Below, underneath, beneath. In the teeth. On interfered, underperformed writing, navigates the intersections of sound, text, and agency through a disoriented and fractured lens. The work interrogates the agentive potential of voices and texts that operate beneath thresholds of visibility and audibility, focusing on the infrasonic, or the otherwise marginalised—framing interference as a practice of refusal against linearity, legibility, and dominant systems of sense-making, enacted by the example of work of writers, composers, and artists.

The thesis recollects notes, diary entries, theoretical crushes, memories, to present both personal-based, and theoretical inputs. Drawing from queer theory, sound studies, and affect theory, the thesis unfolds across three chapters, each probing the relationality of vulnerability, disorientation, soft acoustics, and micro-oralities. In this way, it question and attempts at tracing the agentive power of undertoned, infrasonic, fractured voices.

Author: Federica Nicastro