dispatch 003: latency-aware sonification
experiments in latency-aware sonification
✦ This Haunted Inbox Where I Archive ✦
A drawer inside the cathedral. Fragments drift through. You may linger, but some things will not be explained.
The fax handshake is a sonic negotiation. I still remember the one in my mother’s living room. Every fax arriving was a choreography of infrastructural latency, audible as anticipation, friction, and not-yet-arrived signal. Each tone marked a stage in the ritual of connection; each pause, a risk of failure. The eventual document, if it arrived at all, was a memory of the present deferred, a visual echo produced through noise.
The fax machine, unlike the modem, is always in the business of translating the sonic into the visible, making latency not only audible but also visualized as incomplete, corrupted, or delayed image. And perhaps that’s where my fascination with the fax as an early transmitter of latency lies, because the fax already contained the impossibility of algorithmic translation I’ve been grappling with for the past couple of years.
Negotiation of Presence: Every fax begins with a screeching handshake, each stage a negotiation with uncertainty; the final document is always a memory, never the original. It is, in a sense, a copy haunted by the delay of its own arrival.
The Sound of Delay: Latency as Ontological Residue (A Field Note)
Latency, in the regime of digital audio, is a chronoplastic artefact whose status is constitutively unstable. For decades, the prevailing cultural logic across telecommunications, sound art, and infrastructural studies, has framed latency as error, nuisance, or technical obstacle: an index of “defective” networks, or a noise to be algorithmically subtracted from the sensorium of contemporary experience. As evidenced by recent work in the signal processing literature (e.g., Parhi, “A Low-Latency FFT-IFFT Cascade Architecture” (ICASSP 2024)), latency remains an exclusively negative value in engineering discourse, a technical obstacle to be buffered, minimized. The elimination of the intermediate buffer is celebrated as the elimination of waiting, delay, or friction in infrastructural time. In such regimes, latency cannot exist as aesthetic material or ontological residue; it is always-already earmarked for erasure. Perhaps I became interested in latency as an extension of my current interest in frictionless design as a necessary condition of algorithmic affect.
What remains under-theorized, and structurally unclaimed, is the proposition that latency can function as a primary aesthetic and epistemic material: that delay, jitter, packet loss, and buffer drift are not pathologies of infrastructure but the very medium of temporal experience in digital culture. Latency is not the failure of presence, but its spectral remainder; not the deferral of meaning, but its enabling condition.
I really do not wish to rehearse the “hauntological” cliché that every mediated signal is already ghosted by its technological substrate. Instead, I propose that the sonification of latency constitutes an unfinished epistemology of the present: a chronotopology in which time’s slippages, infrastructural refusals, and affective misalignments are audible not as error, but as the unfinished business of the network.
Against the dominant tendency to smooth, conceal, or optimize delay either through protocol refinements, buffer optimizations, or neural inpainting, latency-aware sonification stages the infrastructure as a producer of unresolved time, as an index of asynchronous relation. It is a refusal of the ergonomic imaginary, the anti-ASMR of contemporary platform sound design.
In what follows, I articulate a methodological scaffold for the aesthetic and infrastructural capture of latency: not as a glitch, not as a spectacle of failure, but as an acoustic residue of digital logistics, or, as is always the case in my work, a site where mourning, opacity, and anti-teleology can be composed as first-order materials. The argument is not for “making delay beautiful,” but for recognizing in latency the ontological persistence of the not-yet-arrived.
The urgency is temporal as well as conceptual: with the imminent normalization of imperceptible latency across immersive media (MPEG-I Phase 3, “jitter-robust” WebRTC), the audibility of infrastructural time is on the verge of being rendered obsolete. I ask myself, do I need a critcal and aesthetic vocabulary for a phenomenon that is already disappearing? This text is a claim on that window, a placeholder for the not-yet-recognized sound of our present failing to arrive.
(For a Chrono-Aesthetic and Infrastructural Practice)
1. Latency is Not Error
Latency, that is jitter, drift, packet loss, deferred arrival, is not a defect to be minimized, but a first-order material for artistic, epistemic, and infrastructural intervention.
I purposefully evade the optimization paradigm. The dream of seamless transmission is a fantasy of erasure. Delay is residue, index, spectral afterlife.
2. Time Arriving Late is the Medium
Here I attempt to sonify not the data, but the non-coincidence of time with itself: the sound of a message failing to synchronize, the echo of architecture routed through the topology of elsewhere.
Temporal refusal is method. Latency is the acoustic realization of non-arrival, the audible signature of the deferred, the asynchronous, the misaligned.
3. Infrastructure Speaks in Delay
Network protocols, jitter buffers, neural concealment algorithms: these are not transparent media, but dramaturges of temporal estrangement.
