The More I Replay This The More I Hear (Everywhere and Everyone)

What do I come back to at ‘0:00’? Returning to an audio file’s 0:00 time marker is a return to many things. It is a homecoming to an unlocatable place of performance and past. It is a journey back to a valley of stillness, a sonic space that exists between a sound and its repeated self. It is ushering sound back into the ears, pulsating familiar vibration through the neck and limbs, syncing and syncopating the heart and lungs with waves of echoes. It is a visitation between past and present versions of oneself as a listener, from moments or decades earlier, each version activated by previous associations made with the sound.

Whether automatically looped or consciously rewound, a multi-temporality becomes audible when a file repeats; a “heterochrony” (Hernández-Navarro 192) . The simultaneity of past and present temporalities - as well as the time of the listener, source of the sound, and audio itself - converge via a buzzy, glitchy, scratchy, or quiet signal that marks the beginning of the file restarting. This restart is both a conceptual ‘start over’ and a somatic resuming of listening. The heterochrony of replay formally makes an audio file and the sound it produces a “temporal shelter to memories” (Bal, “Heterochrony in the Act” 211). The repetition of sound is thus a return to a thing or place, but also a return and departure to multiple moments of ‘when.’

I have referred to the experience of hearing and feeling multiple timelines to propose that the repetition of an audio file is an activation of memory’s “three-partite temporality” that simultaneously connects the past, present, and future - while also weaving together its cultural, individual, and social aspects (Bal, “Activating Temporalities” 97-98). Sound is a material that alters space and time through processes of editing and recording, but it is also an actant that has its own unique movement, agency, and ephemerality. Perhaps we could say that through its arrival and re-arrival (the repetition or looping of an audio file) a sound’s temporality might begin to resemble what Ranajit Guha has termed “migrant’s time,” that is, a temporality that continually activates a nowness (Guha 5). This nowness both disrupts listeners’ temporalisation of the present and who or what is a part of it. As the duration of an audio file flows linearly towards its own conclusion, the potential of its repetition anticipates the future like a seed in the ground, ready to emerge again and again (Guha 8). Listeners trigger this process of renewal, so the identity of the sound grows to be a part of the listener, yet also retains its individuality. This engagement demands care and intentionality from listeners as hosts of the sounds they are playing and consuming, for conforming the identity and time of a sound to one’s personal sense of the present potentially ignores the temporal and cultural alignments songs already have with the past and future.

To ‘host’ an audio file in a digital sense is to save a file on a device. But might hosting audio files also entail inviting and caring for the sounds - the ways they were made, how they arrived, and who made them - deep in one’s body? By repeating a file, bringing it back to ‘0:00,’ having it play, I reactivate and rehouse it; I host it. That also goes for its contents. As a host, a file’s sound is forcibly guided to a time and location in my body, and the heterochrony of each listen is a reminder of this corporeal spatiotemporal specificity. With each repeated listen, there is a return to something social and interlocking, across multiple times and communities, but there is also a return to violence. At ‘0:00,’ I come back to this fact, this place of listening, and these moments of confrontation. 

What pluralities are created, sustained, and linked through ‘0:00’? Intricate and delicate like a spiderweb of interwoven and intersecting threads, the listening positionalities that are activated by replaying an audio file are vast and interconnected, simultaneously rigid and fluid. To adjust and manipulate sound through these positionalities might be thought of as a working through of the relationality Edouard Glissant describes in Poetics of Relation (1990): the “[knowing] ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify” (Glissant 9). Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory” is also relevant here, described in Beloved (1987) as sounds and images that “you think [you thought up]”, but are from “somebody else” and “where [someone] was before [they] came here” (Morrison 43). Both authors speak to specific diasporic histories and narratives: Glissant to the particular languages and identity of African Caribbean descendants, and Morrison to the active memories and autonomy of a formerly enslaved African American woman and her family. While distinct in the communities and geographies that are evoked, their writings emphasise social, political, and historical relationships’ ways of shaping the self. Sonic embodiments of the self also echo the displacement caused by European colonization and slavery, the intergenerational inheritance of collective memory, and people’s individual connections to place and time. No form of sonic embodiment is ever heard in isolation; every person’s positionality is a reflection of everyone else’s. I invoke these authors’ ideas of relationality and extend them across North American and Asian geographies to provide a frame of reference for where and how I listen to the relationship between a Hollywood soundtrack, Black American Music, and Japanese DJing in the following analysis of a single melody, its movement, and its interpolation. 

