Nineteen Hertz and Below: an Infrasonic History of the Twentieth Century Author(S): Sophia Roosth Source: Resilience: a Journal of the Environmental Humanities , Vol

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Nineteen Hertz and Below: An Infrasonic History of the Twentieth Century Author(s): Sophia Roosth Source: Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities , Vol. 5, No. 3, Common Senses and Critical Sensibilities (Fall 2018), pp. 109-124 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.5.3.0109

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Nineteen Hertz and Below An Infrasonic History of the Twentieth Century

Sophia Roosth

Th is is a history of a sound you cannot hear. Human hearing ranges, on average, between twenty and twenty thousand hertz, and infrasound vibrates at a frequency lower than twenty hertz, ever so slightly below the envelope of human audition.1 Infrasound fi rst rattled the scientifi c world in 1883, when the explosion of Krakatoa between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra registered on barographs as subsonic vibrations powerful enough to circle the globe seven times.2 Infrasound shuddered back into scientifi c attention immediately aft er World War II, when interest in infrasound oscillated between harnessing infrasonic vibrations as weapons and tuning into them as signatures or acoustic footprints of nuclear testing, unheard vibrations from a stealthy enemy. Because infrasonic vibrations are not easily dissipated by physical obstacles, they travel much farther than audible sound, a quality that makes them a useful means for measuring events occurring far away, from earthquakes and volcanoes to rocket launches. In 2011 the Com- prehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization presided over a con- trolled explosion in Israel’s Negev desert to fi ne-tune their infrasonic- monitoring equipment; they found that the explosion was recorded by monitoring stations as far away as Mongolia.3 In February 2013, infrasound sensors recorded the strongest infrasonic wave on record—a dense fi reball blooming from the Chelyabinsk meteor as it explod- ed high above Russia’s Ural Mountains. A report in Science described the “meteor’s death throes” as emitting a piercing yet “silent scream,” one that, while inaudible, nonetheless propagated powerful vibrations across great distances.4

This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms As a liminal category alternately dubbed “unsound” or “sound- like,”5 infrasound aff ords scholars the opportunity to interrogate sensorial am- biguity. Sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne diff erentiates between sound and other vibrations: “As part of a larger physical phenomenon of vibration, sound is a product of the human senses and not a thing in the world apart from humans.”6 Such a defi nition authorizes sound studies to turn a deaf ear to those vibrations that are inaudible to humans yet are nonetheless key sensory capacities for nonhuman animals: ultrasonic vibrations among dolphins, bats, and dogs, for example, or infrasonic vibrations with which whales and elephants can communicate and anticipate danger in their immediate environments, such as earthquakes and tsunamis.7 How, then, might sound studies admit into its purview (its percussion?) those aspects of the vibratory world that are not, strictly speaking, sonic? To productively draw sensory studies into conversation with multispecies science studies requires that the nonhuman umwelt be examined as rigorously and on the same footing as the human sensorium (and, indeed, to query the very notion of a sin- gular and homogenous “human sensorium” in the fi rst place).8 A more capacious understanding of sound could consequently reorient its fo- cus away from not only anthropocentric but also “earcentric” models of sonic perception in favor of an extracochlear modality that recognizes entire percussing bodies as vibratory sensory apparatuses.9 Once we retune hearing to incorporate the entire body, rather than ears alone, then the sensory hierarchy falls away. Sensory studies scholars consequently must admit the possibility that sound—or any other sense— cannot be studied (or experienced) in isolation but only on a spectrum with other sensory and aff ective states. Infrasound is on the fringe of the audible yet bleeds into the palpable. It occupies the threshold between hearing and the many other perceptual modalities that audition both complements and overlaps (most signifi cantly, tactility and proprioception, but also nausea and dizziness, as well as aff ective, cognitive, and emotional states). Th e twentieth-century history of infrasound is one place to begin such a project, as it problematizes which vibrations do or do not count as “sound”; requires an extracochlear model of hearing; and attaches audition to somatic feelings and moods, including agitation, anxiety, irritability, and apprehensiveness. In her history of vibration, Shelley Trower demonstrates how

