2. Place-Thought

Despite its intricate entanglement with the history of Western music, tonality, and culture, the monochord is still an instrument: a string stretched in space. Before its divisions and proportions could support the millennia of cultural baggage that has since accrued, it was a construction of string, wood, or metal, assembled from materials at hand and intimately connected to the physical and artisanal spaces in which it was developed. By looking closely at the monochord’s roots in craft and materiality—and by comparing them to the genesis of its doppelgänger in these pages, the chimeracord—, chapter 2 proposes that the sound it produces is a complex synthesis of the workshop, the hands, and the materials that commingled in its fabrication. By refusing to see its voice as an isolated physical vibration in a particular time and space, this chapter asserts that the sonic presence of an instrument inheres not only in its physical vibration, but also in the threads of activity and materiality that run through its construction to its sounding form. Drawing on non-Western traditions of thought, and with a particular focus on orality and sound in the works of indigenous philosophers from North America (Cordova 2007, Deloria Jr 1973/2003, Deloria Jr 1999, Simpson 2014, Borrows 2018, Watts 2015, Todd 2016, et al.), I introduce conceptions of sound that center duration, entanglement, and emplacement. These engagements will reveal sound as a form of thinking and living within an ongoing continuity, inseparable from its surrounding community, ecosystem, and environment. I propose that they can be interpreted through a lens of sonic materialism, embedding sound in the site of its material fabrication through a dynamic form of “Place-Thought” (Watts 2015).