Sonic, Infrasonic, and Ultrasonic Frequencies
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SONIC, INFRASONIC, AND ULTRASONIC FREQUENCIES: The Utilisation of Waveforms as Weapons, Apparatus for Psychological Manipulation, and as Instruments of Physiological Influence by Industrial, Entertainment, and Military Organisations. TOBY HEYS A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2011 1 ABSTRACT This study is a trans-disciplinary and trans-historical investigation into civilian and battlefield contexts in which speaker systems have been utilised by the military-industrial and military-entertainment complexes to apply pressure to mass social groupings and the individuated body. Drawing on authors such as historian/sociologist Michel Foucault, economist Jacques Attali, philosopher Michel Serres, political geographer/urban planner Edward Soja, musician/sonic theorist Steve Goodman, and cultural theorist/urbanist Paul Virilio, this study engages a wide range of texts to orchestrate its arguments. Conducting new strains of viral theory that resonate with architectural, neurological, and political significance, this research provides new and original analysis about the composition of waveformed geography. Ultimately, this study listens to the ways in which the past and current utilisation of sonic, infrasonic, and ultrasonic frequencies as weapons, apparatus for psychological manipulation, and instruments of physiological influence, by industrial, civilian, entertainment, and military organisations, predict future techniques of socio spatialised organisation. In chapter one it is argued that since the inception of wired radio speaker systems into U.S. industrial factories in 1922, the development of sonic strategies based primarily on the scoring of architectonic spatiality, cycles of repetition, and the enveloping dynamics of surround sound can be traced to the sonic torture occurring in Guantanamo Bay during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Exploring the use of surround sound speaker techniques by the FBI during the Waco Siege in Texas, this argument is developed in chapter two. In chapter three it is further contended that the acoustic techniques utilised in the Guantanamo torture cells represent the final modality and the logical conclusion of these strategies that have evolved between civilian and military contexts over the past 80 years. In chapter four, the speaker system instrumentality of the HSS ultrasonic beam - occurring post Guantanamo - comes to symbolise an epistemic shift in the application of waveformed pressure; the dynamics of directional ultrasound technology signalling the orchestration of a new set of frequency-based relations between the transmitter and the receiver, the speaker system and architectural context, and the civilian and war torn environment. The concluding proposition of the study submits that a waveformed cartography - mapping the soundscape's territorialisation by the military-entertainment complex - needs to be composed and arranged so that forms of recording, amplification, and resistance can be made coherent. Given the new set of non-sound politics announced by the HSS, this philosophy of frequency-based mapping will have to re-evaluate the taxonomy and indexical nature of spatial relations. This discipline will be a waveformed psycho geography; a frequency-based modality that heuristically charts the spatial concerns of the neural environment as well as the environs of the material and the built. As a field of research it will have a wide-ranging remit to explore the spatial, psychological, physiological, social, economic, and sexual effects that waveforms have upon our subjectivity. Its methodology - as suggested through the structuring of this study - will be multi-disciplined and multi-channelled. It will create new forms of knowledge about LRADs, iPods, Mosquitos, I ntonarumori , loudhailers, and Sequential Arc Discharge Acoustic Generators - the meta-network of speaker systems through which rhythms and cadences of power are transmitted, connected, and modulated. 