The sonic cannot be reduced either to acoustic sound, on the one hand, nor to elaborate music on the other. The sonic field is itself a function of physical, technical, and symbolic temporal orders and it demands, as such, a media-archaeological analysis that amounts, for its part, to far more than simply cultural studies or music theory. In light of this premise, it becomes clear how temporal orders determine both analogue and digital forms (everything from headphones to magnetic recording tape to digital-electronic computation time). Here we also encounter chronopoetics and the algorhythm. Our faculty of hearing is accordingly far more capable of perceiving time-critical processes than our faculty of sight is: rhythm and tone of the Sonic Time Machine.