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms nineteenth- century physiologists, poets, and spiritualists used sound “to make audible the silent vibrations that were shaping the experience of modernity.”10 Gillian Beer similarly notes late-nineteenth- century anxieties that attended the limits of perception: “Not only the distortion but the extreme tenuity of our senses was brought home as the subsonic, ultrasonic, and subsensible . . . began to surround and imbue the human.”11 Dovetailing with these histories, I fi nd that infrasound became an increasingly salient cultural concern precisely during the midcentury moment when nuclear weapons testing, Cold War logics, and ecological consciousness inaugurated planetary thinking anew. A vibration that could circle the earth and indicate precarious or degraded environments crystallized widespread scientifi c and popular concerns about the hazards of modern geopolitical globality, which resonate to this day. Auditing infrasound as it echoes from the mid-twentieth century to now allows sensory scholars to inquire into the epistemic status of that which is palpable yet unheard. How do our understandings of sound change when they are not vibrations acting on bodies but vibrations that resonate with and within our fl eshy, pulpy selves? In this essay, I relate how infrasonic vibrations were cast as sonic weapons, as well as a signature of the use of atomic weapons— specifi cally, in order to monitor international compliance with the Limited and Comprehensive Nu- clear Test Ban Treaties. I examine infrasound as both cause and register of human anxiety in a technological world suff used with vibrations both heard and unheard. Finally, I stray into infrasound’s use as a way of debunking ghostly hauntings in order to tune in to infrasound as diagnostic of modern paranoias about the imperceptible risks to which we imagine ourselves exposed. At stake is the relation of sounds to vibrations, of vibrations to bodies, and of bodies to the vibrating and per- ilous environments in which they are nestled.

A Devastating Whistle: Silent Weapons in a Cold War In 1941, infrasound reverberated through the pages of Robert Heinlein’s speculative fi ction novel Th e Day aft er Tomorrow. Originally serially published in Astounding Science Fiction as Sixth Column the same year as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Heinlein’s book features American scientists who develop an infrasonic weapon designed to kill a Pan- Asian

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms enemy alliance. Vibrations pitched at fourteen hertz struck fear in the hearts of America’s enemies. Paging through Heinlein’s xenophobic fantasy of vibrant infrasonic retribution, one reads, “Th ose damned subsonics give me the creeping horrors even when I know what’s going on. . . . Th ere’s nothing like the fear of something you can’t understand to break a man down.”12 Stories about weaponizing infrasound were not, however, limited to science fi ction novels— they also seeped into peer- reviewed scientifi c publications, popular science magazines, and mainstream and yellow journalism. Foremost among these was the strange tale of Russian-born French scientist Vladimir Gavreau.13 Twenty years aft er the publication of Th e Day aft er Tomorrow, Gavreau, head of the Electroacoustics and Automation Laboratory of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifi que (CNRS), and his fellow researchers began to feel nauseated, dizzy, and unfocused. While investigating vibrations visible in the liquids found in his laboratory, Gavreau discovered that a defective industrial ventilator in a nearby building had caused a standing wave to vibrate below twenty hertz in his laboratory, though not in any adjacent laboratories. Upon disabling the fan, he and his colleagues immediately recovered. Intrigued by the connection between low- frequency vibrations and feelings of illness and unease, and in particular by the conundrum of “directive vibrations,” Gavreau began researching whether infrasonic vibrations, while unheard, might nonetheless be physically palpable. What happens next, however, oscillates between fact and fi ction, making it diffi cult to separate history from conspiracy theory. Some writers doubt to this day whether Gavreau existed, despite the fact that journal articles and patents bear his name.14 A 1967 issue of the UNESCO Courier speculated that Gavreau was researching a lethal “black noise,” building a “devastating whistle” and a “mammoth organ pipe” twenty- four meters long that could disable or even kill enemy combatants by surrounding them in a sonic “envelope of death” or turning their internal organs into “jelly.”15 Researchers in his laboratory, the press reported, would be snatched from near death aft er their internal organs “hit critical resonance frequencies.”16 One champion of Gavreau was cut- up writer William S. Burroughs, who carried a clipping of a Sunday Times article about Gavreau in his wallet and showed it to several musicians he interviewed in the early 1970s. Burroughs explained to Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page,

