Since the advent of synchronized sound, cinema has treated sound as the guarantor of presence. Voices matched with lips; sound effects filled up space; music felt for the audiences, but most significantly, at the core of audiovisual aesthetics has been synchronization as a guarantor of unity, coherence, and presence. Even when sound drifted spatially offscreen or temporally into memory or narratively out of the diegesis, the classifications such as voiceover, voice-off, internal monologue, and acousmetre were offered to contain it or justify its break from synchrony. As synchrony has remained the norm, moments of asynchrony have been its explainable exceptions.

Breaking away with decades-long traditionalism, contemporary global cinemas, especially narratives that are otherwise tied to conventions of realism, increasingly foreground what Karaduman calls anasonicity/asonority: a mode of impossible aurality that exceeds the established boundaries of film sound. Asonorous sounds are unsyncable, barely audible, or altogether inaudible. They cannot be fully located, attached, contained, or heard, but asonority does not simply break with synchronization; it exposes its fragility, superficiality, conservatism, and normativity.

This seminar welcomes proposals engaging any of the following possible topics of discussion:

• How does The Zone of Interest (Glazer, 2023) call us to resist complicity through its radical audiovisual aesthetic ("the two-film structure" as the director puts it)?
• Mourning through listening; memory as work of resistance and justice and a call to action
• Critique of anthropocentrism through audiovisual forms of asynchrony
• Deepfakes and ethics; generative AI and sonic mismatch as tools of critique, activism, and parody or fueling deception and crisis of knowledge
• Sonic excesses or forms of asynchrony that disrupt heterologocentrism and carnophallogocentrism
• Analysis of impossible synchronizations in contemporary cinemas or media, as in voices matching across bodies, spaces, and times defying notions of "pure time" or "real time" as presence (Derrida, Echographies of Television)
• Multiple temporalities that fold into a single audiovisual instant as in indiscernible sonic crystallizations found in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, Alejandro Inarritu’s The Revenant, or Claire Denis' Nenette and Boni (Karaduman, “Crystal Sounds in Contemporary Global Cinemas”).
• Analysis of sounds that are barely audible; operating at the threshold between the audible and inaudible
• Sonic flashbacks to moments that are not visualized; trace structure rendering time out-of-joint
• Discussion of those sounds in contemporary films that are inaudible, expected but unheard, or simply taken out of the soundtrack, erased and muted.

Beyond those suggestions, any perspectives or research regarding new forms of asynchrony, impossible synchronizations, barely audible, inaudible or unsyncable sounds not mentioned above are also welcome.