Phonophany, or the all-revealing medium

Phonophany, or the All-Revealing Medium dramatises the manifestation of occult and hidden mediation processes present in both audio technologies and Zande magic practices. As a composition, it works from a field recording of a Zande revelation song used to detect witches, employing audio mediation to allow the listener to experience a progressive unfolding of the recorded voice from initially unintelligible, noisy signals. In doing so, the work reflects on how to move beyond preconceptions of audio as a purely documentarian medium that simply “captures” reality. Rather than treating sound recording as transparent representation, the composition foregrounds mediation itself — specifically in the form of electromagnetic noise — as a way of listening oriented toward gradual aural revelation. This approach seeks to expand the capacity of audio media and recording technologies to articulate concepts and probe the audio field, thereby reframing our perception of media and their sensory environments.

Phonophany, a term of my own coinage emerging from this work, designates a process of approaching sound in ways that render the otherwise unhearable manifest, including the revelation of occult and hidden mediation processes. The term does not refer exclusively to microphonic technologies, but also to modes of attention that privilege the emergence of new physical or immaterial dimensions of sound. In this sense, phonophany proposes a shift away from audio naturalism toward an understanding of sound as something that becomes meaningful through layers of mediation, interference, and transformation.

To dramatise the historical and ideological entanglement between hidden processes in audio technology and Zande witchcraft — while also responding to Evans-Pritchard’s invitation to attend to relationships between actors and mediators — the composition treats the medium as an authority, a technology, and a protocol through which things emerge, become transparent, and acquire clarity. In practice, the work employs the field recording alongside two telephone coil microphones, used mutually as carriers through vocoders. A vocoder operates by analysing the spectral and amplitude characteristics of an input sound, often speech, and imposing those characteristics onto another sound, typically a sustained tone or noise. It does so by splitting both signals into frequency bands, extracting the modulator’s envelope in each band, and using those envelopes to shape the carrier, producing the distinctive fused effect often described as speech passing through a synthesiser.

Within this setup, the telephone coil is significant not only for its association with overhearing, surveillance, and technological transparency, but also for its ability to capture normally unhearable electromagnetic impulses and convert them into audible signals. Applying a vocoder to each track allows the channels to speak into one another: when the microphone picks up electromagnetic noise, the revelation song becomes hearable; when the song is sung, electromagnetic noise is unleashed. Through this reciprocal process, the revelatory power of microphonic devices and witch doctors’ songs becomes aesthetically entangled as a shared act of unveiling mediation through the senses.

Ultimately, Phonophany, or the All-Revealing Medium proposes audio artefacts as sites of both transparency and opacity: outcomes of social processes, entanglements, and mediations that reveal with one hand while concealing with the other.

Zande witch doctor song reimagined by Luigi Monteanni.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds