This final chapter addresses how this material voice might become intelligible within our communities, and how it might then contribute to our collective narration of the worlds we hope to create. As the book progresses, it follows the brass of the chimeracord from its dispersal in mineral ore through its extraction, refining, and distribution. At this point, I look more closely at its fabrication, through which it is transformed from cast sheets, rods, and tubes into finished musical instruments. I borrow from Sylvia Wynter’s framework of the overrepresentation of Man and Annie Goh’s recent application of Wynter’s work in sound studies to address the complementary ideological and acoustic overrepresentations of brass instruments (Goh 2019). Following Goh’s contestation of Western acoustemological hegemonies, I compare the finely-tuned acoustic profiles of finished brass instruments to the starkly visceral soundscapes of the workshop, replete with the shuddering, shrieking rejoinders of brass not-yet-tamed. In turning an ear to the sound of these materials-in-flight, I return to the concept of marronage and the role of the plot as both vector of escape and network of complicity (Diouf 2014). I ask how we might attune ourselves to these voices of material marronage, reorienting our workshop, community, and performance spaces towards the “waveforms” of their “reparative rebellious inventions” (McKittrick 2016: 88). In considering how the concept of voice can be returned to its sonic materiality from discourses that have overrepresented it as political agency, I build on Zeynep Bulut’s reconception of “voice-as-skin” (Bulut 2025: 6): “a shared surface, a multisensory interface that behaves both as a boundary and as a web of connection across various bodies and environments” (Bulut 2025: 1). Drawing on my own previous work with the philosophy of Karen Barad, I map the membranous relationships that Bulut describes across discontinuous zones of space and time, examining how discrete agencies at great spatiotemporal removes coalesce in sound through the embodied activity of collective voicing (Toksöz Fairbairn 2022). I position the chimeracord as an agent of what Sara Ahmed describes as “‘becoming oblique’ of the world” (Ahmed 2006: 162), exploring how its discordant hybridity invites us, as listeners, to engage in constructive, collective, and intransitive complicities. Whereas previous chapters revolve around media of material agency, this conclusion follows that material fugitivity into the borderland (Diouf 2014), reorienting our attention towards the human capacity for responding to this material agency and collaborating in its communal creativity. This reorientation situates materials at the center of their own story, inviting our complicity while still voicing their own narrative self-(re)generation. It closes by turning back to the chimeracords themselves as they diffract the bodies and spaces they encounter into innumerable strands of joyfully hybrid reverberation.
