Sound Epistemology

Alexander Billet listens to Damon Krukowski’s “Why Sound Matters.”

By Alexander BilletNovember 2, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Music

FEW KNOW WHAT silence sounds like. This is partly because it doesn’t sound like anything. Like most other absences, we only learn to appreciate silence in the context of what otherwise interrupts it. Some search for it endlessly, isolating themselves in sensory deprivation tanks or traveling to the least populated parts of the globe. Recording engineers install sound dampeners along the walls of studios to keep the sound of the outside out. Even then, some ambient noise is bound to make its way in, even if it’s all but imperceptible, even if it’s only the sound of your own blood rushing in your ears. The closer we get to it, the more likely we are to be overwhelmed by true silence—sublime, awesome, terrifying.

It is an uncanny relationship, sometimes portending real and palpable dread. In his new book Why Sound Matters, Damon Krukowski cites Rachel Carson’s environmental classic Silent Spring (1962) and its horror at the silencing of bird calls, an index for the destruction of delicate ecologies. Yet also, as he shows, the unavoidability of sound can often stand in for that very same destruction. Krukowski touches on the spread of noise pollution, which on the surface may seem a minor concern by today’s apocalyptic standards. Citing the work of environmental advocates and researchers, however, he makes clear that the pervasiveness of anthropogenic sound often reflects the increasing, irreversible damage wrought by industrial development. As global commerce begins to mutate and twist in search of something new to commodify and sell, its sonic footprint gets ever heavier, more inevitable and consequential. The noise of capitalism can disrupt the rhythms of nature itself.

The point Krukowski makes isn’t that sound is inherently good or bad; rather, it is a resource, a material of consequence in daily life. It is also everywhere, something we interact and contend with no matter where we go or what we do:

Noise as a by-product of technology—a waste product—is another example of the materiality of sound. Yet because sound is often regarded as immaterial, the effect of this waste is rarely measured. Were sound solid, like the garbage we pile into landfills, cities like New York and Tokyo would be buried beneath audio accumulation. Were it liquid, those cities would have drowned far in advance of sea rise from climate change. Were it gas or fire, they would be abandoned.

Krukowski thinks about sound in a novel way, and practically has for his whole life, it would seem. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the drummer for dream-pop band Galaxie 500 before venturing with his bandmate and wife Naomi Yang into more directly psychedelic projects like Magic Hour and the folk duo Damon & Naomi. Krukowski is also a broadcaster and author. His 2017 Radiotopia podcast Ways of Hearing, later adapted into a book of the same name, tipped its cap to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) rather unmistakably. Taking an elemental approach to music, it gently prodded the listener to find radical new meanings in the juxtapositions of noise and time and space, love and money and power.

Why Sound Matters takes a similar approach, though one that attempts to go even more granular. The short book—barely more than 100 pages—is the latest installment in Yale University Press’s Why X Matters line. Series such as these can often produce volumes that turn out to be mere mirages—banality disguised as popularization. This book is something different, offering a viewpoint not merely novel but downright revealing.

Krukowski opens Why Sound Matters with the story of what he did during the pandemic. When lockdown dropped onto every city, town, and village in the world, he found himself, like virtually every other working musician, without a crucial source of income. So, when the worst had passed, when small corners of the world started to reopen, Krukowski got a job working the soundboard at Club Passim, a mainstay in the folk music scene since the 1950s, not far from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “[T]he room is filled with sound and people sharing that sound,” he writes, “which is more of what I needed than I knew.”

The author returns to Club Passim throughout Why Sound Matters, recounting short snippets that illustrate his belief in sound as something intricate and fascinating: the stories attached to certain instruments, the lengths to which an artist will go to get “just the right sound,” the thoughts that bubble up when musicians are sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen. These moments help coax the reader into thinking of sound not as a material but as an experience. We’re invited to rely on our own senses to give the author’s case its substance.

If sound is material, then much of our interaction with it is composed of not just the way it invades some spaces but also how some of us work to keep it out of others. There is, as Krukowski points out, a kind of haughty NIMBYism that surrounds some kinds of sound. Neighborhoods that were neglected for decades become gentrified. The cheap indie club or art space that once set up shop there precisely because it was socially marginal is now forced to contend with neighbors complaining about “the noise.”

