenge and one in which silence represented in American literature contains the potential for political critique.Ultimately, a study of the ineffable in the North American context is a study of erasures, from archival gaps to the untranscribable and the untranslatable. Since contributions in this special series center on written texts, they must take on the inevitable paradox of the ineffable in literature: If put into words, how is it ineffable? How can the ineffable be written down, let alone theorized? As suggested in Fagan and Grider’s interlude, studying the ineffable is an incentive to revise academic and historiographical approaches that foreground the literate over the sonic. Part of this renewal of academic practices includes growing familiar with writing around and along instead of about. Authors in this series confront these challenges in their attempts to honor the ineffable and its subversive potential via the registers of sound studies, incorporating them into the toolbox of literary studies as they learn to listen between the lines.This special series emerged from ongoing collaborations and discussions between Carolyn Philpott and me, focused on the intersection of artistic practices and written histories of Antarctica. These exchanges took place while we were attending the 4th International Festival of Antarctic Arts and Culture in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2012. Now, after many years, I am very thankful to both Dr. Philpott and her coeditor for this series, Elizabeth Leane, for their hard work in helping to promote humanities-based research through the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and the biennial SCAR Open Science Conference (OSC). Manuscripts for this series originated in Philpott and Leane’s, “Antarctica and the Arts” panel sessions at the 11th SCAR OSC in Pucón, Chile, in 2024.As Antarctica becomes increasingly central to conversations about climate change and its related worldwide impacts, listening to its vast and varied soundscapes, as well as to sound-based works directly inspired by the icescape, has never seemed more important. It is our hope that this series inspires readers to listen to Antarctic-related sound works and to reflect on the many benefits that can be gained by engaging with this rich corpus of work—for listeners, artists, and researchers, as well as for the Antarctic region itself.