Civic Acoustics - What must be made audible for justice to be possible? The Neoteric Thinking Podcast What if public space could hear? What if we designed our cities not only for what is seen, but for what is sounded—and more importantly, for what is heard together? This episode explores the concept of Civic Acoustics: a cultural and ethical framework for sound in public life, where volume, rhythm, and auditory presence are shaped by mutual awareness and negotiated cohabitation. In a world of hyper-amplified voices, we ask what it means to sound with, not over, one another. Our sonic environments are not neutral. As Jean-Luc Nancy teaches us, listening is relational—it opens the body to others. And Christina Sharpe reminds us that in the wake of historical violences, how we listen becomes a political act. The episode also draws on Brandon LaBelle’s work on acoustic justice, and considers how a shared auditory commons might make room for Deaf-centered spatial ethics and the unheard within everyday governance. Civic Acoustics invites us to hear infrastructure differently. It challenges us to listen across difference, to hear not just expression but relation, not just signal but the conditions of sounding. This is not a utopian silence—it is a call to recalibrate presence, to reimagine audibility as a civic capacity. We ask what it means to make space sonically, ethically, together. Extending the Framework of Civic Acoustics The audio essay introduces civic acoustics as a way to understand sound not as atmosphere or background, but as a structure of governance—where tone, rhythm, and silence shape who is recognized, who is erased, and how public life is composed. What follows deepens that proposition, extending the framework with greater precision around sonic power, refusal, epistemic authorship, and the ethics of silence. Rhythm is political. It is not simply shared—it is set. The ability to shape time, to determine pacing, and to interrupt or continue a sound is a form of control. Civic acoustics must acknowledge that rhythm is authored by institutions, enforced by platforms, and often normalized by dominant cultural logics. A just civic acoustics must name who has the power to detune, and who is expected to adjust. Rhythmic equity is not only a matter of listening—it’s about redistributing temporal authority. Not all rupture belongs in relation. While the concept welcomes dissonance, it must also allow for sonic acts that resist absorption. Some refusals, traumas, and silences cannot be composed into a shared civic rhythm without being diminished or violated. Civic acoustics must honor the reality that some sonic presences seek distance, not recognition. Holding space for refusal—not as absence, but as unassimilable ethical stance—is essential to the framework’s integrity. Deaf and neurodivergent epistemologies must shape the grammar, not just the content, of civic acoustics. The theory must not simply reference these perspectives as sources of moral insight or inclusive design. It must be co-authored by their temporalities, spatialities, and communicative norms. This means reconfiguring the foundational assumptions of rhythm, presence, and even sound itself.  Theological references must be treated as metaphysical commitments, not symbolic structures. If liturgical forms—like interruption, sacred time, or the call and response—are invoked as models, the theory must engage with what they signify beyond design. Sacred sound carries obligations, histories, and metaphysical weight. A civic theory that borrows these forms must do so carefully, either by participating in their ethical logic or explicitly translating their relevance to secular public life. Silence must be given full ethical complexity. It is not always offering. Sometimes it is harm, absence, or abandonment. Other times it is an act of resistance—a refusal to be made legible. Civic acoustics must make space for silence that cannot be explained, categor