By

Geeta Dayal

on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 1:00 pm.

In Krystof Wodiczko’s striking installation Out of Here: The Veterans
Project, currently on view at the ICA in Boston, choppers roar
overhead. People scream in the distance. Glass breaks and shatters on
the floor. The viewer can see almost nothing; the large room is dark,
except for a few windows high above, created by a row of video
projections. The view from these windows is obscured; the piece is as
much about what you can’t see than what you do see. But even more
importantly, the piece is about what you hear–and what you can’t
hear. The chants of an imam become the sounds of women wailing.
Gunshots begin to fire sporadically. Military officers yell harsh
commands. The rumble of bass—a swarm of Humvees in the distance,
drawing closer—gets louder and more threatening. The longer you stay
in the room, immersed in the increasing racket, the more palpable the
sense of dread becomes. The harrowing sounds of war are not simply
about the sounds themselves, but the spaces in between.

In the intriguing new book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear [MIT Press], Steve Goodman
explores the power of sound as a tactic of irritation, intimidation,
or even permanent harm. Goodman analyzes “environments, or ecologies,
in which sound contributes to an immersive atmosphere or ambience of
fear and dread–where sound helps produce a bad vibe.”

Goodman catalogs a litany of military uses of sound that seem like
sinister science fiction fantasies. The “Urban Funk Campaign” was a
suite of audio harassment techniques used by the military in Vietnam
in the early 1970s. One such technique was called “The Curdler,” or
“People Repeller,” a panic-inducing oscillator with the ability to
cause deafening impact at short distances. The Windkanone, or
“Whirlwind Cannon,” was a sonic weapon planned by the Nazis. The
“Ghost Army” was a unit of the U.S. Army in World War II that
impersonated other units to fake out the enemy, employing an array of
sonic deception techniques with the help of engineers from Bell Labs.
“The Scream” was an acoustic weapon used by the Israeli military
against protesters in 2005. That same year, the Israeli air force
deployed deafening sonic booms over the Gaza Strip—producing powerful
physiological and psychological effects. “Its victims likened its
effect to the wall of air pressure generated by a massive explosion,”
Goodman writes. “They reported broken windows, ear pain, nosebleeds,
anxiety attacks, sleeplessness, hypertension, and being left ‘shaking
inside.’ “

The physiological effects of sound get an extended discussion via the
concept of infrasound, or sub-20 Hz bass frequencies, which are
legendary for inducing bodily harm. Fantastical tales about infrasound
and its infamous effects on the human body abound in popular lore.
Infrasound devices generally require huge, heavy rigs to produce such
powerful waves, which limit their practicality. One of the book’s most
fascinating accounts is the story of the wily scientist Vladimir
Gavreau, who did bizarre experiments with infrasonic waves in his
French laboratory in the 1960s. According to Goodman, one such
experiment caught
Gavreau and his team in a “vibratory “envelope of death,” where they
“allegedly suffered
sustained internal spasms as their organs hit critical resonance frequencies.”
Goodman seizes upon these outer limits
of sound – infrasound at the low end, and ultrasound at the high end –
and explores them extensively. For him, infrasound and ultrasound, at
the edges of our range of perception – illustrate the “unsound,” as he
terms it, the “not yet audible.”

Freakish military devices like “The Curdler” may seem like footnotes
of the historical record–curiosities from wars staged in far-flung
lands. But these devices also hit close to home. Last September,
police in Pittsburgh utilized a device known as the LRAD (Long Range
Acoustic Device) cannon against G20 protesters — the first documented
use of one of these acoustic cannons against civilians in the United
States. At top volume, the cannon is capable of emitting high-pitched
warning tones at 146 decibels — loud enough to cause permanent
hearing damage.

How do we make sense of these uses of sound? Goodman sidesteps a
full-on historical survey of the subject. Nor is he interested in a
scientific analysis of the neurobiology of audition. Instead, he
presents a theoretical apparatus for understanding these acts of sonic
warfare, via thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio, and
Jacques Attali. Goodman argues for an “ontology of vibrational force,”
as a way of understanding “the not yet audible.” Goodman defines
vibrational force
as a “microrhythmic oscillation,” and uses the idea of
“rhythmanalysis”–a philosophy of
rhythm developed by the philosophers Pinheros dos Santos, Gaston
Bachelard, and Henri
Lefebvre—to advance his argument.

Along the way, Goodman delves into a bewildering array of references
from the worlds of
philosophy, psychoacoustics, art, music, and military strategy. The
Futurists’ fixation with noise, war, and speed figures in here, from
Luigi Russolo’s famed tract “The Art of Noises” to Marinetti’s fevered
exultations: “Load! Fire! What a joy to hear to smell completely
taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathlessness under the
stings.” So, too, do the discourses of Afrofuturism, the surreal
fictional landscapes of William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, the
1984 cult film Decoder, “audio
viruses,” Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the refrain, Jamaican sound
systems, the work of the sound artist Mark Bain, and the “Mosquito
Anti-Social Device,” a high-frequency tool designed to prevent UK
teenagers from loitering.

Sonic Warfare is a heady, sprawling read, densely packed with detail.
Goodman’s wide range is, in part, influenced by his background. In
addition to being a writer and theorist, he doubles as an accomplished
producer of dubstep under the alias kode9, wandering a subterranean
world of bone-rattling bass pressure, towering speaker stacks, and
crowded rooms. His unique dual existence makes him strangely – and
ideally – suited for a book which requires not only an understanding
of theory and history, but also a close and personal understanding of
the powerful physicality of sound itself.

Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World
(Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150
articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The
Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune,
Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several
courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of
California – Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of
New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and
journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack.