From the dialectical sounds of music to diasonics: rethinking the role of sound in Adorno and Cage

This thesis develops two theoretical frameworks—which I call “dialectical sound” and “diasonics”—to reconceptualize the role of sound in philosophical criticism of music and the sonic arts. While Western art music has historically dominated philosophical discussions of music, recent writing increasingly engages with sound as a broader category. This raises questions about shifting from music as a set of historically specific cultural forms to sound as a medium of criticism. Rather than opposing sound to music, the thesis proposes dialectical sound and diasonics as approaches that extend critical insights from the philosophy of music to explore sound's broader potential. Building on Adorno's philosophy of music, the concept of dialectical sound helps us understand how sound both embodies and engages with societal contradictions through organized relationships that resist resolution. Drawing on Hegel's dialectics and displacing Benjamin's conception of the dialectical image into a sonic framework, the concept of dialectical sound reveals how sound can function as a transformative medium that disrupts fixed meanings and enables reimaginings of the contradictions of modernity.
Central to this approach is Adorno's emphasis on the musical score as a site where dialectical struggles are embedded. The score transcends its instructional purpose, becoming a space where written and imagined elements interact to evoke sonic potential beyond mere auditory experience. This understanding of sound's metaphorical dimension allows for deeper engagement with social and historical tensions, particularly in examining how musical works mirror and critique societal alienation.
The thesis pursues this analysis across three domains: music, language, and psychoanalysis. In music, it fills a gap in the secondary literature by examining the relationship between music and language in Adorno’s philosophy—particularly through analysis of how the composers Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen employ dialectical sound to engage with social tensions; with particular attention to Stockhausen's electronic innovations and their exploration of music's mimetic potential. In language, it addresses an overlooked dimension of Adorno's thought by uncovering how sound's historical embedding in linguistic structures offers critical perspectives on philosophical works by Hegel and Heidegger, and literary works by Joyce and Beckett. An excursus on psychoanalysis explores sound's catalytic role in facilitating shifts in consciousness within therapeutic settings, using Berg's Wozzeck as a case study.
Inspired by John Cage's approach to sound and James Joyce's linguistic innovations, the thesis introduces diasonics—a conceptual framework that explores how sound can relate through coexistence and emergence, rather than through opposition. This framework invites rethinking traditional binaries—such as subject/object, culture/nature, and mimesis/rationality—not through opposition or negation, but through layered, coexistent relationality. Through analysis of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Cage’s Roaratorio, the thesis shows how diasonics opens up new possibilities for thinking about sound, relation, and structure. By treating dialectical sound and diasonics as complementary frameworks—one attentive to structured relationships grounded in dialectical tension and negation, the other to relational emergence beyond these categories—the thesis offers a broader approach to the critical potential of sound. It bridges gaps between music criticism, linguistic analysis, and philosophical inquiry, offering new methodological tools for examining how sound can both criticize existing structures of meaning and imagine new forms of relation.