Definition of Sound Fossils:

• sound fossils are a form of sonic research that refers to an ancient record of an acoustic activity, a sound trapped or indexed in material form.
• central to the field of archeoacoustics and in the discourse of paleosonics
• Archeoacoustics is primarily dedicated to reconstructing aural and audible histories of ancient sites, focusing on, for example, the acoustics of ancient rock art sites or the influence of sound in the architectural design of tombs or burial sites.
• Paleosonics in contrast is committed to ‘hearing’ prehistoric environments.
• To think of a sound fossil, then, is to grapple with dialectics: dialectics of life and non-life, organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate.
• Contemporary sound fossils also unearth the existence of non-human audio-recording technologies, enabling us to listen to pre-human soundscapes such as, for example, the sound of the Big Bang.

Sound Fossils in Contemporary Art:

• A mineral ontology of contemporary Art might contribute or detract from concepts of material animism. (Testing out the logic of an ethics of being in which the living-non-living binary might no longer apply, and to see what this teaches us about the new materialism’s of contemporary art.)
• Paying attention to the materiality of objects forces a confrontation with art’s material conditioning. (The ghosts of post-minimalist sensibility in which representation gives way to presentation. The new materiality of art is instead guided by principles of inaccessibility, withdrawal, and blindness.)
• Uneasy collaboration between non-human/human but not exclusive to humans (Timothy Morton and Elizabeth Grosz)
• Sensation as non-organic life
• The material trace
• “liveness of art”
• art is so often used as a limit case by object-oriented philosophers.
• Laurent Grasso’s exhibition, “The Horn Perspective” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2009) and “Sound Fossil” at Sean Kelley Gallery in New York (2010).
• Caillois’ mineral collection in the Museum of Natural History in Paris and his (1966) book, “Pierres” (Stones).
• Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson exhibition work, “Making a Record (Diamond, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald)” (2009-2014) and “a drusy vein” (2014.

Philosophy:

• The sound of the creation of the universe is exemplary of a kind of fossilization that gained prominence in philosophical discourse following the publication of Quentin Meillassoux’s book Après la finitude (After Finitude) in 2006. In this text, Meillassoux coined the term the archi-fossile (arche-fossil) to describe a remnant of the universe confirmed by science as existing before the beginnings of terrestrial life.
• For Povinelli, the archi-fossile instead functions as a ‘canny’ material mobilization of a widespread ‘self-involvement with things that existed before we got here. Povinelli’s critique that his invocation of the archi-fossile hijacks the language of power. As Povinelli urges, an object-event that humans are accountable for and responsible to, rather than the result of a linear dislocation of past into present—then the pull of the absolute results only in political evisceration, creating ‘social tenses’ or moral hierarchies that work in service of what Foucault would have understood as biopolitics.
• The mechanism by which the process of non-human/human collaboration is the trace: the material trace of time-outside-thought, manifested in the present. (if iteration is the possibility of repetition, the trace continues to function irrespective of whether there is life or not.)
• The Derridean trace - Derrida vitalist philosophy: Christopher Braddock’s challenge to ‘think all signification as delayed trace and all trace as animate’ (the trace predates perception, is a quality of temporal endurance, structured by temporal succession of of the interval.) (absent presence/absent present)
• “Ancestral time” - ancestral in the present
• Espacement
• In considering the implications of this expanded concept of trace in which the border between the living and the dead is rendered irrelevant if not entirely obsolete, two speculative potentials arise: (i) the possibility of being without life and (ii) the possibility of time without thought. Both address the capacity for being out of time.
• (Hagglund) Derrida’s ‘organic chauvinism’, in which both language and the trace are viewed as synchronous exclusively with living beings. He writes: ‘Everything that is subject to succession is subject to the trace, whether it is alive or not’.
• (Derrida) what unites living beings or what produces their commonality is the ‘finitude of their life’
• (Writing and Difference of 1967), Derrida insisted similarly that ‘traces thus produce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the period of their erasure’

Science:

• In 2012, a team of scientists published an astonishing reconstruction of a song produced by a cricket living in a Jurassic forest, after finding a pristine specimen of a 16-million-year-old fossil of the creature.
• In 2016, the discovery of a fossilized voice-box from a bird living in the age of the dinosaurs similarly provided new insights into a ‘cretaceous soundscape’, and added further volume to the audibility of the past.
• Robert Dicke, formulated a hypothesis that, if the Big Bang had occurred, traces of low-level radiation should be dispersed throughout the universe.
• In 1965, while studying the radio emissions of the Milky Way, radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson picked up the audible record of the creation of the universe: the sound of the beginning of time. This 13.8-billion-year-old sonic residue, or ‘sound fossil’ as it was initially dubbed, was subsequently identified as cosmic microwave background noise, and Penzias and Wilson later received the Nobel Prize for their discovery.
• (40,000 - 70,000 year old Caves in Kimberley, Australia) Series of images (Gwion Gwion), fungi inhabited paintings - simultaneously preserving and reanimating the image in an ongoing cycle of preservation and decay. Because the pigments are literally alive, all attempts to date these works of rock art through carbon analysis have been thwarted. (Transference of ancestral lineages)