Nuno Fonseca

Music takes sound as its fundamental material — “sound in itself.” It shapes it with form, pulse, and rules to occupy a defined temporal span. Yet the essence of music resides in the sound itself, its primal source. Especially from the 20th century onwards, new artistic forms have emerged that treat sound — both auditory perception and sonic experience — as both starting point and destination. This represents an ontological shift: rather than treating sound merely as a vehicle for language or traditional tonal music, it is now valued as an autonomous phenomenon, with its own existence, texture, materiality, and presence in space and time.
The ontology of sound assumes that listening is more than simply hearing — it is a mode of being in the world, a sensitive form of perception that merges subject and object into a single aesthetic experience, freed from conventional narrative, representational, or musical functions. Within this framework, a new aesthetics of attention emerges, where sound is understood as an event and listening as a critical practice. Contemporary sound art of this kind invites us not only to listen, but to think with our ears — to rediscover the world through its most intimate vibrations.