From Theophrastus to Immersive Technologies: Reconsidering the Ethics of Sonic Modulation

This preprint traces a conceptual trajectory from Theophrastus’ account of musical ethos to contemporary immersive technologies, arguing that the problem of sonic influence has not disappeared but has shifted in language and scale. In the peripatetic tradition, music was understood as formative modulation rather than aesthetic ornament. Although modern discourse has replaced “soul” with embodied and regulatory frameworks, the anthropological premise of human attunability persists. What has changed is the magnitude and infrastructural persistence of technological intervention. By examining escalation, saturation and the architectural turn of immersive environments, the article proposes an ethics of sonic modulation grounded in proportion, resonance and longitudinal consideration. Rather than opposing technological innovation, it argues that amplification renders measure newly urgent.