The 1960 earthquake in the Moroccan city of Agadir and its aftermaths reveal a heterogenous «unsound» field, between state-supported technocratic listening and Indigenous sonic virtuality. In this chapter of his book Sawt, Bodies, Species, Gilles Aubry turns to extra-musical domains of aurality in his study of the earthquake, offering an opportunity to examine how sound and listening are crucial in the ways realities are constructed.

Gilles Aubry identifies post-industrial, virtual, and future aspects of listening in the practices of the scientific experts in charge of the city’s reconstruction. In comparison, Ibn Ighil’s 1960 poem «Story of Agadir» provides a radically different account of the disaster. The poet’s versifying generates its own instance of sonic materiality, which is not necessarily related to physical properties of sound. This leads Aubry to the discussion of the concept of «unsound» (Goodman 2010), a popular notion in sound studies coined in order to describe the potential of future sound and sonic virtuality.

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