Notes on Ping: From the Banal to the Horrifyingly Significant

This paper explores the complex imaginary and material formation of the sound-word »ping«. A most ubiquitous and generic yet heterogenous sound, it is as much audible in remote marine environments and laboratories as it is in domestic interiors. Its emotional charge can be similarly divergent: as a transduced sonar signal, for example, it gathers oceanic intensities, and modulates them for the ear, producing cross-contextual affect. This amplification of ‘threat’ is discussed in relation to the sound’s banal efficiencies in domestic and workspace spaces (where »pings« aggregate as ambient background) when the background acoustic is subdued (Thompson, 2002). Christoph Cox’s notion of sonic ontology (2018) is applied implicitly by way of his discussion of the signal of the actual within the virtual ‘noise’ that constitutes sonic flux. This frames and relativizes the discourse of signal/noise through an exploration of the sound of »ping« and its elevation as a cultural literary reference (in Samuel Beckett’s prose poem). This isolated generic sound (one that is entirely contrived and manufactured) can, it will be argued, operate on an affective spectrum for the listener from the banal to the horrifyingly significant.