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Short abstract:

This sound-paper listens to frequencies as they comes in and out of mattering across energetic forms of weather and sound, receding into imperceptibility and surfacing into detectibility, considering how frequency can serve as a meta-analytic for ways of drawing things together.

Long abstract:

A Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability is a rare and stunning cloud formation that resembles ocean waves in the sky – as if drawn in a highly stylized manner, one wave following another in a regular, arcing formation. It occurs when the upper layer of wind moves faster than the lower layer, drawing moisture upward into a visually stunning display. The nineteenth century physicists after which it is named investigated the pulsing dynamics of energy and physicality of atmospheric forms, addressing subjects spanning meteorology, thermodynamics and acoustics. “Frequency,” a property of energy waves, is one way in which these seemingly disparate domains are rendered commensurable. The generalizing quality of frequency puts pressure on disciplinary divisions, modes of classification, and singularity, amplifying the coextensiveness of heat and sound, or, following Deleuze and Guattari, the molecular and the molar. Though frequency is general, its variations and interactions lend it an instability that is at once epistemological and ontological. The paper approaches frequency as a meta-analytic for ways of making relations. As part of a book that draws things together around qualities of instability, resistance to classification, and disturbances of relied upon categories – terms that also come from the interaction of frequencies – it considers what we can learn from frequency as a way of working and thinking. By taking up historical and ethnographic moments in which the term frequency is used and grappling with its universalizing impulse, the sound-paper performs the work of drawing things together while reflecting on modes of analysis.