Time travel has long been a tantalizing concept in both science fiction and theoretical physics. While we often imagine time travel as a physical journey through past and future landscapes, it can also be experienced in a more abstract yet profound way—through sounds.
Sounds of the Past
The past resonates with echoes that we can sometimes recreate or reimagine. Ancient musical instruments, historical recordings, and even the ambient noise of a bygone era—such as the clatter of horse-drawn carriages or the crackle of early radios—allow us to immerse ourselves in history. Time capsules of sound, like phonographs and vinyl records, are portals to another time. Through these, we don’t just hear the past; we feel its texture and rhythm.
Imagine walking into a cathedral where Gregorian chants are sung exactly as they were centuries ago. In that moment, the separation between now and then dissolves. Similarly, technologies like audio restoration bring forgotten voices and music back to life, giving us a sensory experience of eras we’ve never lived.
Sounds of the Future
The future, by contrast, is harder to predict. What will the world sound like in 50 or 100 years? Speculative sound design in films and media offers some possibilities—mechanical drones, synthetic symphonies, and alien languages. Advances in technology might also bring us auditory experiences we can’t yet conceive, like music tailored to our emotions in real-time or soundscapes of entirely virtual worlds.
The idea of time travel through sound becomes even more fascinating when paired with concepts like acoustic archaeology or audio synthesis. Could we someday accurately recreate the voice of a long-dead figure based on historical data? Could we design sounds that represent the potential noises of a future city or a space station?
Living Between Past and Future
We live at an intersection of temporal sounds. While digitized archives allow us to dive into historical audio, modern soundscapes are already capturing this era for future generations. Every recording, from a bustling city street to a personal podcast, becomes a thread in the fabric of history.
Time travel, then, doesn’t require a machine. It requires listening—tuning into the echoes of the past and the imagined vibrations of what’s to come. Sounds are a bridge, a timeline written not in years but in waves and frequencies. What does your time sound like? What echoes will you leave behind?
Serena Dibiase is an experimental vocalist, sound artist, performer, poet. She identifies her artistic and sound productions with the androgynous name Kratu. She carries out her artistic investigation starting from intense physical/respiratory practices and through analogue and not-analogue devices, to listen to radical phonic geographies, choral happenings, interventions on biophonies and geophonies extracted from explorations in abandoned, wild, industrial spaces, in a horizontal treatment of the sources. She collaborates as a sound dramaturg and performer with independent theatre companies, and also working for Biennale Teatro ’22-’23 and disseminating her research in Italian and international festivals. She collaborates as artistic consultant in contexts of social hardship (jale, community outreach centre for addicts), considering these incursions into her broader spectrum of anthro-poetic research. He has been leading Mouth of the landscape, a transversal vocal training and listening workshop. Her EP Nostalgia for the Androgynous released by Oceani Label.
