2001: What Is Sonic Warfare? 2

The twenty-first century started with a bang, setting the resonant frequency of fear at which the planet has been vibrating, trembling, ever since. In the echo of this bang, the software designers of anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that were mutating the global music industry were drafted in as “precogs” of the actions of viral terror networks. At an irregular rhythm, audio and audiovisual cassettes would turn up on the desks of Arab media networks, relaying jihadist communiqués. Seeking to verify these rare terror clues, Western security agencies would subject these sound bytes to audio forensic analysis, a vocal parallel to fingerprint analysis, digitally hunting down transitions between phonemes, the patterns of glitches that function as unique voice identifiers. But irrelevant of truth value, these pulsed sonic signals triggered real, incorporeal transformations within the ecology of fear.

These specifics are new, but the sonic dimensions of conflict are ancient. From Hitler’s use of the loudspeaker as a mechanism for affective mobilization during World War II, through to bin Laden’s audiotaped messages, the techniques of sonic warfare have now percolated into the everyday. But how the illusive decentralized networks of contemporary asymmetric warfare resonate within the decentralized networks of sonic culture remains a topic of marked neglect.

How are sound systems (consisting of bodies, technologies, and acoustic vibrations, all in rhythmic sympathy) deployed in a war of mood, sensation, and information? And what demilitarized zones can they produce, laboratories for affect engineering and the exorcism of dread, occupying the precarious virtual threshold between dance and violence? What, in other words, is sonic warfare?

It is always more useful to ask what something can do, its potential, rather than what it is, its essence. What then is the power of this phrase sonic warfare? Can it conceptually rewire the microsound of politics and the micropolitics of sound? What cultural tensions does it amplify? In what follows, an open sketch will be made in response to these questions, identifying a discontinuum of deployments of sound system concepts, cultures, and technologies across the fault lines of contemporary culture.1 At the dawn of a new millennium and in the midst of the cybernetic phase of war and cultural machines, an investigation of sonic warfare reveals some intriguing patterns regarding emergent modes of perception, collectivity, and cultural conflict in the twenty-first century.

Throughout history, often imperceptibly, the audiosphere has been subject to militarization. A notion of sonic warfare lies at the heart of modern experimental music and takes us back to the apex of the sonic avant-garde, to Luigi Russolo’s Futurist manifesto for music, The Art of Noises, which glorified explosions, rifle fire, and the dissonance of industrial machinery as an assault on the deadened sensorium of classical music and bourgeois aesthetics. The futurist art of war in the art of noise framed cultural innovation in the field of music as a sensory war in which the stakes were no less than the distribution and hierarchical stratification of the nervous system. A crystallization of the belligerent li-bidinal field of the early twentieth century, futurism processed the schizzed and shell-shocked psyche of the battlefield, seeking a new synthesis—one claiming to break with the organic wholeness of the past in favor of a technical enhancement (and usually, for Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a phallic extension), a rewiring of the body and its sonic sensations.

Theorists such as Jacques Attali and Paul Virilio repeatedly return to the early-twentieth-century futurist conceptual experiments such as those of Russolo and Marinetti’s poetics of shell shock, to explore the intersection of war machines and media machines. Fusing together the concepts of noise, war, and speed with the technosensations of the industrial age, the futurists launched what they considered to be an assault on the harmonic order. In his 1913 manifesto, Russolo noted that musical sound was too limited in “its variety of timbres. The most complicated orchestras can be reduced to four or five classes of instruments in different timbres of sound: bowed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and percussion. Modern music flounders with this tiny circle, vainly striving to create new varieties of timbre. We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”²

For both Russolo and Marinetti, the battlefield is glorified as a ballistic aerodynamic space in which the eye dismounts the pyramid of the senses, leaving sensory navigation in the domain of the haptic. As Russolo puts it,

In modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. The sense, the significance, and the expressiveness of noise, however are infinite... . From noise, the different calibres of grenades and shrapnels can be known even before they explode. Noise enables us to discern a marching patrol in deepest darkness, even to judging the number of men that compose it. From the intensity of rifle fire, the number of defenders of a given position can be determined. There is no movement or activity that is not revealed by noise.³

