2400-1400 B.C.: Project Jericho 3

In Project Jericho, a short radiophonic piece created by the dramatist Gregory Whitehead, a hyperstitional research institute, the Jericho Institute, and its research program is fabulated to embody the recent history of sonic warfare.1 Whitehead’s work versioned the biblical myth of the Walls of Jericho (Joshua 6:5) in which Joshua is spearheading an attack on the city. Outside the walls of the city, God instructs Joshua to march around it once each day for six days in total silence. On the seventh day, he has to march around seven times. Then before the Ark, seven priests blew on seven trumpets made from ram’s horns, and, as if by magic, like a sonic bulldozer, the walls came crashing down. In Project Jericho, the “living spirit” of the institute, under the name of Colonel Walter Manley, is an unnerving fusion of George W. Bush and Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. With helicopters buzzing around a filtered audio communiqué, Manley relates, in a parody of the recent wave of U.S. military strategy documents and press releases, how “we are at the dawn of a new era of military history marked by the dominance of a weapon system based on the most powerful sound in the universe.” Manley outlines that the institute’s brief is to research and use

sound creatively in the production of nonlethal weapons designed to save lives by changing the hearts and minds of our adversaries. During the Vietnam war, we still confused sonic power with high volume, for example, in the so called Urban Funk Campaign where we mounted supersized oscillators on top of attack helicopters and blasted Victor Charlie with heavy metal at 120dB. We called that weapon the Curdler and it was a very primitive system, but we also used high frequency nighttime wailing sound in a weapon we called the “Wandering Ghost,” intended to spook the Viet Cong by playing on certain Buddhist beliefs and that weapon was a big step forward because we came to realize that there is no sound more powerful than the one that conquers your true heart with deep vibrations.... Ultimately what we are talking about is a weapon that uses harmonic infrasound amplified by the power of Evangelical Christian faith to summon and deploy a voice that sounds like it comes from right inside your head, but also sounds like it is coming from everywhere else. A voice that comes from everywhere and no where, from everyone and no one, and when you hear it, you will obey no matter what it says because the real weapon that brought down the walls of Jericho was the voice of God.... At the Jericho Institute, we like to think of America’s deep and abiding Christian faith as one of our most strategically potent natural resources. We have extensive prayer networks throughout the Bible belt and elsewhere and our objective is to synchronize the latent vibrational power of these faith networks with an infrasonic sound that formally replicates the voice of God in terms of its frequency range and overall acoustic envelop. We call this process, “charging the airspace,” a process that resembles rubbing on the magic bottle until the genie comes out. Ladies and gentlemen, God is there to hear our prayer. Now it is true that the previous assumption was that God had to make the first move from an acoustical perspective as in for example when he says “let there be light” but we believe that if we can create the right acoustic and provide the appropriate vibrational context, it will be possible to actually produce the voice of God in a faith based conflict whereby “God is on our side” ... [cut to low flying helicopter...].

Whitehead’s Project Jericho neatly wraps the real and fictitious history of sonic warfare into a hyperstitional package. And it is an ominous package, a potential projectile laser-guided by the convergence of evangelical certainty and neoliberal preemption. It taps into an episodic history consisting of the hazy stories of secret military research entangled by webs of fiction, myth, and dark science. Rummaging around for something concrete, you happen upon dead end after dead end of conspiracy theory, inventions without patents, and rumors without origin. Much conjecture, for example, points to eccentric research carried out in Nazi Germany. One bizarre device was said to have been spawned by an Austrian researcher by the name of Dr. Zippermeyer. As a reaction to relentless Allied air assault of Germany, he was alleged to have experimented with both wind and sound as potential antiaircraft weapons. His Windkanone, or “Whirlwind Cannon,” was supposed to have produced artificial whirlwinds “by generating an explosion in a combustion chamber and directing them through specially designed nozzles at their target. Experiments with a small cannon supposedly shattered planks at 200 yards (183m) range, and a full size one was built.”²

From cartography (via sonar) and signaletics (deployed in acoustic detection), from psyops (psychological operations) to the current fashion in nonle-thal “soft” weaponry for crowd control (the violence of sensation),³ this logistics of sound perception mobilizes a range of affects traversing the psychophysi-ological and an invisible history of the research and development of tactics of amplitude and tactics of frequency. It brings into the field of power the dimension of unsound, of frequencies just outside the periphery of human audibility, infrasound and ultrasound, as well as the nonstandard use of popular music, not as a source of pleasure, but for irritation, manipulation, pain,⁴ and torture.⁵ No doubt, empirical and in-depth studies are lacking and desperately needed on these diverse deployments. However, as our primary aim lies elsewhere, a brief overview will have to suffice. Even this cursory glance, however, provides a counterpoint to popular music studies at their most banal, with their dismal celebrations of consumerism and interminable excuses for mediocrity.

