The essay takes shape around the mystery of tone and seeks ways to understand Adorno’s undefined tone and how the grammar of tone also serves as a backbone for a dialectical method that leads the way(s) to utopia. My paper will explore how tone is first formed in Hegel as a philosophical dialectical concept, as autonom from man in its natural figure, while at the same time expressing the inner life of the subject. Then locate how its dialectical form is picked up by Ernst Bloch, where it becomes more materialistic as an embodiment of the tone of the earth, which according to him is capable of something utopian and, above all, how it is interwoven with music. Hegel and Bloch become the background to what Adorno’s undefined tone may have been derived from and what it may mean. Finally, this discussion leads to whether the tone that Adorno leaves undefined in his musicological writings is capable of a negative utopia? Can the tone be the guiding ineffable voice that has been neglected by the barbarity of western history?