We live in times of rapid digital development, where especially the latest innovations in artificial intelligence have come to challenge the status and functions of knowledge and educational practices (Zhang & Aslan, 2021). At stake is not only the survival of the subject matter as a specific content of knowledge worth conserving for future generations, but also the question about what makes knowledge meaningful, relevant and worthwhile studying in the first place. In this paper I will discuss the possibilities for education and teaching to bring life into subject matter, as a content of knowledge, in ways that cannot be done through digital technologies alone (c.f., Stiegler, 2010). In this discussion, I develop the concept of acousmatic teaching as a practice that brings forth the material, sonorous and transformative functions of the subject matter.

In its most basic definition, music is a human form of expression that uses the physicality of air to produce vibrations that encounter and resonate with the minds and bodies of human beings (Nachmanovitch, 1990). On the one hand we can understand music as a vibrating gestalt of sounds that confronts us (Bucht, 2009), and on the other hand we can understand ourselves as musical configurations that confront the world we inhabit (Lingis, 2004). The genre acousmatic music explores the spatial and material aspects of music and focuses on sounds rather than on what produces these sounds. The materiality of the sounding object and the space it creates produces an acousmatic materiality that calls for heightened attention (Bertrand 2020). Jettisoning the idea of music as a linear and rhythmic process founded in a tonal center, we can describe it as a sonorous and acousmatic space in motion that manifests itself through factors that allude to, e.g., nearness and distance, or difference and identity (Rytzler 2023). Acousmatic music calls for the listener to perceive sound with a reduced sensibility to the sound’s identity (Frappier 2020).

If we follow the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière, acousmatic teaching would be about performing a dis-identification of the subject matter in order to make it accessible to the students as well as a dis-identification of the students in order to make them encounter the subject matter as unique subjects (Biesta 2014). In acousmatic teaching the subject matter, by addressing the students, produces a partage du sensible that enables new things to be said, thought or done. As such, the encounter between the students and the subject matter could be described as one of resonance, to speak with the sociological thinker Hartmut Rosa. Rosa (2019) uses the notion of resonance as a productive contrast to Marx’ notion of alienation as it describes transformative encounters between humans and the world. In times where the state of knowledge as we know it is at stake, Rosa's notion reminds us that knowledge is something that connects humans with the world, that situates them in the world and something that lets them discover, encounter and navigate in the world. Bildung, according to Rosa, is deeply connected with resonance. When being in a state of resonance, Rosa claims, we never stay the same. Building occurs when a relevant domain of the world starts to speak to us, when it addresses us. This experience of resonance transforms us, and this encapsulates what it means to exist as a human being.

In order to develop the concept of acousmatic teaching, the paper draws on discussions from aesthetic theory (Rancière 2014), music philosophy (Bucht, 2009; Lingis 2004) and sociology (Rosa 2017).

Music and teaching are both about identifying new territories and new spaces for perceptions. Acousmatic teaching is a way of attending to that which escapes contours, surfaces, and ideal forms but still invites us to speak, think and feel. In order for the subject matter as a thing of the world to sing with its one voice, teaching practices need to develop and encourage a listening mode that attends to the abstract timbre of the teaching content rather than on its mimetic and representative aspects. In this space of acousmatic teaching, students will confront the sound of the subject matter in its pure materiality. I suggest that acousmatic teaching can contribute to the development of new modalities of human cognition that can cope with and within the accelerating digitalization of modern public education. I hope that the paper's suggested shift of focus, from understanding subject matter as a representation of the world to subject matter as the world presenting itself, can contribute to discussions that are relevant for a public European education that still values Bildung and Growth, especially in times of rapid digital and technological development.

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