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Professor Gavreau of France developed infrasound as a military weapon. A powerful infra-sound installation can, he claims, kill everyone in a fi ve- mile radius, knock down walls and break win- dows. Infra- sound kills by setting up vibrations within the body so that, as Gavreau puts it, “You can feel all the organs in your body rubbing together.” Th e plans for this device can be obtained from the French Patent Offi ce, and infrasound generators con- structed from inexpensive materials.17 Burroughs similarly sketched out Gavreau’s story to David Bowie while interviewing him for Rolling Stone in November 1973; the two imagined making music that might “maim [the audience].”18 Weaponized infrasound left an indelible impression on Bowie, who told Dick Cavett in a televised interview a year later that a “black noise bomb” that could destroy a city had been invented in France and that you could purchase the patent for less than four dollars.19 Industrial musicians Th robbing Gristle, also devotees of Burroughs, incorporated infrasound into their live performances, as Th robbing Gristle synthesist Chris Carter explained, to “make people do things that they didn’t want to do— making people feel ill and dizzy and stuff .” 20 Th e band also bombarded squatters with infrasonic waves to force them out of Genesis P- Orridge’s backyard.21 Gavreau’s “mammoth organ pipe” featured in a 1973 volume of Belgian feminist comic book Yoko Tsuno, in which the titular electrical engineer must rescue a famous organist from the villainous Karl Moebius and his destructive infrasonic L’o r g u e Du Diable (devil’s organ). Such anecdotes are, perhaps, symptomatic of Cold War paranoia heavily dosed with the coke-fueled avant-garde industrial and glam scenes of the early 1970s. Nonetheless, they persist in sober sources to this day; the Hastings Center issued a 2010 report warning its readers, “Acoustical weapons, which have not yet been perfected, would employ inaudible infrasound to resonate in body cavities and cause disorientation, nausea, vomiting, and bowel spasms.”22 Such hypothetical weapons are, in many ways, an insidious obverse to the use of sonic booms by the American military during the Cold War— in the 1964 Oklahoma Sonic Boom Experiment, citizens were regularly exposed to sonic booms (eight times a day over six months) to test the psychological repercussions of the “sound of freedom.” In such

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms exercises, “through sound, the state touched people’s bodies,” such that “the Cold War was mapped onto the fi eld of sensory experience.”23 In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman notes how a “tactics of frequency” “brings into the fi eld of power the dimension of unsound.”24 While the use of audible sound—loud, piercing noises and grating pop music— has been studied as part of the history of sonic warfare, from crowd control to human torture, panic over (or enthusiasm for) infrasonic weaponry draws our attention toward the specter of sounds unheard, transmitted from far away yet acting intimately on the bodily interior.

“The Voice of the Atmosphere” Given that infrasound was already understood to be a weapon in itself, it is unsurprising that infrasound would soon also be enrolled as indexical of weaponry and hence a deterrent against the proliferation and testing of nuclear weapons. By the 1950s both the United States and the Soviet Union had set up infrasound monitoring stations in order to detect atmospheric nuclear testing.25 Over two thousand nuclear weapons tests were conducted between 1945 and 1996; and in the fi rst two decades following World War II, infrasound was an effi cient mechanism for the US government to keep tabs on Soviet atmospheric weapons detonations.26 “Studying VLF [very- low frequency] emissions produced by nuclear explosions,” Douglas Kahn notes, “was part of a larger scientifi c task of producing and monitoring seemingly every possible electromagnetic and acoustical (seismic, infrasound) signal and chemical and isotopic signature from around the world.”27 Th e 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty moved nuclear testing underground, where its monitoring became the province of seismic rather than infrasonic recording devices. Infrasound monitoring of nuclear weapons was revived again in the 1990s, when the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was draft ed and codifi ed by the United Nations General Assembly.28 In the intervening years, a global network of infrasound stations were installed to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the organization of which is headquartered in Vienna.29 Sixty global infrasound stations are currently being built, and forty- fi ve, at last count, are already functioning, registering infrasonic waves, and transmitting signals back to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) headquarters in Vienna.30

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fig. 1. Infrasound monitoring station, Schauinsland, Germany. Image courtesy of the CTBTO Public Information, https://www .ctbto .org.

When North Korea detonated nuclear weapons in 2010, scientists at the CTBTO offi ces knew hours later, before North Korea had made an offi cial announcement.31 In this respect, infrasound monitoring is not simply a technology deployed in the service of desired geopolitical harmony but rather functions as harmonic geopolitics. While nuclear weapons detonations were rare occasions for most citizens, other sources of infrasound were growing increasingly com- monplace. Th e same 1967 issue of the UNESCO Courier that publi- cized Gavreau’s research also reported on the dangers of modern noise to human welfare. “Th e Danger of Sounds We Cannot Hear” blames infrasound for a host of conditions, from the discomfort experienced by airline passengers to dizziness, fatigue, and a “fl uttering sensation” plaguing urban dwellers. Readers are warned that “inaudible noise, like an invisible enemy, is even more deadly than the noise we hear.”32 No longer thought of only as a literal weapon but also as an inaudible yet deadly by- product of modernity, infrasound had bifurcated.

