恐怖をモジュレートする――テラフォーミング時代のミルーと音楽

Abstract

This is the English self-translation of my article originally published in Japanese in Gendai Shiso (Seidosha, Vol. 53, No. 7, 2025), titled 「恐怖をモジュレートする――テラフォーミング時代のミルーと音楽」. This essay examines the role of music in the age of terraforming, arguing that sound functions as a medium through which human sensibility and environmental perception are recalibrated in response to planetary transformation. While terraforming is often conceived as a technological process of making other worlds habitable, this paper redefines it as an affective and cultural practice of modulation that reshapes the conditions of perception, embodiment, and coexistence. Drawing on works such as Claire Denis’s High Life (2018) and Steve Goodman’s Astro-Darien (2022), it explores how speculative sound practices anticipate new relationships between music and artificially constructed environments. Engaging with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, the essay situates music as a transindividual entity that emerges through dynamic relations within a milieu rather than as an object contained within an environment. In this sense, music participates in the ecological co-constitution of space, mediating between human and nonhuman agencies. It also develops Jacques Derrida’s concept of “fearful domestication” and Mike Davis’s “ecology of fear” to suggest that the impulse toward terraforming, and the soundworlds it generates, arise from overlapping anxieties about environmental collapse, technological control, and political instability. Through analyses of contemporary electronic and ambient practices, including Instruō’s SCÍON module that translates bioelectric signals into sound, the essay proposes that music can serve as a site of affective coexistence rather than control. By transforming the sensory and emotional registers through which fear is experienced, music becomes a form of speculative design that modulates the very possibility of inhabiting the future. Ultimately, Fearful Modulation presents music as both medium and method of terraforming, reconfiguring the conditions for perceiving and dwelling within future worlds.

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