Ubiquity

An effect linked to spatio-temporal conditions that expresses the difficulty or impossibility of locating a sound source. In the major variant of this effect, the sound seems to come from everywhere and from nowhere at the same time. In a minor variant, sound seems to come simultaneously from a singular source and from many sources. Beyond the simple phenomenon of sound reflections that limit localization, the ubiquity effect opens the way to the metaphysical dimension of sound. Diffused, unstable, omnidirectional sound presents an intrinsic tendency toward ubiquity – in fact it is impossible to delimit or materialize the "location" of a sound. Inversely, the notion of ubiquity, immaterial in principle, could not be better evoked than by sound – it cannot be seen, it does not "manifest" itself, and it uses other sensorial channels to be revealed, among which hearing seems to predominate. There is therefore a fundamental link between sound and ubiquity. Certain sounds are in fact more "present" than others: any "sound background" – an urban drone, the purring of a machine in a reverberant room, or the bodily hum of an organism – can be described as a ubiquitous sound in the very literal sense that it comes from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. But these different sounds do not produce an effect; rather, they are characterized by the fact that we forget them and no longer hear them. The sound itself is ubiquitous, but there is no ubiquity effect. For the ubiquity effect to occur, we must consciously look for the source location of the sound, and fail, at least for a moment, to identify it.