In this legacy of Italian futurism,⁴ the intersection of sound machines and war machines as a field of cultural analysis has been dominated by this elusive concept of “noise.”⁵ Usually noise, or disorganized sound, is conceived as a weapon, a code bomb launched by those practitioner-theorists angry at the complacency or conservativeness of a certain hierarchal stratification of audiosocial matter. Noise, from Russolo to Attali, is therefore understood as intrinsically radical, as that which lies outside music, that which threatens music from without, rejuvenating it, giving it the energy to do anything new. Following the futurists, noise, for Attali, is understood as a cultural weapon that attacks musical codes and networks in an audiosocial warfare of aesthetics and economics. Attali notes that before its development in information theory, “noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it has been associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague,” and other agents of destruction.⁶

From futurism in the early twentieth century onward, noise has been a key preoccupation of the modernist sonic avant-garde. Often under a conceptual alliance with “chaos,” noise ties together the “Art of Noise” to John Cage’s experiments with any sound whatever, chance, and the I-Ching, to free jazz and Japanese noise terrorism, through to the recent preoccupations with digital glitches, process aesthetics, and their current manifestations in generative and algorithmic music and microsound. Yet despite the radical rhetoric, many of these avant-gardist formulations of noise as a weapon in a war of perception, a war whose battlefield is the body (its sensations, reflexes, and habitual ticks), fail time and time again to impress. With many of these instances, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari point out, “All one has left is a resonance chamber well on the way to forming a black hole.”⁷ In an already radically schizophonic⁸ soundscape of the early twentieth century, Louise Varese had decried the noise tactics of the Italian futurists for having “slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives.”⁹ Now, in the twenty-first century of ubiquitous schizophonia, an alternative formulation is required that discards those exhausted uses and practices that result from the paradoxical “genrefication” of noise.

In his recent Bring the Noise, Simon Reynolds notes how the “noise effect” has made a recent resurgence, particularly through “all those overlapping sub-styles of squall and atonal abstraction that come out of industrial music, free jazz, musique concrete and sound art. The concept of ‘noise’ has made a big comeback in recent years... the irritating end of it is all those artist aiming for ye old ‘shock effect,’ their pure noise laden with content of tediously ‘transgressive’ nature (all the old clichéd faves of vileness and violation: serial murder, neo-Nazis, yawn...). The blindingly obvious fact is that no one shockable is within earshot; there’s no disruption or challenge in these scenes, because they’re screeching to the converted.”¹⁰ If anything should be salvaged here, it is that noise is always a relational concept, and Reynolds persuasively argues that the concept is actually least radical in the “ears-are-wounds sense.” Instead, for Reynolds, noise stands for the reservoir of invention in those “popular but un-pop sounds [that] have echoed the trajectory of twentieth-century avant-garde classical music, which advanced through incorporating non-musical sounds, aestheticizing mistakes, deploying randomness, and asserting the percussive and the textural over the melodic and harmonic.”¹¹

In addition to pointing to the problems of futurism’s orientation to temporality in a postcyberpunk epoch, of leaving the past behind to speed off into the future, the concept of noise will be steered elsewhere, investigating what happens when it is conceived not as an end in itself but instead as a field of potential. At the same time, it will prove useful to retain and sharpen the futurist concern with acoustic warfare, whereby sonic effects serve as cultural weapons. Yet where possible, a detour will be taken around the celebration of entropy in much discourse surrounding noise, instead staying alert to the micromovements lurking within. By shunting the problem of noise onto one of the emergence of rhythm from noise, the power of a vibrational encounter to affectively mobilize comes into clearer focus.

As a backdrop to this resurgence of the concept of noise, the “sonic” has become an increasingly fashionable terrain in recent years, coinciding with the explosion of electronic music culture in the 1980s and 1990s and its intensification of this futurist and Cagean openness to nonmusical sound and a related resurgence of interest in the potential of postliterate sensory recombinations by attacks on the dominant ocularcentric models of Western philosophy¹² Conceptually, the limitations of many cultural studies approaches have been exposed with this expanded remit from music culture to sonic culture. Some attempts have refocused phenomenologically around the concept of audition.¹³ However, probing deeper than the merely auditory, the vibratory materialism developed here focuses, before human hearing, on the primacy of the synesthetic.¹⁴ The sonic will be emphasized in its sensory relation, in its intermodality, as rhythmic vibration, in excess and autonomous from the presence of a human, phenom-enological subject or auditor. Any definition of sonic culture must synesthetically take into account that which exceeds unisensory perception, that which impresses on but is exterior to the sonic. Sonic warfare is therefore as much about the logistics of imperception (unsound) as it is perception. The bandwidth of human audibility is a fold on the vibratory continuum of matter. With reference to military research into acoustic weaponry, this molecular backdrop will be mapped as a vibratory field into which the audible is implicated. On the frequency spectrum, bounding the thresholds of perceptible sound (above 20 hertz and below 20 kilohertz), where sonic perception becomes intermodal or defunct, lies infrasonic and ultrasonic wave phenomenon. The narrowband channel of the audible plunges into the murky depths of low-frequency infra-sound and subbass, or constricts into the piercing high frequencies of ultrasound. Sonic culture, thus situated, renders the urban audiosocial as a system of speeds and channels, dense pressure pockets, vortices of attraction, basins of acoustic immersion and abrasion, vibratory and turbulent: a whole cartography of sonic force.

