Sound by Friction is a program I designed for the project “Fear, Love and Revolution: A Space for Collective Thought, Workshops and Artistic Interventions,” curated by Inés Plasencia at Intermediae, Matadero Madrid, in 2022. I proposed a concept of the sonic based on emotional approaches to fear.

In this idea of sound by friction, I suggest that—beyond discourse, beyond spoken or written words—sound and music articulate a different relationship between body and time, between our personal and shared experiences. Friction was presented in this session from the perspective of how a body can be affected by a sonic body. Under the reverberation of sonic frequencies (more or less abstract), physical and mental states are mobilized by sound, capable of becoming empathic or traumatic, evoking emotions and producing meaning.

Friction emerges from musical mixing, from the collisions within listening processes, and also from the frictions of histories. Among the unspoken things, political forms of sound appear—forms that materially speak about social histories, life experiences, and ways of inhabiting the world. Within a rhythmic pattern, one can trace from the ancestral relevance of sonic storytelling to the violence of appropriation—where emancipatory forms may arise in their capacity to resist historical canons and the determination of musical genre.

From multiple perspectives, the performativity of rhythm is a language that engages with a body and an audience—where terror also speaks in tones of access, segregation, and inclusion. Political debates open up in which a sonic dimension of fear emerges as a relational strategy of bodies affected by noise.

Sound by Friction, ad-hoc piece by Álvaro del Fresno and Daniel Florez ©Intermediae. Photos available at Intermediae’s Flickr.