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms In May 1976, scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University’s atmospheric infrasound station, began registering what researcher William Donn reported as “strange signals [that] began to appear . . . at about the same time on alternate days.”33 Aft er several weeks, the researchers realized that they were recording the fi rst Concorde fl ights landing at Dulles International Airport. Th ey used the resulting infrasonic vibrations, which were degradations of the Concorde’s “sonic boom,” as an atmospheric probe to listen to what Donn called “the voice of the atmosphere.” Following the Concorde’s rumblings, Donn noted small atmospheric diff erences that registered on morning and aft ernoon fl ights, in summer and in autumn; and in so doing, he realized that environmental change could be monitored by listening to infrasonic frequencies.34 Around the same time, physicians began attending to infrasound’s possible eff ects on the body. No longer concerned with infrasound as a weapon, it was now recognized as a resonant, inaudible, yet potentially hazardous and inescapable artifact of urban modernity— a subauditory miasma. A literature review published in Lancet in 1973 noted that dif- ferent parts of the body resonated at various frequencies— “for example, the abdomen at about 10 Hz. . . . Abdomen vibrations may cause distress and sickness, whilst excessive chest vibration may interfere with the normal respiratory system.”35 Th e authors were careful to note, however, that while infrasound may be detrimental to one’s health, one person’s nuisance was another’s pleasure; “Chest vibrations,” they wrote, “inci- dentally are a welcome eff ect at discotheques and pop concerts, where the music is felt as well as heard—the total experience.”36 Th e attention to our bodies as entities already vibrating in tune with the infrasonic environment triggered concerns that the wrong kind of infrasound might be deleterious, even fatal. Th e medicalization of infrasound built on earlier anxieties that infrasound might be weaponized, joining them to worries over the ways in which a vibratory ecosystem might impact, penetrate, and resonate with human bodies. In 1980, physician Nuno Castelo Branco was appointed the chief medical offi cer at an aircraft manufacturing and repair facility owned and operated by the Portuguese Air Force. He began noting strange symptoms and behavior among his employees, which he chalked up to their long- term exposure to infrasonic vibrations.37 He reported that several employees, in apparent fugue states or epileptic fi ts, would wan-

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms der dangerously close to spinning propellers, from which fellow colleagues would drag them away at the last minute. He named this condi- tion “vibroacoustic disease.” Castelo Branco compared diseases caused by acoustic vibrations to other conditions that result from invisible or impalpable environmental phenomena; “It is high time that scientists begin to view acoustical phenomena with a framework usually applied to electromagnetic phenomena,” he pronounced.38 Within the electromagnetic spectrum, for example, the eye registers light within a small range of frequencies. Electromagnetic waves beyond that frequency— most notably, x- rays— are unseen yet nonetheless profoundly hazardous to one’s health. He proposed a similar model for vibratory phenomena; while not perceived by the human ear as sound, the acoustical spectrum nonetheless includes frequencies that can do serious bodily damage or be harnessed for medical diagnostics and therapies, as is the case with ultrasound. Castelo Branco’s work has in the last fi ve years been bolstered by physicians studying a contested illness that was named wind turbine syndrome in 2009. Nina Pierpont, the pediatrician who coined the term, noted that infrasonic waves emanating from wind turbines cause “a sensation of internal quivering, vibration, or pulsation accompanied by agitation, anxiety, alarm, irritability, rapid heartbeat, nausea, and sleep disturbance.”39 Recall Robert Heinlein’s science- fi ctional scientists railing against “those damned subsonics” giving them “the creeping horrors.”40 Th ough not recognized as a legitimate medical illness, people who live or work near industrial wind turbines report a wide variety of symptoms ranging from vertigo to nausea, irritability, annoyance, stress, and panic attacks.41 Anxiety is here treated as a suite of symptoms triggered by resonance frequencies, similar in many respects to Vladimir Gavreau’s report half a century earlier. If anxiety and paranoia was once a side eff ect of what infrasound vibrations might be indexical of, now infrasound itself is identifi ed as the immediate cause of embodied anxiety. If infrasound was once considered a rarity, triggered by a rogue nuclear blast or a defective generator, for those who today identify as suff ering from vibroacoustic disease or wind turbine syndrome, it is an unavoidable blight, a vibration blanketing the modern technologically mediated globe. In the last ten years, infrasound monitoring facilities are increasingly being repurposed toward monitoring and predicting environmen-

