We cannot shut down our hearing at will, or crop certain sounds out of our auditory field, the way we can close our eyes or turn our heads to block unwanted sights. Still, we often expect a certain raw, unfiltered fidelity between the acoustic world and our experience of sound — I call this sonance.
Yet this experience is far from raw. It is full of interpretation, adjustment, and meaning-making. Listening is not a photographic record of the acoustic properties of a space at a given moment. Through concentration and focus, we can “zoom in” on particular qualities of sonance, discerning distances, directions, material textures, even the temperature or humidity of a space — simply by listening.
Michael Carnes, musician and developer behind Exponential Audio and the classic Lexicon 960L algorithms, observes the same phenomenon: “I’m quite convinced we don’t hear it [reverb] photographically.”
For Carnes, reverb is more about feeling and experience — about sonance — than it is about capturing a perfect acoustic snapshot of a moment.
Sound and light often behave similarly, bouncing off surfaces, creating resonant colors, blurred rainbows, diffused gradients, and geometric phasing patterns. Yet in other ways, they are radically different. Light reaches our eyes instantly and absolutely. Sound, by contrast, is always already disappearing — arriving, passing through us, fading into memory.
Leonardo da Vinci did not consider music a high form of art compared to painting, precisely because of its ephemeral nature. Visual arts, for him, could capture something lasting of human existence. Probably he would have preferred convolution over algorithmic reverb — the former recreating room acoustics based on real-life recordings, while the latter seeks not mathematical precision, but a reconstruction of sonance: the felt experience of being within a space.
With sonance, there is always the initial arrival of sound (presonance), the living presence of sound (resonance), and the inevitable fading away (desonance). And the complete and final non-existence, absonance.
Carnes describes this ephemerality beautifully: “If we’re listening carefully, we can reconstruct a lot of what may have happened, but there’s a level of detail that’s forever lost.”
This is the beauty of echosophy: the art of listening not just to sounds, but to our own being as it arises and fades in time and space. By opening our ears to the world and listening closely, we become space.