In the mutating logistics of sonic perception, a general tendency in both research and deployments can be detected. The historical drift in the technical deployment of sonic force is marked by a number of parallel phase transitions: from the violence of high amplitude to inaudible or silent frequencies, from discipline and punishment to subtle control through modulation of affective tonality,⁶ from forcing behavior to the distribution of “self-control,” from the messy and unmanageable to the highly directional and targetable, from exceptional deployments to ubiquitous fields or enclaves fortressed by sonic walls, and from music as pleasure to music as irritant. Importantly, this is not a successive history of stages; these modalities of sonic power coexist with each other, often literally in the battlefield. Moreover, precursors exist decades before they snugly align with the current modalities of power. Instead, sociotechnical inventions and refinements layer up—so, for example, while there is a drift toward more subliminal effects, the perfection of sonic violence with new directional technologies means its use has never before been so practical. At the same time, certain events mark qualitative shifts in this history, beyond which everything changes. I suggest later that directional ultrasound perhaps marks a phase shift in the way acoustic space is understood in relation to the war machine. Finally, the specifics of each deployment add new inflections, topographic and strategic—from the jungle warfare of Vietnam, to the urban desert warfare of the Middle East, to the dispersion of rioters, to the most trivial “antisocial” behavior, right through to the enhancement of affinities to consumption—that relate war and sound in different ways. The ubiquity of media and the increasing importance of asymmetric urban warfare together have meant that any tactics whose impact wounds are invisible and nonlethal offers methods less likely to trigger waves of revulsion through the networked consciences of global media.

Early attempts to develop sonic weapons focused on the physicality of low-frequency sound and the fact that it dissolves completely into tactile vibration at frequencies around 20 hertz. Below this threshold lies the field of infrasound. Infrasonic phenomena, unlike ultrasound, maintain their power as they pass through a range of media. Surveying the limited literature on these semiaudible wave phenomena, one finds Virilio’s informational logistics of deception in operation. Research uncovers an array of conspiracy theories shrouding programs of military research into the battlefield operation of infrasonic weaponry or police experiments within crowd control situations—a war of vibration to dampen the insurgent potential of the street. The Internet, in particular, is awash with conspiracy theories on “black research.” According to this murky body of knowledge, military uptake of infrasound technologies stretches back at least to World War I, during which detectors were used to locate enemy gun positions. Resultant pathological effects in the middle ear also began to be discovered in military personnel during the two world wars in soldiers working with machines emitting low-frequency vibrations. Moreover, it has been noted that certain infrasonic frequencies plug straight into the algorithms of the brain and nervous system. Frequencies of 7 hertz, for example, coincide with theta rhythms, thought to induce moods of fear and anger.⁷

A key hyperstitional⁸ figure, who appears as a refrain in the underground literature on infrasonic acoustic weaponry is French robotics researcher Vladimir Gavreau,⁹ allegedly head of the Electroacoustics and Automation Laboratories of the Centre de la Recherche Scientifique during the 1960s. Gavreau and his team, we are told, performed some pioneering experiments into the anomaly of infrasonic waves that were directional in “contradiction of a universally accepted acoustic law which states that low frequency sounds emitted by a relatively small source propagate in all directions.”¹⁰ After accidentally experiencing nausea in his lab with his research team (owing to unintended vibrations leaking from industrial machinery), Gavreau became obsessed by harnessing infrasonic resonance to design sonic weapons (usually in the form of huge pipe devices). After another experiment, caught in the vibratory “envelope of death,” Gavreau and team allegedly suffered sustained internal spasms as their organs hit critical resonance frequencies. It was these strange physiological anomalies, generated by inaudible vibrations, that inspired his research into infrasonic acoustic guns. The key notion was that directional inaudible sound at certain resonant frequencies “acting directly on the body” could produce “intense friction between internal organs, resulting in a severe irritation of nerve endings.”¹¹ Some versions of the Gavreau story even suggested that one of the team had his insides pulped, and reinforced tank armor was ripped open by the infrasound Levasseur whistle. The team set out developing a number of applications of their findings, including acoustic guns, acoustic lasers, and acoustic “rectifiers,” all based around infrasonic frequencies.

As the Gavreau episode illustrates, to have a future, sonic weapons would have to be less messy. After the 1960s, the blunt violence of infrasound research can also be found in the panic-inducing violence of high-volume frequencies. Manley makes reference to the Urban Funk Campaign (UFC) and Wandering Soul, the U.S. “audio harassment” psyops campaigns in Vietnam and Laos during the early 1970s that inspired General Kilgore’s infamous Wagnerian fly-bys in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The UFC experimented with tactics of amplitude and frequency. Audible and inaudible frequencies were pumped into the jungle at the Vietcong at high-volume levels (120 decibels and higher). The objective, through attacking with sound instead of munitions (of course, in actuality, it was sound as well as bombs), was to weaken the resolve of the Vietnamese guerrilla fighters and make them come out of hiding and surrender. The UFC deployed helicopter-mounted devices known as sound curdler systems. The Curdler, or “People Repeller,” was an oscillator that could deafen at short range. When used with a public address system and a 350 watt sound amplifier, it was possible to direct intelligible speech to a range of 2.5 miles.¹² The Curdler was also capable of unleashing siren frequencies of between 500 and 5,000 hertz and of inducing panic. With more powerful amplifiers, the device made it possible to construct a sonic pyramid up to 3,500 meters in height, bathing the jungle canopy with an invisible and mobile architecture.

