01/2026NEW

Imagining the Non-Present: Thought Experiments on Rich Temporality in Sound

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Several stacked pages of hand-written eighteenth-century music notation, ripped across the staff line.
Edited by Carlo Diaz.
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Artistic researchers and social scientists theorise non-chronological time in music.

Imagination is part of the practice of nearly every musician. But does this faculty only aid in the preparation of music—practising, rehearsing, devising, composing—or is it more fundamental to the art form? By recasting temporality from a chronology of past, present, and future to a phenomenology of present and non-present, this publication seeks to elucidate the relationship between one’s situation within and curiosity beyond the present across a variety of musical practices. Through studies of sampling and archiving, variation and silence, history and utopia, forgery and counterfactuals, the contributors articulate in polyphony a chronologically conjoined identity for the not here, not now.

Contents

Introduction
CARLO DIAZ

Not Yet and Already There: On the Imagination of Real Life
TIM INGOLD

Drawing on Bergson, Dewey, and Whitehead, this chapter rethinks creativity through improvisation, musical performance, and calligraphy, proposing imagination not as innovation or design but as participation in an unfolding and continually self-transforming world.

Other Presents
JENNIFER WALSHE

Through speculative Irish avant-garde archives, neural-network improvisation, and machine-generated musical histories, this chapter explores how artistic practice can interrogate surveillance capitalism, personalised media environments, and the unstable structures of feeling through which contemporary life is increasingly mediated.

Transcending Time and the Self: The Shared Political and Social Potential of Contemporary Composition and Historically-Minded Performance
PRIYA SATIA

Exploring history, Romanticism, and political thought, this chapter rethinks historically informed performance and contemporary composition as convergent imaginative practices through which music mediates selfhood, temporality, collective experience, and possibilities for social transformation.

Speaking Nearby History: The Fictional, the Historical, the Imagined, and the Real
MARK DYER

Medieval music manuscripts, GAN machine learning, and artistic research converge in an exploration of parafictional histories, historical plausibility, and the shifting boundaries between archival reconstruction, speculation, and musical meaning.

Imagining the Past Through the Present: Questioning Notions of Sameness and Difference Through the Virtual and the Actual
BRYN HARRISON

How repetition alters musical perception is central to this exploration of digital looping, suspended temporality, and the shifting relationship between live performance, recorded sound, and experiences of duration, memory, and becoming.

Mental-Dependent Musical Objects: Framing and Objectification in My Musical Practice
PABLO GALAZ SALAMANCA

From Beethoven motifs to contemporary compositional practice, musical objects are reimagined as unstable and allographic entities whose meanings emerge through framing, perception, cognition, and the shifting relationships between notation, sound, gesture, and interpretation.

Sonic Images, Dreams, and Hallucinations
CAROLINE WILKINS

Case studies of the Stegreif Orchestra and in audible: The Baroque Cello Project examine how musical performance can explore improvisation, choreography, historical practice, and sonic experimentation through fluid relationships between bodies, technologies, listening, and imagination.

Plastic Time: An In-Progress Provocation to Dialectic Immaterialism
JAMES WOOD

What if musical time is neither linear nor quantised? Drawing on hardcore music, Ligeti, Mingus, and rhythm theory, this chapter proposes “plastic time” as a non-Euclidean and anti-foundational approach to musical temporality.

Closing Forum
CARLO DIAZ, JOÃO CARLOS SANTOS, PRIYA SATIA, AND MICHAEL SHANKS

The closing forum brings together perspectives from archaeology, historiography, and artistic research to discuss temporality, rhetoric, embodiment, heritage, phenomenology, and the imaginative reconstruction of pasts, presents, and possible futures.

Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Publication Colophon

Cite as

Diaz, Carlo, ed. Imagining the Non-Present: Thought Experiments on Rich Temporality in Sound. SONUS Series. Ghent: Orpheus Instituut, 2026. https://doi.org/10.47041/SONUS.2026.2.

Colophon

Date
20 January 2026
Review status
Double-blind peer review
License
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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