Hi Nico! Great article, thank you for sharing. Although the topic of sound and ANC algorithms isn’t something I’ve deeply engaged with before (Spotify tells me I barely hit 100 hours of listening last year), your exploration of noise and its manipulable realities feels unexpectedly close to my own research into the conceptual and aesthetic figure of background and foreground.

I was especially interested by your discussion of noise as socially constructed (via Hagood) and the role of ANC in regulating and deleting it. This reminds me of how platforms like Zoom blur our visual backgrounds, enforcing a similar logic of selective erasure. In both cases, algorithms make decisive cuts into sensory environments, collapsing heterogeneity into something sanitised, yet neither fully real nor entirely simulated – a hybrid.

Your point about the agency of the listener being removed, and media creating perceptual absence while remaining invisible, resonated deeply. I wonder how this logic extends beyond sound into the broader algorithmic mediation of perception. It seems to align with Simondon’s and Deleuze’s ideas of intensity.

It feels like the concept of heterogeneity might connect your argument with Megan’s essay, and I very much look forward to working together

Nico - Induction of Sonic Distance

Induction of Sonic Distance

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