SONIC WARFARE Technologies of Lived Abstraction Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, editors Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Erin Manning, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, Steven Shaviro, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Aff ect, and the Ecology of Fear, Steve Goodman, SONIC WARFARE Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear Steve Goodman The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please e- mail special_sales@mitpress .mit .edu This book was set in Syntax and Minion by Graphic Composition, Inc. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Goodman, Steve. Sonic warfare : sound, aff ect, and the ecology of fear / Steve Goodman. p. cm. — (Technologies of lived abstraction) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN - - - - (hardcover : alk. paper) . Music—Acoustics and physics. Music—Social aspects. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. I. Title. ML.G '.—dc Contents Series Foreword vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction xiii 1 1998: A Conceptual Event 1 2 2001: What Is Sonic Warfare? 5 3 2400–1400 B.C.: Project Jericho 15 4 1946: Sonic Dominance 27 5 1933: Abusing the Military- Entertainment Complex 31 6 403–221 B.C.: The Logistics of Deception 35 7 1944: The Ghost Army 41 8 1842: Sonic Effects 45 9 1977: A Sense of the Future 49 10 1913: The Art of War in the Art of Noise 55 11 1989: Apocalypse Then 59 12 1738: Bad Vibrations 63 13 1884: Dark Precursor 69 14 1999: Vibrational Anarchitecture 75 15 13.7 Billion B.C.: The Ontology of Vibrational Force 81 16 1931: Rhythmanalysis 85 17 1900: The Vibrational Nexus 91 18 1929: Throbs of Experience 95 vi Contents 19 1677: Ecology of Speeds 99 20 99–50 B.C.: Rhythm out of Noise 105 21 1992: The Throbbing Crowd 109 22 1993: Vorticist Rhythmachines 113 23 1946: Virtual Vibrations 117 24 2012: Artifi cial Acoustic Agencies 123 25 1877: Capitalism and Schizophonia 129 26 1976: Outbreak 133 27 1971: The Earworm 141 28 2025: Déjà Entendu 149 29 1985: Dub Virology 155 30 1928: Contagious Orality 163 31 2020: Planet of Drums 171 32 2003: Contagious Transmission 177 33 2039: Holosonic Control 183 34 Conclusion: Unsound—The (Sub)Politics of Frequency 189 Glossary 195 Notes 199 References 251 Index 265 Series Foreword “What moves as a body, returns as the movement of thought.” Of subjectivity (in its nascent state) Of the social (in its mutant state) Of the environment (at the point it can be reinvented) “A process set up anywhere reverberates everywhere.” The Technologies of Lived Abstraction book series is dedicated to work of trans- disciplinary reach, inquiring critically but especially creatively into processes of subjective, social, and ethical- political emergence abroad in the world today. Thought and body, abstract and concrete, local and global, individual and col- lective: the works presented are not content to rest with the habitual divisions. They explore how these facets come formatively, reverberatively together, if only to form the movement by which they come again to diff er. Possible paradigms are many: autonomization, relation; emergence, complexity, process; individuation, (auto)poiesis; direct perception, embodied perception, perception- as- action; speculative pragmatism, speculative realism, radical em- piricism; mediation, virtualization; ecology of practices, media ecology; tech- nicity; micropolitics, biopolitics, ontopower. Yet there will be a common aim: to catch new thought and action dawning, at a creative crossing. Technologies of viii Series Foreword Lived Abstraction orients to the creativity at this crossing, in virtue of which life everywhere can be considered germinally aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere already political. “Concepts must be experienced. They are lived.” Erin Manning and Brian Massumi Acknowledgments A special thanks to Lilian, Bernard, and Michelle for putting up with my noise since day zero. For the brainpower, thanks to: Jessica Edwards, Torm, Luciana Parisi, Stephen Gordon, Kodwo Eshun, Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, Matt Fuller, Robin Mackay, Kevin Mar- tin, Jeremy Greenspan, Jon Wozencroft, Bill Dolan, Raz Mesinai, Simon Reyn- olds, Dave Stelfox, Marcus Scott, Mark Pilkington, Erik Davis, Toby Heys, Matt Fuller, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Steven Shaviro, Stamatia Portanova, Eleni Ikoniadou, Cecelia Wee, Olaf Arndt, Joy Roles, James Traff ord, Jorge Camachio, Tiziana Terranova, Jeremy Gilbert, Tim Lawrence, Haim Bresheeth, Julian Henriques, Jasmin Jodry, Wil Bevan, Mark Lawrence, Neil Joliff e, Sarah Lockhart, Martin Clark, Georgina Cook, Melissa Bradshaw, Marcos Boff a, Dave Quintiliani, Paul Jasen, Cyclic Defrost, Derek Walmsley, Jason and Leon at Tran- sition, Doug Sery at MIT. For the ideas, collectivity, and bass, maximum respect to: Ccru, Hyperdub, DMZ, Fwd>>, Rinse, Brainfeeder. For the sabbatical: