Sonic Imagination. Aural Environments as Speculative Artefacts

Abstract

The human imagination received a discursive gain regarding its societal and economic importance as a cognitive resource in the course of the 20th and 21st century. This situation motivated the emergence of imagination tech- niques of which we discuss several briefly in this paper. The various forma- tions of ‘speculative’ strategies within art and design can be seen as a recent extension to this tendency. While such strategies are usually predominantly visual, we suggested in our earlier research and practice (‘The Institute of Sonic Epistemologies’) that aural techniques might be equally suited to stim- ulate the human imagination, since such approaches leave the visual senses open for mental imagery in the human mind. We found these early explora- tions to be fruitful and decided to further our understanding of the aesthetic, fictional and medial factors being at work when aural environments trig- ger the human imagination. Against this backdrop, the present article is a working paper on ‘aurally induced mental imagery’ that covers a literature overview of the neuropsychology of the human imagination and discusses an eclectic corpus of sound work, which we query for the above-mentioned factors.