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms tal risks— earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, meteors hurtling toward earth from outer space— in addition to anthropogenic phenomena such as nuclear explosions and rocket launches. Th ough built to eavesdrop on clandestine nuclear tests, infrasound is now a burgeoning and globalized data- collection project aiming to hearken the vibratory world, a “soundtrack to catastrophe.”42 A Science article reported on the rumbling of Mt. Etna in the summer of 2001: “Th e shaking mountain, with its roiling ash cloud, acted like a giant transmitter, triggering pressure waves that undulated through the atmosphere.”43 Volcanoes register signature infrasonic vibrations in advance of exploding, giving CTBT stations a few minutes’ to hours’ lead time in warning communities liv- ing nearby. In 2013 the CTBTO signed an agreement with the director of the Geophysical Survey of the Russian Academy of Sciences allow- ing Russians to receive data from infrasound stations in order to de- liver near- real- time global tsunami warnings.44 Russia, the country for which infrasound monitoring stations were built in the United States in the fi rst place, is now a steward of infrasonic vibrations. Th e retooling of CTBT stations to monitor and predict volcanoes and earthquakes fi lters infrasound’s previous technological uses, re- fashioning the enemy not as a political threat but an environmental one. In this regard, infrasound might be considered, following sound- installation artist Raviv Ganchrow, to be “the bandwidth of the Anthro- pocene,” because “environmental infrasound exhibits an intermingling of large- scale human industrialized activity with these other earth- and atmosphere- related frequencies.”45 Such technoecological vibrations are, to quote Douglas Kahn, “emissaries of earth magnitude” that allow globalized auditing of an imagined “whole earth” absent the technological surveillance aff orded by “the ‘earthrise’ and ‘blue marble’ photo- graphs of the 1960s and 1970s” or contemporary GPS satellites.46

Conclusion: A Shiver in the Air In the early 1980s a British engineer named Vic Tandy started doing de- sign work for a company that manufactured medical equipment. Work- ing in the company’s laboratory one evening, he began to feel unwell: “Th ere was a feeling of depression, occasionally a cold shiver.”47 Sitting at his desk writing, he “began to feel increasingly uncomfortable”— “sweating but cold,” he reported, “and the feeling of depression was no-

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ticeable. . . . It was as though something was in the room with” him. He had the uncanny sense of being watched. He saw a ghostly apparition appear on his left , moving, he later wrote, as one “would expect a person to.” He felt a chill in the room, and his hair stood on end. When he turned his head, the apparition vanished. Th e following morning, Tandy, an amateur fencer, was sharpening his fencing blade in the laboratory, when he noticed that it quivered at a regular frequency. Using acoustic equipment, he investigated the lab and found that there was a standing infrasonic wave in the laboratory vibrating close to nineteen hertz, which was caused by a new fan re- cently installed in the extraction system. Once the fan was replaced, the hauntings ceased. Tandy speculated that the infrasonic vibration was responsible for the feelings of unease and dread sometimes associated with ghostly hauntings. He even suggested that the spectral fi gure was caused by the viscous fl uid in his eyeball vibrating at the same frequency as the standing wave, thereby distorting his vision and causing visual hallucinations. He made a modest career over the next few years as an amateur ghost hunter, traveling to other haunted sites— medieval cel- lars, moldering castles— in the United Kingdom in search of infrasonic waves.48 Infrasound cannot be contained by canonical defi nitions of “sound,” nor has it ever been properly contained by scientifi c orthodoxy. From the alarmed report of a Soviet scientist’s “devastating whistle” that could liquefy internal organs to science- fi ctional death rays to contested ill- nesses marked by feelings of quivering and vibratory dread, infrasound has, since its discovery, been associated with hidden, oft en sinister or malevolent forces, those which are all the more unsettling because exposure is unnoticed, even insensible. A liminal vibration propagating at the cusp of human audibility, ever so slightly below the threshold of human perception, invites all-too- human anxieties about the limits of our own capacity to sense and know the environment in which we are embedded. Th e infrasonic calls attention to our embodiment, our status as sacs and pockets of quivering fl uid and pulp that are submerged in and resonate with an uncertain environment—hence long-standing worries over vibrating vitreous humors, organs jellifying, and head- exploding sonic waves. Infrasound also pulsates with human panics over hidden forces and the limits of our ability to perceive them— phenomena not