At the time of writing this essay, I found myself listening to different arrangements of the “Love Theme” from the 1960 movie, Spartacus. Over the last twenty or so years, I have often listened to - and replayed - Nujabes’ song, “Final View” (2003), but it was not until this past year, 2025, that I realised the saxophone is sampled from Yusef Lateef’s album, Eastern Sounds (1962). Listening to Nujabes over the past decade, I often recalled myself in elementary school first enjoying “Final View” in the anime, Samurai Champloo (2004). I had long assumed the saxophone was sampled from Black American Music, knowing that Nujabes primarily samples from artists in this musical tradition. However, I was never able to locate where he had first heard the sounds he used in his records. I traversed down a wormhole of audio files and videos to find Lateef’s sampled record, and despite being excited to finally know where the saxophone had come from, the wormhole continued deeper yet. I eventually arrived at Alex North’s Spartacus composition as the sonic source that created the inspiration for Lateef and then Nujabes. My listening migration had brought me across multiple countries, genres, and eras of music - but the magical thing was that the core melodic idea was the same and completely different in each instance.

Listening back to arrangements of the same melody a thousand different ways was jarring; it cultivated a listening experience across and through ‘the same idea’ in multiple settings, all of them based in and moving toward one another. A song that seemed so firmly rooted in Japanese hip hop suddenly spread out to various trajectories and destinations with different listeners. I could hear more than my personal dimension of listening with each return to the beginning. 

In the multidimensionality of replay, one softly hears the echo of their own listening positionality. People locate their ever-moving and changing relationship to a single excerpt of sound, as well as all that it carries culturally, socially, and politically. Proximity and relation make replay capable of exercising a simultaneous distance and closeness; audiences become capable listeners alongside communities of sound-makers, musicians, and performers, but they never fully join those communities. Being close to, but not part of a sonic landscape confronts listeners with their responsibilities as guests: to not over-impose or steal from their hosts. Hearing one’s own position of listening structures how one moves through and relates to sounds, and to the communities surrounding those sounds - while also holding listeners accountable to participate in and nourish the wider web that connects a multiplicity of sounds together. 

Ethical listening, I want to argue, should not try to engender universality. Sounds are echoes and embodiments of different communities, languages, and landscapes, and assuming that these differences should be transcended in the name of “reconciliation” reinforces the idea that there is a singular way and place to listen from (see Robinson 205). When we listen back, we can hear and feel reverberations of dissimilarities in our identities, ultimately situating ourselves as completely different from - but always together with - one another. In listening back, perhaps we can start to construct a sonic community that graduates from literal or figurative differences and barriers keeping us apart. The dangers of cultural appropriation and exploitation are not altogether sidestepped, but listening back might allow a kind of relationality to be felt in contrast to the isolation often engendered by rigid categorisations of sound, by genre, racialisation, and national identity. Everyone and everywhere comes back when ‘0:00’ repeats. 

What do we take each time ‘0:00’ comes back around? Nevertheless, repeating and re-listening to audio is a process of extraction, despite a person’s well-intentioned motivations, curiosities, and creative ventures. Music students endlessly replay recordings to improve their instrumental techniques, absorbing the essence of someone else’s sound to improve their own virtuosity and style. Throughout high school and university, classmates and teachers would advise me to “go back and replay a record at least ten times in order to truly get something out of it.” In gaining knowledge from replayed audio files, we take sounds and cultures out of their original context and rehouse them in our own bodies. 