2 List of Contents Title Page 01 Abstract 02 List of Contents 03 I ntrod uction 07 Literature Review 36 Methodology 48 Chapter 1: A Convergence of Electricity, Networked Amplification, and Music: The Influence of Muzak in the Fordist Factory 65 Section 1: The First Movements of the Muzakal Body 66 The Rhythmical Ordering of Audioanalgesia 72 Transnational Harmonies 77 Section 2: The Industrialised Logic of 'It is all in the Mind' 80 Top of the Charts - The Worker's Emotional Terrain 85 Section 3: Disconnecting the Global Village 94 The Fleshy Cadence of the Antenna Body 99 A Cognitive Mapping of Audio Architecture 102 3 Chapter 2: Surrounded by Sound: The Use of Speaker Systems at the Waco Siege 106 Section 1: Compounding the Body of Noise with the Body in Noise 107 Stoking the Fires of Cultural Assimilation 115 Section 2: A Psychological Symphony of Disaster 120 The 51-Day Diary of a Failed Rock Star 122 Virasonic Attack 128 Section 3: Inverting Wilderness 132 The Acoustic Ontology of an Outsider 137 An Audiotopia of Sonic Waste 139 Loudhailers for the Living Dead 142 Chapter 3: The Inverted Eschatology of Black Ecstasy: When Music Becomes Painful in Guantanamo Bay 146 Section 1: The State's Capacity to Render Sonic Intensity 147 Transferring Sonic Modalities 154 Dancing to the Tunes of the Military-Entertainment Complex 160 Break it Up, Break it Up, Break it Up, Break Down 163 Excavation, Autopsy, and Exorcism of the Sonic Body 166 Section2: Approaching the Thresholds of Silence and Noise 171 Violence and the Voice 177 4 The Dynamics of Not Wanting to Listen 181 The Instrumentality of Sonic Pain 185 Fear of Music 188 Amplifying the Utility of Futility Music 190 Section3: The Repetitive Cell 197 Constructing Walls of Sound 203 The Excessive Reality of the Sonic Cell 206 Cultural Compression and the Sonic Cell 211 The Catwalk and the Death Camp 215 Chapter 4: Out of Earshot: A Ventriloquistic Ontology of Directional Ultrasound 220 Section 1: The Production of Ultrasonic Linearity 221 HyperSonic Sound 222 The Audio Spotlight 224 Non-Sound, Non-Lethal Weapon, Non-Pain? 225 Civilian Uses of Ultrasonic Non-Lethal Weapons 229 The Art of Movement of Unheard Bodies 230 Section 2: The Story of the Whispering Parasite and Siamese Consciousness 232 Changing the Channels of Duplicity 237 The Ear of the Schizophrenic and Psycho-Geography 241 Section 3: A Silent Killing in the Trans-Auditive Era 244 5 We are Never Outside of Geography 250 Inaudible Infection 254 The Engineering of the Twenty-First Century Ear 257 Conclusion 261 Bibliography 297 Appendix 333 Glossary of Terms 334 Muted Knowledge Not Included in the Thesis 365 6 INTRODUCTION 7 This study commences its investigation into the orchestration and territorialisation of architectural soundscapes by the military-industrial complex when wired radio was introduced into U.S. factories in 1922 to improve worker's rates of productivity. The research subsequently traces a lineage of speaker system deployments throughout the twentieth-century in which waveformed strategies have been brought to bear on decreasing numbers of bodies in spatially reductive circumstances - from the factory to the compound to the detainment cell. Th e rupture in this frequency-based trajectory of sound effects, occurs after the sonic torture of detainees in Guantanamo Bay. After Guantanamo, there is no architectural space smaller than a cell for a speaker system to be utilised within and no greater violence for music to be channelled towards than the psychological and physical breakdown of a targeted body, as illustrated below in diagram 1. The twenty-first century shift instigated by the military-entertainment complex effectively displaces the sonic speaker from its position surrounding the body by replacing it with an ultrasonic speaker that is projected into the body, or into the skull to be more specific. ~- ~- ~{II -~ I} ...,C\) - 0- M 1S I~ C/) ~ ~ M- 2012 -~ 2002 1993 1922 Diagram 1 8 Sound, Infrasound, and Ultrasound It is widely accepted that everything in the known world has a resonant frequency. Frequencies that form our perception of sound, those between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz constitute only a small bandwidth of the full waveform spectrum that we exist within. There are three ranges of frequencies, one range either side of the sonic range. Those frequencies that fall below 20 Hz and beneath the lower limit of human hearing are named infrasound. As more supine waveforms that reside close to the ground they are distinguished by their capacity to travel long distances, through, and around objects with minimal dissipation. Naturally occurring phenomena such as earthquakes, tornadoes, waterfalls, and volcanoes generate infrasound, whilst animals such as alligators, elephants, and whales are understood to perceive and utilise it to communicate over hundreds of miles. The range of waveforms that reside above 20,000 Hz is referred to as ultrasound. Being highly directional and tractable it is utilised in medical imaging techniques such as sonography to penetrate the body and measure the reflection signature, revealing information about the somatic inner structure. The British Army meanwhile employed it for their 'Acoustic Squawk Box' (Rodwell, 1973) (a crowd dispersal unit tested in 1973 in Northern Ireland), and as a communication tool/non-lethal weapon by the U.S. military in the guise of the HyperSonic Sound® technology (also referred to as the HSS (see glossary». The HSS system is