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms felt yet that endanger us. As such, infrasound is more than something unheard that indexes danger. Apprehending it makes people apprehen- sive about the various risks to which we imagine ourselves exposed— unseen enemies, unheard weapons, rogue states slipping past acoustic surveillance, degraded environments, risky labor, noisy cities, forces that are supernatural, perhaps malevolent, but always just beyond the limits of human perception. Sophia Roosth is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor in the De- partment of the History of Science at Harvard University. Roosth was the 2016 Anna- Maria Kellen Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin and the Joy Foundation Fellow of the Radcliff e Institute for Advanced Study (2013– 14). Roosth has published in Critical Inquiry, Representations, diff erences, Ameri- can Anthropologist, Science, and Grey Room. In her fi rst book, Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), Roosth asks what happens to life as a conceptual category when experimentation and fabrica- tion converge. Her next book, Th e Quick and the Dead (under contract with Chicago), will off er a historically and ethnographically informed travelogue into the worlds of contemporary geobiologists, scientists seeking ancient microbial life- forms fossilized in stone.

Notes Th is article grew from a presentation I delivered at the “Sonic Skills Expert Meeting: Sound and Listening in Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1920s- Now” at Maastricht Uni- versity in January 2014. I thank Karin Bijsterveld for her invitation. Stefan Helmreich, Hillel Schwartz, and Alma Steingart provided useful commentary on early versions of this piece. I also thank Erica Fretwell and two anonymous reviewers for Resilience for their feedback and editorial guidance. 1. Of course, the range of human audition is an abstraction, and each person’s hearing range varies over the course of a lifetime as a result of repeated exposure to loud noises. Jonathan Sterne argues that such exposure can lead to audile scarifi cation, an analysis he off ers to resist the ableism implied by pathologizing age- related hearing loss. Jonathan Sterne, “Audile Scarifi cation: Notes on the Normalization of Hearing Damage” (Department of the History of Science Public Annual Lecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, April 21, 2016). 2. A barograph is a barometer that translates pressure into physical graphs. Daniel Clery, “Test Ban Monitoring: No Place to Hide,” Science 325, no. 5939 (July 24, 2009): 382–85; Kate Ramsayer, “Infrasonic Symphony,” Science News 165, no. 2 (2004): 26– 28. See also Raviv Ganchrow, “Long Wave Synthesis,” in Th e Geologic Imagination, ed. Lucas van der Velden, Mirna Belina, and Arie Altena (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2015), 194–95.

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 3. David Fee et al., “Overview of the 2009 and 2011 Sayarim Infrasound Calibration Ex- periments,” Journal of Geophysical Research 118, no. 12 (June 27, 2013): 6122– 43. 4. Richard Stone, “Siberian Meteor Spurs Dash for Data, Calls for Safeguards,” Science 339, no. 6124 (March 8, 2013): 1135. 5. Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Aff ect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Paul C. Jasen, Low End Th eory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 6. Jonathan Sterne, Th e Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11. 7. To review the literature on infrasonic communication among elephants, see Elia T. Ben- Ari, “A Th robbing in the Air: Th e Discovery of Infrasonic Communication among El- ephants Has Given Researchers a Whole New Way of Hearing Th ings,” BioScience 49, no. 5 (May 1, 1999): 353–58; Christian T. Herbst et al., “How Low Can You Go? Physical Produc- tion Mechanism of Elephant Infrasonic Vocalizations,” Science 337, no. 6094 (August 3, 2012): 595–99; Katharine B. Payne, William R. Langbauer, and Elizabeth M. Th omas, “Infrasonic Calls of the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus),” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 18, no. 4 (February 1986): 297– 301; Joyce H. Poole et al., “Th e Social Contexts of Some Very Low Frequency Calls of African Elephants,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 22, no. 6 (June 1988): 385– 92. 8. Th e multispecies turn in anthropology was inaugurated by a special issue of the journal Cultural Anthropology; S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “Th e Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (November 1, 2010): 545– 76. On the umwelt, consult Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Th eory of Meaning (1934; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Feminist science studies scholars have forged a path in exploring nonhuman sensoria: Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Eva Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfi sh: Prefi xial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves,” WSQ 36, no. 3 (2008): 64–85; Eva Hayward, “Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (November 1, 2010): 577– 99; Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers, “Involutionary Momentum: Aff ective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters,” diff erences 23, no. 3 (January 1, 2012): 74–118. See also Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Th ink: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 9. Jasen coins the term extracochlear to describe low- frequency vibrations, such as bass, in Low End Th eory. For another account of extracochlear hearing, consult Stefan Helmreich, “Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science,” in Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor J. Pinch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151– 75, reprinted in Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 137–54. Indeed, work broadening the understanding of sound has already been taken up by researchers in bioacoustics, who fi nd that marine organisms such as crustaceans communicate via rasps and rumbles apprehended by their compatriots not with ears (for they have none) but as a full- body sensation propagated by mechanosensory hairs and antennae; see Douglas J. Colson et al., “Sound Production during Feeding in Hippocampus Seahorses (Syngnathidae),” Environmental Biology of Fishes 51, no. 2 (1998): 221–29; S. N.

