In Sean Michaels's 2014 novel Us Conductors, a fictionalized Lev Sergeyevich Termen describes his most famous invention:

Us Conductors explores a time when sound and music were less rigidly understood than they are today. Musicians of the early twentieth century, both serious and casual, imagined devices like the theremin – which generates a signal audible to human ears by integrating two electric oscillator frequencies – as the future of their craft. We catch a glimpse of a possiblefuture not achieved, in which the new, strange sounds of the electric avant garde would fundamentally transform the Western acoustic canon.

Termen plays only a small part in Wolfgang Ernst's Sonic Time Machines, but the Soviet inventor and German media theorist are very much in-tune. They share an experimental approach to sound and expansive understanding of its relationship to human physiology and culture. Michaels’ fictitious Termen believes that implicit in the temporal oscillations of electric current is the potential for a peculiar kind of poetry. He understands how sonic media like his theremin disrupt conventional understandings of music, sound, noise, and time. Such are the stakes for Ernst, and in Sonic Time Machines he channels some of Termen's experimental zeal. Ernst forges new conceptual and methodological orientations for analyzing sonic articulations not as conventional ‘sound’ or ‘music’, but rather in terms of sonicity.