When Attali asked us to probe into the “fundamental noise” that scrambles contemporary codes of communication, he was implicitly signaling the central-ity of affect. It is at a subsignifying level, at the level of intensity where a “crossing of semantic wires” occurs, that a map of affective tonality can be constructed. Sonic Warfare forces an engagement with theories of affect and the imperceptible and sidesteps those preoccupations of cultural studies’ critical musicological approaches that tend to limit discussion around issues of representation, identity, and cultural meaning.¹⁵ The linguistic, textualist, and social-constructivist perspectives that dominated cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s are of little use to us here. Even Attali, against the critical musicological obsession with the meaning or signification of sound, points out that music itself “cannot be equated with a language ... [because it] never has a stable reference to a code of the linguistic type.” If it must be construed as a language, then it is one that abandons narrative; it is not myth coded in sounds instead of words, but rather “language without meaning.”¹⁶ Affect comes not as either a supplement or a replacement to the preoccupations of cultural theories of representation, but rather as an approach that inserts itself ontologically prior to such approaches, thereby examining the very conditions of possibility for a sonic materialism and the ethico-aesthetic paradigm it would entail.

As opposed to sound as text, the dimension explored here is that of sound as force. Sonic warfare then, is the use of force, both seductive and violent, abstract and physical, via a range of acoustic machines (biotechnical, social, cultural, artistic, conceptual), to modulate the physical, affective, and libidinal dynamics of populations, of bodies, of crowds. Before the activation of causal or semantic, that is, cognitive listening,¹⁷ the sonic is a phenomenon of contact and displays, through an array of autonomic responses, a whole spectrum of affective powers. Sound has a seductive power to caress the skin, to immerse, to sooth, beckon, and heal, to modulate brain waves and massage the release of certain hormones within the body. Discussion of the physiological affects of sonic weaponry has usually centered on intensity (acoustic power), the ultrasonic or the infrasonic; the very loud, the very high pitched, and the very low pitched. At high sound pressure levels, the ear is directly damaged. Need we be reminded that noise, like anything else that touches you, can be a source of both pleasure and pain and that “beyond a certain limit, it becomes an immaterial weapon of death. The ear, which transforms vibration into electric impulses addressed to the brain, can be damaged, and even destroyed, when the frequency of a sound exceeds 20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels. Diminished intellectual capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion, neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the environment.”¹⁸ Curtis Roads notes that “the force of an explosion, for example, is an intense acoustic shock wave” and calls these potent frequencies and amplitudes “perisonic intensities (from the Latin periculus meaning ‘dangerous’).”¹⁹

A different conception of sonic warfare is perhaps suggested, in prototype form, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Such a conception deviates from an intrinsic relation between noise and sonic violence suggested from futurism through to Attali and beyond, and instead implies a kind of guerrilla sonics out of which any militarized investment would be constructed only through capture. Rather than the conventional monotonous artistic alliance between noise and destruction in a transgressive attempt to shock, noise instead becomes a vibrational field of rhythmic potential. A “sonic war machine” along these lines would be defined by its rhythmic consistency, would not take violence or noise as its primary object, but rather would concentrate its forces on affective mobilization and contagion. Its politics of frequency would entail the way in which vibrational force would be captured, monopolized, and redeployed.

