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In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a "chirp," a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists' acoustemology-that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their "sonic way of knowing and being." Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a "vocabulary," a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms-Einstein's equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files-operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations-amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors-become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

A personal essay about hearing loss, disability, the amplification of the sound of one's body, the way that hearing and mishearing leads to metaphor, and the losses and gains of disability as well as normative sensing.

I see them in the streets and in the subway, at dollar stores, hospital rooms, and parties. I see them silently dangling from electrical cables and tethered to branches of trees. Balloons are ghost-like entities floating through the cracks of places and memories. They are part of our rituals of loss, celebration and apology. Yet, they are also part of larger systems, weather sciences, warfare and surveillance technologies, colonialist forces and the casual UFO conspiracy theory. For a child, the ephemeral life of the balloon contrasts with the joy of its bright colors and squeaky sounds. Psychologists encourage the use of the balloon as an analogy for death, while astronomers use it as a representation for the cosmological inflation of the universe. In between metaphors of beginning and end, the balloon enables dialogues about air, breath, levity, and vibration.

"Voice Yard is an online space created to encourage people to listen and be heard. Used to perceiving our world mostly visually, we sometimes forget that sound is another important means of perception and communication. Every object reveals itself not only through its shapes and colors, but also through sounds, sometimes even more telling about its essence. We, humans, have always used our voices as an important means of self-expression and communication. There are familiar metaphors revealing its existential importance, such as "inner voice" and "voice of the heart," referring to an intimate "true nature" inherent in this human ability."

"With The Clearing, composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and writer JJJJJerome Ellis establishes a new metaphor that frames speech dysfluency-stuttering in particular-as a space for possibility rather than a pathology."

"Turning Towards a Radical Listening is an immersive audio-visual metaphor in which an audience is asked to reconcile how their sonic experience is represented, documented, given language and transcribed by AI algorithms over the course of apx. 70 minutes. The resulting nonsense concrete poem demands consideration of how we exist between input and output-holding space for us to tune into what can be lost in translation. "

"They grow in secret and yet form the largest living organisms in the world: mycelia, the subterranean filament of fungi. In this, the sound artist Antye Greie-Ripatti {AGF} sees a metaphor for political activism in the age of the Internet. Here, too, small cells are interlacing in the subsurface to effect the greater. For her radio composition "Mycelium" Greie-Ripatti therefore sonifies the vital functions of fungi and contrasts them with voices of activists from all over the world. This creates a multi-lingual sound network, which transports a quiet but sustainable utopia: Together we are strong."