This issue’s essays explore one of sound’s most fascinating and yet elusive aspects: the unsound. This is the realm of the sonic that lies beyond auditory perception: imagined sounds; sounds that are transduced into non-auditory, ultra- and sub-sonic registers; sounds that are as yet unheard or are heard but resist being understood and mastered through what Derrida had famously called their “ideality.” But the concept of the unsound does more than denote an absence. As several of the essays gathered here show, the unsound also enables different kinds of presences that would otherwise be unavailable through more conventional conceptual and audile techniques such as the sounds of schizophrenia or dementia.