Replay in the examples I mention above demonstrates a listening for something, as opposed to listening to something. This intentional mode of listening for the sake of finding or seeking themes, ‘new sounds,’ or structural markers shares similarities with xwélmexw scholar and artist Dylan Robinson’s term, “hungry listening” (2). Theorised as a settler colonial listening positionality, hungry listening is characterised by taking or displacing things from the sonic contexts and cultures from which they originate. Listening repeatedly for different kinds of techniques, structural harmonies, and geographical leitmotifs (see Kahn 106) is thus a kind of hungry listening because it encapsulates “a teleological orientation toward progression and resolution” that mirrors someone’s voracious appetite leading to their own satiation (Robinson 50). In other words, people listen for what they want to hear, and they only take away what they find important or fulfilling. 

Robinson speaks to a pedagogical aspect of “Western art music” (Robinson 1) focused on recognition and identification through listening (Robinson 50). I think of my own music education, which indeed emphasised listening for specific chord progressions, conventional orchestral and big band instrumentations, as well as meters. In classical and electronic musical training alike, we can observe in the Western conservatory model a consumption of sound and rigidity of performance conventions that assumes only one ‘correct’ way of listening. This kind of listening is hungry because it seeks “felt confirmations of square pegs in square holes [and] the satisfactory fit [of] sound knowledge [slid] into its appropriate place" (Robinson 51). Replaying a piece of audio conveniently facilitates an “errantry” (Glissant 14-15) and violence through listening under the guise of ‘trying to better understand,’ especially in the case of Indigenous and diasporic songs and sound traditions. 

Perhaps when a listener chooses to replay an audio file over and over again, a kind of taking one’s cue from the sound itself might become possible; a mode of listening that is more respectful and responsible. However, this ultimately does not eliminate the accompanying extraction. Eating everything up is unavoidable in this situation. Concerned with superficial ways of orientating positions of listening that lead to appropriation, Robinson points out: 

To define new forms of listening-in-relation does not entail simply applying an alternative configuration at will. Unlike iPhone photo filters, one cannot simply select and add noncolonial, feminist, queer or black listening filters in order to listen otherwise. This reductive approach essentializes critical listening positionality as something that might simply be applied by choice, and fails to recognize that to apply a form of Indigenous listening would also constitute appropriation. (51) 

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He writes with reference to his own experience of being a visitor on Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe lands, trying to listen in relation to the knowledge systems of those places and communities without extracting or applying them to his own listening practices (Robinson 51). I share his criticisms about the filter-fication of listening. Were I to simply change my wording - ‘taking from sound’ to ‘taking cues from sound’ - regarding the main ideas of this essay, I would be ignoring the underlying extraction that would take place regardless. Adopting a different perspective or changing the label surrounding one’s listening positionality does not simply absolve a person or their listening of extraction. Since repetitive listening will always be a process of pulling at deeply personal or community-specific customs, techniques, and stories, the extraction that happens at ‘0:00’ should also be a moment of accountability for how one is about to listen. If someone is prepared to extract from sound, they must also be prepared to take responsibility for how, where, and why what they have taken ends up somewhere else.

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What is given to’0:00’? Listeners give their time and attention. They give their bodies. They give an indication of interest or reliance on an audio file’s sound through its repetition. A surrender of boundaries and silence, 0:00 is given a unique intimacy that is characterised as much by vulnerability and encounter as it is hunger and extraction. 

The decision to engage again with an audio file from its beginning creates expectations of a sonic rapport, an ongoing auditory connection, or an audible relatability. Listeners are always at risk of being overwhelmed, alienated by, or confronted with a sound; its distance, unfamiliarity, or hostility, relative to their own listening positionality and identity. Faced with this risk, listeners give away little pieces of the social and geographical boundaries that shape their listening pathways. Thus, replaying an audio file is a means of creating relationships with the file’s embodiment of emotional, social, political, and environmental things, but it is also the active creation of an intense relationship with the file itself. Listeners rely on the emotional conjuring and ritual of replaying audio files. This ritual lets them listen back, outwards, and towards other people and other temporalities that might otherwise be hidden, silent, or not often heard. In trying to hear others, listeners hear themselves, and this listening forces a relationship where they seek a progressive familiarity in exchange for laying their positionality and identity bare.

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What comes back at ‘0:00’? Everywhere, every time, everyone. 

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