The domain of the aural opens, at once, on to the act of composition and on to the iterative context of a composition’s reception; it comprises embodiment(s) imbricated with an array of inscriptive practices. The works of these pages instantiate (as compositions) and contemplate (as critical texts) the differing degrees in which techniques of the body enter into dynamic relation with modes of inscription, forming a feedback loop that co-constitutes their capacities. To this degree, an aural poetics – in opposition to the vast discourse of its homonym – can evade the facile separation of an essentialized “oral” and “written,” veer away from the technological determinism and psychosocial developmental model that commentators have grafted upon this faux binary, and compel us to imagine and examine composition across artistic practices through assessing specific articulations of materials and occasion. Here, listening is manifold.