ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that an acoustic understanding is grounded in a potentiality for poetic world making activity, that is, the creative and critical crafting of more-than-social relations found by way of sound and listening. Notions of auditory blockading are suggestive for considering how the musical gatherings in Budapest support community building by enabling a disengagement from the broader public sphere. From our perspective, sonic engagement operates on both social and corporeal levels, moving from an engagement with questions of language, narrative, and the symbolic ordering of particular collective agendas, to experiences and challenges around corporeality. Returning to understandings of sonic engagement we have been pursuing, sound and listening emerge as key to both activating the social while complicating and elaborating its borders. We are concerned with sound and listening as the basis for both social and more-than-social relations, as well as sonic and more-than-sonic practices.