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Patek and R. L. Caldwell, “Th e Stomatopod Rumble: Low Frequency Sound Production in Hemisquilla californiensis,” Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology 39, no. 2 (June 2006): 99–111; Sheila N. Patek, “Spiny Lobsters Stick and Slip to Make Sound,” Nature 411, no. 6834 (May 10, 2001): 153– 54; E. R. Staaterman et al., “Rumbling in the Benthos: Acoustic Ecology of the California Mantis Shrimp Hemisquilla californiensis,” Aquatic Biology 13, no. 2 (August 4, 2011): 97– 105. 10. Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (London: Continuum, 2012), 3– 4. 11. Gillian Beer, “‘Authentic Tidings of Invisible Th ings’: Vision and the Invisible in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 91. 12. Robert A. Heinlein [Anson McDonald, pseud.], Sixth Column, pt. 2, in Astounding Science Fiction 26, no. 2 (1941), 124, https://archive .org /stream /Astounding _v26n06 _1941 - 02 _dtsg0318 - LennyS #page /n123 /mode /2up. 13. Vladimir Gavreau, “Pneumatic Generators of Intense Ultrasound,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 28, no. 4 (July 1, 1956): 803; Vladimir Gavreau, “Infrasound,” Science Journal 4, no. 1 (1968): 33; Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 18– 19; Alexander Rehding, “Of Sirens Old and New,” in Th e Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vol. 2, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77–106. 14. Seth Horowitz, Th e Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 15. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 18–19; Horowitz, Universal Sense. 16. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 18–19. 17. William Burroughs, “Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, and a Search for the Elusive Stairway to Heaven,” Crawdaddy, June 1975, https:// arthurmag .com /2007 /12 /05 /willima- burroughs - onled - zeppelin/. Th e article from which Burroughs quotes is Frank Dorsey, “Joshua Knew a Th ing or Two,” Sunday Times, April 16, 1967. Th e article does not mention a French patent on an infrasonic weapon. 18. Craig Copetas, “Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman: William Burroughs Inter- views David Bowie,” Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974, http:// www .rollingstone .com /music /news /beat - godfather - meets - glitter - mainman - 19740228. 19. Th e relevant clip from the interview can be viewed at “David Bowie Talks about a Control Bomb on Dick Cavett Show— 1974,” YouTube video, 1:08, May 23, 2013, https:// www .youtube .com /watch ?v = cQLZerYmi _U. 20. Atte Oksanen, “Anti-Musical Becomings: Industrial Music and the Politics of Shock and Risk,” Secessio 2, no. 1 (2013). https://secessio .wordpress .com /vol - 2 - no - 1 /anti - musical - becomings - industrial - music - and - the - politics - of - shock - and - risk/. 21. S. Alexander Reed, Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 22. Michael L. Gross, “Medicalized Weapons and Modern War,” Hastings Center Report 40, no. 1 (2010): 34– 43. 23. David Suisman, “Th e Oklahoma City Sonic Boom Experiment and the Politics of Supersonic Aviation,” Radical History Review 2015, no. 121 (January 1, 2015): 170– 71; David