This points to something particular in the sonic architecture of late capitalism. How much effort is dedicated to keeping out as much as keeping in? How much do certain kinds of sounds (or silence) signify the increasing privatization of contemporary life? “If you live in a house with the windows pulled shut,” asks Krukowski, “enter your car with windows rolled up, drive to a place where the windows are sealed, and then get back in the car to go back to the house, how much do you interact with the exterior soundscape?”

This walling-off of the social has come to inform just about every human environment. Earbuds are our tool of choice in the public sphere, helping us ignore the existence of other people as much as possible. And the proliferation of streaming services further accelerates this trend toward isolation. But if sound, as a material resource and an experience, has consequence, then it also has, in some way or another, value. And like everything else of value, there is inevitably money to be made from it.

Krukowski points to the example of Spotify. The ubiquitous streaming platform has invited criticism in recent years, and rightly so. Though it hosts nearly the entire history of recorded music, its archive is also glutted with nondescript white noise—the sound of rain patter, ocean waves, and forest winds. The more listeners turn to Spotify in search of these relaxing sounds, the more subscribers are secured in perpetuity.

It’s here that Krukowski lays out what is probably the crux of Why Sound Matters. If sound has value—including exchange value—where exactly does this value come from? Anyone with a half-decent grasp of Marxist economics can probably see where this is going. If sound has exchange value, then it must, by its very nature, involve some form of labor. Even the sounds that would happen without the slightest human intervention require someone to record them if they are to show up on the internet. Krukowski writes:

When Spotify conspires to use its own ambient recordings in place of those posted on its site, it is exercising its corporate power as a platform to supplant the labor of others. Three million daily hours of consumption, or $38 million of potential annual profit, have already been attracted to the platform by that labor—which Spotify would like to claim for itself by asserting there is no difference between various recordings of rain, or waves, or birds, or anything else in nature that we cannot easily identify as individual. And yet the labor represented by each of those recordings is highly individualized. It came from different people.

The extensive amount of labor that goes into making a recording “sound like something,” is a fascinating point. Krukowski writes of nature documentaries’ surprising reliance on field recordings that are manifestly not from where the scenes are shot, and of the history of foley work in radio and film. He also briefly quotes Edgard Varèse, who rejected the idea of being a musician in favor of becoming “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.”

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This grounding of sound—and particularly music—in our conception of labor used to be far more prevalent. The legacy of modernism lent itself to considering all sound—natural or human-made—as a form of music. Think of the unconventional and often decidedly “nonmusical” sounds of musique concrète, or the experiments of Russian composer Arseny Avraamov, attempting to incorporate whole cities and naval fleets into jarring symphonies. These trends, which reflected the high modernist impulse to see human labor as a mechanism for liberation, could take chillingly authoritarian or radically egalitarian forms. Krukowski is, with no room for doubt, a partisan of the latter trend. He also, in opening up a different way of understanding the relationship between sound and music, identifies the overlooked role that the musician (or “sound-arranger”) has in mediating our place in the world.

Krukowski considers two examples. The first is Bernie Krause—the man who, along with his musical partner Paul Beaver, introduced the Moog synthesizer and later worked with the Doors and George Harrison and contributed to such iconic soundtracks as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The second is Chris Watson, founding member of the industrial music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire, who appeared on the group’s first four albums before abruptly departing in 1981. Both abandoned their work in more “conventional” musical forms to embrace field recordings and ecological soundscapes: the wild and untamed winds of the English moors, echoes of Pacific marine life, the old-growth forests of Northern California. As Krukowski writes:

Watson’s and Krause’s long labors of recording soundscapes in the field may have less commercial value than the foley produced for nature documentaries—“natural” sound work they are both also familiar with, and have participated in. Nonetheless, the value of their labor is clear. What they have each recorded is irreplaceable—literally, because so much of it has been lost to climate change and biological extinction. But it is also unreproducible because it is the work of individuals. That the subject matter of their documentation is nature changes nothing of the labor invested in it, even if we can’t tell one wave from the next.

If Krukowski sees the sound-arranger/musician as playing a unique, overlooked role in sensitizing us to a fragile and endangered world, then he aptly also sees a necessity in protecting the interests of these people—as musicians and as laborers. For the past few years, he has been an active and high-profile member of United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). Founded in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, the group has dedicated itself to making the kinds of demands of the music industry that union members make in other lines of work. Moreover, it is worth considering how many other forms of labor—including those typically understood as blue-collar—are being subjected to de-skilling and casualization, particularly as AI continues to run rampant through our cultural landscape.

