Sound and its subcultures can be understood to offer more dynamic ways of accounting for bodies, movements, and events. In the last 15 years or so, renewed interest in sound-based scholarship and the increasing significance of the acoustic—as simultaneously a site for analysis, a medium for aesthetic engagement, and a model for theorization—has been identified as ‘the sonic turn’ (Drobnick). This ACRU symposium traces the potentialities running across the sonic, from the natural soundscape to hyper-computational processing, and asks, what is it about sound that can be said to enable new modes of thought, perception and experience?