This range of conceptions may initially be outlined in terms of a continuum. At opposite poles of the sonic warfare continuum then, two basic tendencies could be identified, two poles of this continuum of sonic force, perhaps two inverse modes or tactical tendencies. One is militarized, and the other engages in a warfare with an altogether different set of priorities.²⁰ In abstract terms, these extensive and intensive tendencies of audiosocial radiation can also be usefully described as, on the one hand, centrifugal, efferent, repulsive, producing a movement that spirals out from source, and on the other hand, a centripetal, afferent, attractional power producing a movement that spirals in toward a source. Clearly one tactical deployment of sound is subordinated to the strategic aim of crowd dispersal, to the dissipation of a collective energy, to repulsion and dissolution of clusters, and to the individualization of the movement of bodies. On the other side, we have a tactical deployment whose objective is that of intensification, to the heightening of collective sensation, an attractive, almost magnetic, or vortical force, a force that sucks bodies in toward its source. This dynamics may be thought meteorologically in terms of heat and pressure, as in “the eye of the storm,” or in terms of the turbulence of fluid mechanics: a power to generate a rhythmic rotation, intensification, and collective individuation (to render the crowd as a body in its own right). In this instance, the aim of mobilizing bodies extensively is accompanied and perhaps overridden by the primary objective of the intensive mobilization of affect.

Crucially, between these two coexistent tendencies, the attractive and repulsive power of sonic force, the issue is obviously not simply one of good or bad. Rather, their ambivalence indicates some of the emergent features central to the strategies and tactics of control within contemporary capitalism. The relation between these two tendencies of sonic force must be thought through very carefully. Not only must the extensive tendencies of “sonic war machines” be examined—their abilities to make bodies move—but also the range of intensive tendencies involved in the deployment of sound system technologies—their modulation of affective tone. While the centrifugal, repulsive deployment of sound machines (cultural, not just technical) can appear to be the preoccupation of military and police functions, it would be futile to naively celebrate the centripetal attractive power of the sound system. The problem of sonic warfare, strategic, tactical, and logistical, is clearly a complex one. In many compelling sonic cultural situations, we have a mixture of both, where, for example, sound is so overwhelming that we feel forced to take leave, but instead, resisting that initial gut feeling, the autonomic or involuntary reaction to take flight, we stay to enjoy. Conversely, a sonic fascism may occupy both poles of this continuum.

To help clarify this analysis, key insights on sonic media extracted from philosophy, fiction, cultural theory, popular music, and the intersection of science and art will be examined against the backdrop of military urbanism in order to identify the new sensations mobilizing an emergent generation of practitioners and theorists. Much speculation can also be found in conspiracy theory, which is only natural when research related to the defense industry is concerned. These sonic fictions and urban myths can form a starting point for a more careful philosophical investigation. For, in addition to the paranoid sensationalism that enlivens these often spurious accounts, they remind us that the sonic (and un-sonic) body is always poised precariously in a processual disequilibrium with the acoustic environment, and that even minute perturbations of this environment can set in motion resonant events and generate and provoke unforeseen cultural mutation. Moreover, if Jacques Attali is right, then in addition to the intense perceptual encounters sound system cultures can produce through music and noise, they may also emit transposable and prophetic diagrams of sociality, equipped with novel armories of affects, percepts, and concepts.

As already noted, Sonic Warfare will not attempt to be comprehensive about the full range of sound-affect conjunctions but will instead concentrate on the strange nexus of sound and fear. If Brian Massumi was correct when he argued in the early 1990s that fear was our overriding affective syndrome, the “inherence in the body of the multi-causal matrix ... recognizable as late capitalist human existence,”²¹ what critical urbanist Mike Davis has dubbed the ecology of fear, then analysis of these sensory tactics of affective mobilization and contagion will only become more pressing. The sonic is particularly attuned to examining one strand of this ecology of fear: dread.

Sonic experience will be placed in the context of a resonant cosmos that cuts across the duality of physical and emotional processes. The point of constructing this ontology of vibrational force is not to naturalize cultural phenomena in order to deny any possible tactical intervention, nor to suggest nature as a force of spontaneous vitality and therefore emancipatory power. Rather, the resort to a basic, indifferent vibrational plane exposes the inhuman entities that haunt the nature-culture continuum as it transects the networked affective battlefields of twenty-first- century geostrategy The production of the ecology of fear is intensified under the shadow of “shock and awe.” An investigation into asymmetric attacks and deployments waged on the affective status quo within the microcosm of the sonic might have a much broader significance.

Finally, the sonic forms a portal into the invisible, resonant pressures that impress on emergent cyberspaces with all of their problematics, from virtuality to piracy. With increased online bandwidth, sound has attained a more central role in the polymedia environment of contemporary culture, unleashing unpredictable technoeconomic transformations resonating throughout global music culture. Sonic Warfare therefore also offers some insights into the economy of attention of contemporary capitalism.