It is undeniable that the algorithmized music industry is profoundly exploitative. Spotify infamously pays artists fractions of a penny per play. This is, of course, the same streaming service that donated $150,000 to Donald Trump’s inauguration celebrations and whose co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has funneled more than $700 million of his own money into the development of AI-powered weaponized drones. As Arielle Gordon observed in her interview with Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (2025), these donations and investments “made manifest” Spotify’s “unspoken aims […] In the age of the raging narcissist, Spotify makes a streaming platform for the isolated ego, using its music data to mollify and flatter rather than disrupt or provoke.” Pelly’s book, released earlier this year, raises troubling questions about the kinds of people who are shaping our sonic curation of the world. Like Krukowski, she believes we must radically reconsider music’s value, and the consequences of its “immaterialization.”

Why Sound Matters briefly examines the growing trend of concert audiences throwing items at performers whose music they supposedly love. What, Krukowski asks, might possess fans of Harry Styles, Cardi B, Billie Eilish, and many others to lob hard, even sharp, objects at them? What, for that matter, is behind fans going even further—rushing stages, assaulting and injuring artists? Krukowski suggests that the answer might lie, at least in part, in the passive, impersonal methods we are using to consume their music. If their songs are so disposable, then why not the people who create and perform them? If music is less a material creation than something that wafts through the air without consequence, what have artists done to deserve safety and respect? What, for that matter, in this age of increasing hyperautomation, have any of us done? These are bleak suggestions; they’re also hard to dismiss.

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It may be too late to ward off this way of thinking. It’s already here, thriving in Gordon’s “age of the raging narcissist.” So many contemporary structures of thinking and feeling have already been infected and atrophied by it. Yet we should reckon with the economic and cultural logic that led us here. A growing chorus is pointing out (perhaps too late) that the contemporary rise of fascism could only be possible in a world that already treated materials, resources, and people as disposable. Not only has a commoditized way of life truly failed to provide for our needs; it has also blinkered our sense of what a meaningful life even is. Still, at the center of it all lies the unavoidable fact that someone made this system, and it could thus be unmade. What exactly is preventing alternative realities from emerging?

These types of questions are too often answered with fatalistic truisms and rhetorical shrugs designed to shut down rather than foster critical thought. Consider the adage that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s not clear who first said this. Variations of the sentence have been ascribed to Laurie Anderson, Lester Bangs, Elvis Costello, Steve Martin, and David Byrne. In any case, the statement denotes an indolent worldview suited to the weak pastiche that prevails in so much contemporary art. Anything that exists can only be itself, and any other way of regarding it can only be folly. In opposition to this view, Krukowski’s book seems to slyly reply, But why can’t we dance about architecture?

Daniel Ek and his ilk clearly see the ineffabilities of sound and music as something to be stripped down into data to power commodified apps and weaponized drones. So why should we accept other, less inhuman possibilities? Why should the generative move of layering different systems of thought and understanding on top of each other be the purview only of the cynical and the venal?

Why Sound Matters, slender volume that it is, seems less to be hammering at these questions from the outside than burrowing from within them. The idea that something so seemingly ethereal as sound can be a system of thought that shapes reality raises the question of what kinds of experiences sound makes possible. Krukowski isn’t coy about his own allegiances. They are nowhere clearer than in the book’s final pages, where he reflects on the sounds he absorbed and processed during a mass rally at Cambridge Common featuring Bernie Sanders. Yes, there is a bit of John Berger’s socialist-humanist methodology at work here, and some undeniable Marxist influence. Far more accurate, though, is to say that Why Sound Matters resembles the thinking of Henri Lefebvre. Like Lefebvre, Krukowski zooms in on everyday life to such a minute degree that we can almost separate the various shapes and sounds that make it up. And when we can see and hear them so closely, we can’t help but wonder whether some alternative arrangement might be possible.

Sound, it would seem, is in chains, held back from having the impact on our daily lives that it otherwise could. If that were all Why Sound Matters argued, it would be worthwhile. But the book also coaxes us to sit with the implications, to consider them without distraction, to look at the connections revealed when the noise settles down.