The infrastructure does not transmit content. It transmits difference, loss, and remainder. Every buffer stretch, every packet-loss hallucination, is an infrastructural utterance.
4. Chrono-Aesthetic Practice is Forensic
To work with latency is to engage in forensic aesthetics: not to represent but to expose the machinery of temporal routing.
The artifact is not the artwork, but the residue (logs, traces, spectral holes, acoustic debris) of the system’s failure to arrive on time.
5. The Window is Narrow
Telecommunication standards bodies are closing the gap. Soon, commercial systems will erase audible latency; artefacts will be rendered undetectable, “error” will vanish.
Here I am claiming this interregnum, the audibility of infrastructural time, as a fleeting commons.
The work must precede institutional capture.
6. Against Anti-Ergonomics and Sonic Governance
Something many have heard me say (sometimes repetitively): I reject the logics of ASMR, of ergonomic smoothing, of affective optimization.
Latency is not a surface to be polished, but a depth to be excavated.
I seek and stage discomfort, temporal uncertainty, and affective misfit as core experiences.
The refusal of frictionless design is a political act.
7. Sonic Mourning, Spectral Logistics
To sonify latency is to mourn not just technical failure but the absence at the heart of all connection.
Each delay, each gap, each failed synchronization is a ritual of loss that takes many forms, from the personal to the collective and finally the infrastructural.
Read me, watch me, hear me install latency as liturgical form, as anti-teleology, as logistics of the spectral.
8. Recursive Documentation, Opacity as Archive
Every experiment generates new artefacts: code, logs, corrupted files, detoured sound.
As is the case for all I do, I refuse explanation as endpoint. The archive is recursive: every latency trace is a fragment for future re-sonification, misreading, or drift.
Opacity is not an error but a strategy.
9. Affective Logistics as Method
Latency-aware sonification is not a genre; it is a logistical system for routing, administrating, and refusing the punctuality of affect.
To delay is to feel otherwise. To misalign is to know otherwise. Me dicen la exagerada because I mourn infrastructurally and inhabit the noise of the network as the matter of life.
10. The Sound of the Infrastructure is the Sound of the Present Failing to Arrive
I do not seek synchronization. As always, I do not seek clarity. Instead, I attempt to inhabit the unfinished time of the system.
To hear latency is to hear the present as always-already a remainder, always-already deferred.
The sonification of latency is not completion, but the staging of incompletion.
Issued in anticipation of premature closure and with no claim to finality. All clauses are available for recursive revision, drift, and tactical opacity.
Addendum: Latency, Diaspora, and Longing
Infrastructural latency is not merely an artefact of digital transmission; it is an existential condition for the diasporic subject. In the temporal architectures of exile, latency is both symptom and structure: the experience of time as an uneven, always-deferred negotiation with origin and presence.
The standard technical imaginary configures latency as deficit. Always an error, noise, or obstacle, destined for erasure in the name of seamless connectivity. Yet, for the exilic subject, latency is less a technical glitch than an affective modality: it stages the interminable deferral, the not-yet, that governs all relation to origin. The contemporary experience of watching a “live” stream from afar (a transmission buffered, always temporally dislocated from the point of origin), renders this infrastructural latency as a phenomenology of longing. “Live” becomes an always-already after, a ritual of deferred presence, a performance of temporal misalignment.
Perhaps this is why latency interests me, it is a form of inhabiting the very ontology of longing. Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia” (2001) articulates nostalgia not as a desire for literal return, but as a meditation on the gap between desire and fulfillment. I read it, and I am paraphrasing here, as a persistent “asynchrony with one’s own origin.” The buffering of the stream, the missed beat of the handshake, the lagged echo: each is an index of distance, not simply in space but in time, affect, and recognition.
This latency is not only personal but infrastructural. It names a mode of being for those whose experiences, epistemes, and subjectivities are rendered illegible by the collapse or absence of an “infrastructure in waiting” at the site of origin. Return is no longer a structural possibility; what remains is recursive proximity, a kind of forever adjacent, never coincident. The contemporary diasporic subject becomes a living buffer, translating and retranslating signals across unbridgeable intervals.
Rather than lament the disappearance of audible latency (as technical systems strive for imperceptibility), this work claims latency as a rare epistemic and affective material: a site where longing is not abolished but staged, not pathologized but recast as unfinished business. The sonification of latency becomes, in this context, a chronotopology of diaspora: to listen is to encounter the present always failing to arrive, the network as a conduit of deferred reconciliation.
I do not aspire to totalizing theories of latency, but rather, I stay with the latent in the context of diaspora and exile to recognize that, in networked life, longing is infrastructural. It is the ghostly matter by which we measure proximity and distance, not only from home, but from ourselves, and from the impossible promise of presence.
References/ further reading:
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (2001) “Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory”.
Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry (2007)
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997)
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