Recently I found myself awake in the very early morning. Through a partly-open window I could hear (but not see the source of) a complex noisy sound in a high register. It was very rhythmical, strangely so, and I convinced myself that I was listening to rock music coming from a neighbour’s tinny transistor radio. What rock song this could be with its compellingly irregular phrasing, I couldn’t have said, but my halfasleep mind decided that it was so, and I projected my assumptions onto what I was hearing. Further investigation yielded the obvious truth — the dawn chorus of my leafy Berlin street was the origin of the sound. The experience though, reminded me of the power of the acousmatic, and the idea that when we can’t see the source of what we hear, the listening individual is given an opportunity, a freedom even, to interpret that sound in any manner that they can possibly imagine. Joanna Bailie