Making Sense of Sound

What makes sense before - or indeed after or without - interpretation? What’s missing from interpretation? This talk considers the Jamaican dancehall sound system session as an experimental apparatus for exploring the ways we make sense of our experience of the world prior to its analysis. The supra-liminal extremes of sonic dominance in dancehall session provide experimental material for an understanding of what is described as a sonic logos. This is multi-sensory analogical approach to making sense draws on the connoisseurship that the sound system crew have of the qualities of sonic experience. Such embodied way of making sense operate through ratio, patterning, gradients of intensity and the rhetorics of the body, rather than through the traditions of representation, code or analytical interpretation.