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Suisman, “Th e American Environmental Movement’s Lost Victory,” Public Historian 37, no. 4 (November 1, 2015): 111– 31. 24. Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 17. 25. Richard Stone, “Data Treasures of the Test Ban Treaty,” Science 297, no. 5578 (2002): 41– 43. 26. “Known Nuclear Tests Worldwide, 1945–98,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54, no. 6 (November 1, 1998): 65–67. See also Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Joseph Masco, Th e Nuclear Borderlands: Th e Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppen- heimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 27. Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 111. 28. “Comprehensive Nuclear- Test- Ban Treaty,” accessed June 24, 2018, https:// www .ctbto .org /fi leadmin /content /treaty /treaty _text .pdf; Hugh Gusterson, “Th e Virtual Nuclear Weap- ons Laboratory in the New World Order,” American Ethnologist 28, no. 2 (May 1, 2001): 417– 37. 29. David Brown et al., “Th e IDC Seismic, Hydroacoustic and Infrasound Global Low and High Noise Models,” Pure and Applied Geophysics 171, nos. 3–5 (September 8, 2012): 361– 75; Michael A. H. Headlin et al., “Listening to the Secret Sounds of Earth’s Atmosphere,” Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union 83, no. 48 (November 26, 2002): 557– 65. 30. Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organi- zation, Annual Report 2014 (Vienna, Austria: Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Or- ganization, 2014), https:// www .ctbto .org /fi leadmin /user _upload /pdf /Annual _Report _2014 /English /2014 _AR _E _Complete .pdf; Clery, “Test Ban Monitoring.” 31. Lars- Erik De Geer, “Reinforced Evidence of a Low- Yield Nuclear Test in North Korea on 11 May 2010,” Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry 298, no. 3 (August 27, 2013): 2075– 83. 32. “Th e Danger of Sounds We Cannot Hear,” in Gunther Lehmann, “Noise and Health,” UNESCO Courier, July 1967, 26– 31. 33. William L. Donn, “Exploring the Atmosphere with Sonic Booms; or How I Learned to Love the Concorde,” American Scientist 66, no. 6 (1978): 724– 33. 34. Nambath K. Balachandran, William L. Donn, and David H. Rind, “Concorde Sonic Booms as an Atmospheric Probe,” Science 197, no. 4298 (1977): 47– 49; William L. Donn et al., “Infrasound at Long Range from Saturn V, 1967,” Science 162, no. 3858 (1968): 1116–20; William L. Donn and Nambath K. Balachandran, “Meteors and Meteorites Detected by In- frasound,” Science 185, no. 4152 (1974): 707– 9. 35. “Infrasound,” Lancet 302, no. 7842 (December 15, 1973): 1368– 69. 36. “Infrasound,” 1368– 69. 37. Mariana Alves- Pereira and Nuno Castelo Branco, “Vibroacoustic Disease: Biological Eff ects of Infrasound and Low- Frequency Noise Explained by Mechanotransduction Cellu- lar Signalling,” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 93 (2007): 256– 79. 38. Alves- Pereira and Castelo Branco, “Vibroacoustic Disease,” 259.

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This content downloaded from 128.135.98.36 on Mon, 28 Jan 2019 19:59:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 39. Nina Pierpont, Wind Turbine Syndrome: A Report on a Natural Experiment (Santa Fe: K-Selected Books, 2009), 270. 40. Heinlein, Sixth Column, 124. 41. Simon Chapman et al., “Th e Pattern of Complaints about Australian Wind Farms Does Not Match the Establishment and Distribution of Turbines: Support for the Psycho- genic, Communicated Disease Hypothesis” PLoS One 8, no. 10 e76584 (October 2013); A. Farboud, R. Crunkhorn, and A. Trinidade, “‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’: Fact or Fiction?,” Journal of Laryngology and Otology 127, no. 3 (March 2013): 222–26; Magda Havas and David Colling, “Wind Turbines Make Waves: Why Some Residents Near Wind Turbines Become Ill,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 31, no. 5 (October 1, 2011): 414– 26; Loren D. Knopper and Christopher A. Ollson, “Health Eff ects and Wind Turbines: A Review of the Literature,” Environmental Health 10 (2011): 78; Jennifer D. Roberts and Mark A. Roberts, “Wind Turbines: Is Th ere a Human Health Risk?,” Journal of Environmental Health 75, no. 8 (April 2013): 8– 17; Alec N. Salt and James A. Kaltenbach, “Infrasound from Wind Turbines Could Aff ect Humans,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 31, no. 4 (August 1, 2011): 296–302. 42. Hugh Raffl es, Insectopedia (New York: Vintage, 2011), 330. 43. Stone, “Data Treasures of the Test Ban Treaty.” 44. CTBTO, “CTBTO Head Visits Moscow, Signs Tsunami Warning Agreement,” press release, https:// www .ctbto .org /press - centre /highlights /2013 /ctbto - head - visits - moscow - signs -tsunami - warning - agreement/. 45. Ganchrow, “Long Wave Synthesis,” 184– 85. 46. Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 16, 17. 47. Vic Tandy and Tony Lawrence, “Th e Ghost in the Machine,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 62, no. 851 (1998): 360– 64. 48. Vic Tandy, “Something in the Cellar,” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 64, no. 860 (2000): 129– 40. See also Mark Pilkington, “Th e Fear Frequency,” Guardian, October 15, 2003.

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