The School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at University of East London. pressure • Neural • Hypersonic entrainment modulation of audible • Organ frequencies resonance • Cavitation and effects threshold of heating of the body ear pain • Nausea 120dB at high frequencies • Concussion • Neural entrainment hearing damage • and due to prolonged Tissue damage if physical exposure prolonged exposure impact • Respiration inhibition inaudible audible frequencies inaudible infrasound ultrasound unsound = nexus unsound = of not-yet-audible unsound = sound frequencies sound becoming becoming tactile neuro-affective 0 20Hz 20kHz frequency We’ll come in low out of the rising sun and about a mile out, we’ll put on the music. —General Kilgore, Apocalypse Now Introduction It’s night. You’re asleep, peacefully dreaming. Suddenly the ground begins to tremble. Slowly, the shaking escalates until you are thrown off balance, clinging desperately to any fi xture to stay standing. The vibration moves up through your body, constricting your internal organs until it hits your chest and throat, making it impossible to breathe. At exactly the point of suff ocation, the fl oor rips open beneath you, yawning into a gaping dark abyss. Screaming silently, you stumble and fall, skydiving into what looks like a bottomless pit. Then, without warning, your descent is curtailed by a hard surface. At the painful moment of impact, as if in anticipation, you awaken. But there is no relief, because at that precise split sec- ond, you experience an intense sound that shocks you to your very core. You look around but see no damage. Jumping out of bed, you run outside. Again you see no damage. What happened? The only thing that is clear is that you won’t be able to get back to sleep because you are still resonating with the encounter. In November , a number of international newspapers reported that the Israeli air force was using sonic booms under the cover of darkness as “sound bombs” in the Gaza Strip. A sonic boom is the high- volume, deep- frequency eff ect of low- fl ying jets traveling faster than the speed of sound. Its victims likened its ef- fect to the wall of air pressure generated by a massive explosion. They reported broken windows, ear pain, nosebleeds, anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, hyperten- sion, and being left “shaking inside.” Despite complaints from both Palestin- ians and Israelis, the government protested that sound bombs were “preferable xiv Introduction to real ones.” What is the aim of such attacks on civilian populations, and what new modes of power do such not- so- new methods exemplify? As with the U.S. Army’s adoption of “shock-and- awe” tactics and anticipative strikes in Iraq, and the screeching of diving bombers during the blitzkriegs of World War II, the objective was to weaken the morale of a civilian population by creating a climate of fear through a threat that was preferably nonlethal yet possibly as unsettling as an actual attack. Fear induced purely by sound eff ects, or at least in the undecidability between an actual or sonic attack, is a virtualized fear. The threat becomes autonomous from the need to back it up. And yet the sonically induced fear is no less real. The same dread of an unwanted, possible future is activated, perhaps all the more powerful for its spectral presence. Despite the rhetoric, such deployments do not necessarily attempt to deter enemy action, to ward off an undesirable future, but are as likely to prove provocative, to increase the likelihood of confl ict, to precipitate that future. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Aff ect, and the Ecology of Fear explores the rippling shockwaves of these kinds of deployments of sound and their impacts on the way populations feel—not just their individualized, subjective, personal emo- tions, but more their collective moods or aff ects. Specifi cally, a concern will be shown for environments, or ecologies, in which sound contributes to an im- mersive atmosphere or ambience of fear and dread—where sound helps pro- duce a bad vibe. This dimension of an encounter will be referred to as its aff ective tone, a term that has an obvious, but rarely explored, affi nity to thinking through the way in which sound can modulate mood. Yet in the scenario above, the sonic weapon does more than merely produce anxiety. The intense vibration literally threatens not just the traumatized emotional disposition and physiology of the population, but also the very structure of the built environment. So the term aff ect will be taken in this broadest possible sense to mean the potential of an entity or event to aff ect or be aff ected by another entity or event. From vibes to vibrations, this is a defi nition that traverses mind and body, subject and object, the living and the nonliving. One way or another, it is vibration, after all, that connects every separate entity in the cosmos, organic or nonorganic.