Sonic Aesthetics
Did you hear that? I've said it for years, in the middle of a conversation, suddenly pointing at the air. A transformer humming low. A door closing in a specific way. A bird's wings on takeoff. I've had this habit for years without a word for it. A few weeks ago I decided to look for it.
A search that turned personal
I was researching field recording for video games — how sound designers capture real-world sounds to build the sonic world of a game. The search took an unexpected detour and brought me to J. R. R. Tolkien.
Tolkien made a term popular in the middle of the twentieth century: phonaesthetics — the aesthetics of spoken-language sound. The idea that some sounds in speech are more beautiful than others — not because of what they mean, but because of how they're built. Cellar door sounds more beautiful than dishwasher, even though both name similar everyday things.
Tolkien took this seriously. He didn't just write fantasy — he built entire languages, and inside those languages, he chose every name for how it sounded. Mordor isn't dark by accident; its name piles up hard consonants and low vowels. Lothlórien isn't luminous by accident; it flows in liquids and open vowels. Every place, every character, every race in his universe carries a name that sounds like what it is. That match between sound and feeling is phonaesthetics applied to making things.
When a creative process is done with that kind of care — every element chosen with that intention — the result tends to feel beautiful almost on its own. The beauty comes from the depth and the care poured into the work. That's why great sound design in games and animation has always pulled me in: behind every decision is someone who thought this sound and not another, for these reasons. The sound designer's style isn't a visible signature; it lives in thousands of small decisions piled up.
The problem with the word
Here's where I tripped: phonaesthetics is about the sound of spoken language. It's a small corner of phonetics and poetics. It doesn't describe what I experience when I hear steps in the snow and say, "That's a nice sound."
What I'm chasing — the pleasure of sound that isn't language, sound as something you can love for itself — has other names. Several, actually.
Sonic aesthetics, more common in sound studies and sound art. Aesthetics of sound, more descriptive. Acousmatic listening and reduced listening — concepts Pierre Schaeffer worked out in the 1940s — describe how to hear a sound for itself, apart from where it came from. Each one covers a different slice of the territory.
None of them lives in the everyday vocabulary of people who work with audio. We say tone, vibe, feel, character — pointing at the same place without naming it. And the word I thought I had — phonaesthetics — turned out to belong to a different field.
So here I am, in public, without the word I thought I had. I'll call this territory sonic aesthetics while I keep looking. But the label matters less than the territory. The territory exists, whatever we call it.
That search for the right word turned out to point somewhere personal.
The realization
I barely play instruments. I don't think in music theory. And that gap — between knowing too little to be a "real musician" and still ending up with music people dance to — is where this piece lives.
My music was always sound design for my storytelling, dressed up as songs. I just didn't know it until I chased the word long enough.
Every track started with a sound, not a melody. When I sat down to produce, I wasn't looking for a chord progression or a rhythmic idea — I was looking for a sound that mattered to me. Melody, structure, transitions — all of that was scaffolding around the chosen sounds. The final format just happened to be a song.
When I see it this way, my path stops looking scattered. I started as a junior sound designer in Mexico. Life took me through other roles inside audio — rigger, technician, booking, promoter, producer, performer, mixing engineer. Electronic music let me keep using that muscle without calling myself a sound designer formally. And now, on purpose, I'm trying to come back to that first love with everything the road taught me.
It's not a transition. It's a return with vocabulary and adaptability.
The method, when there is one
If you build music from a melody, you ask: what notes? What chord? What shape?
If you build from sonic aesthetics, you ask something else: what sound, why this one, and what does it do to the room?
In practice, three things do most of the work:
Pleasure as compass. A sound earns its place if you want to keep listening to it. If you find your hand reaching for skip, the sound is wrong. The body knows before the brain catches up.
Coexistence over hierarchy. Two beautiful sounds placed badly will fight. Two ordinary sounds placed well will sing. The art is less about finding rare sounds and more about how the ones you have share a room.
The structure is already there. Your ear has absorbed thousands of hours of music. The structure lives in you whether you can name it or not. Working from sound doesn't mean working without rules — it means the rules run underneath, out of sight.
These aren't principles anyone taught me. They're what I noticed I was doing after years of doing it. What this post helped me see is that they have a name. They live inside a field that already exists. The frame is called, more or less, sonic aesthetics.
The invitation
Next time you hear a sound that catches you, pause.
Don't analyze. Don't compare. Don't try to name what it does. Just stay with it for a few extra seconds. Notice that it wasn't the song that caught you, or the source, or the context. It was the sound itself — doing something specific, in a specific way, that your body answered before your mind had time to label it.
That's the practice. Whether it has a name matters less than it seemed when I started looking.
— Andrés 🫀