As the unhinged Manley suggests, this was not just about a tactics of amplitude. At night, its effectiveness was intensified, acquiring an enhanced power to tap into superstitious belief systems. The Curdler produced the “voodoo effects” of Wandering Soul¹³ (or Wandering Ghost, as Manley calls it), in which haunting sounds said to represent the souls of the dead were played in order to perturb the superstitious snipers, who, while recognizing the artificial source of the wailing voices, could not help but dread that what they were hearing was a premonition of their own postdeath dislocated soul. As journalist John Pilger reported in his book Heroes,

The 1st Air Cavalry Psy-Ops (Psychological Warfare) officer was a captain, although he might have been Sergeant Bilko; he wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a banana grin. He was a stereo-and-speakers buff and what he loved to do was to fly in a helicopter low over the jungle and play his tapes to the enemy. His favorite tape was called “Wandering Soul,” and as we lifted out of Snuffy he explained, “what we’re doing today is psyching out the enemy. And that’s where Wandering Soul comes in. Now you’ve got to understand the Vietnamese way of life to realize the power behind Wandering Soul. You see, the Vietnamese people worship their ancestors and they take a lot of notice of the spirits and stuff like that. Well, what we’re going to do here is broadcast the voices of the ancestors—you know, ghosts which we’ve simulated in our studios. These ghosts, these ancestors, are going to tell the Vietcong to stop messing with the people’s right to live freely, or the people are going to disown them.”

The helicopter dropped to within twenty feet of the trees. The Psy-Ops captain threw a switch and a voice reverberated from two loudspeakers attached to the machine-gun mounting. While the voice hissed and hooted, a sergeant hurled out handfuls of leaflets which made the same threats in writing.¹⁴

Many reports retell its use by the Sixth Psy-Op Battalion and various navy units. Other accounts, for example, by a U.S. helicopter pilot, complained that instead of winning over hearts and minds, it always immediately drew enemy fire, making the Vietcong soldiers vulnerable to attack as opposed to encouraging them to surrender or defect peacefully.¹⁵

Although its existence was denied by the British Ministry of Defence, the UFC was also supposed to have inspired a device called the Squawk Box, used during the troubles in North Ireland for crowd control. In an article in the New Scientist in 1973, a report was published on the alleged effects of “nonviolent” crowd dispersal weapons using ultrasound. The squawk box was contained in a three-foot cube mounted on Land Rovers and was said to emit two ultrasonic frequencies that together produced a third infrasonic frequency that was intolerable to the human ear, producing giddiness, nausea, or fainting, or merely a “spooky” psychological effect. The report noted diplomatically, “Most people are intensely annoyed by the device and have a compelling wish to be somewhere else.”¹⁶

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, new techniques of sonic coercion entered the fray. Between December 21 and 31,1989, U.S. troops in Panama City directed loudspeakers at former CIA employee Manuel Noriega, who had barricaded himself in the Vatican embassy. They bombarded him with loud rock and pop music¹⁷ and on-message songs such as Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run” and “You’re No Good” by Linda Rondstadt in order to either irritate him or prevent him from sleeping. Militarized pop got even more avant-garde during the Waco siege of 1993. The FBI engaged in “acoustic psycho-correction,” playing high-volume music blended with sound effects into the compound of the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh with a playlist that was accompanied by bagpipes, screeching seagulls, dying rabbits, sirens, dentist drills, and Buddhist chants. One story maintains that silent subliminal tapes were also used along with music, including the tale of one Guantanamo detainee who was left in an empty room with a boom box playing a variety of classic rock tracks, which John Ronson suggests were embedded with subliminal messages to nudge him toward revealing all he knew about al Qaeda.¹⁸ Other torture allegations against the U.S. Army, for example from Falluja in Iraq, tell of the bizarre subjection of captives under interrogation with musical torture.¹⁹

Alongside these allegations from the U.S. war on terror, the episodic history of sonic warfare has recently taken on even more prescience due to the widely covered uses of acoustic weaponry by both the U.S. and Israeli armies. In February 2004, for example, the American Technology Corporation secured a $1 million deal to provide long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) to the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq. These LRADs are said to provide “an effective less-than-lethal tool to communicate, affect behavior, and support lethal rules of engagement.”²⁰ They involve targeted high-frequency beams of sound about 2,100 to 3,100 hertz of up to 150 decibels within a range of 100 yards.²¹ Their primary function has been as a crowd dispersal tool, and they were also used in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to repel looters.

Returning again to Colonel Manley, pumped up with his zealous enthusiasm, he seemed excited by the prospect of deploying his theoacoustic weaponry, with Whitehead making parallels to widely reported tests of sonic crowd control near Jericho early in the summer of 2005,on the eve of the evacuation of settlers from the contested West Bank territory. The Israeli army issued a press release about its contingency plans for dealing with turbulence among Israeli and Palestinian populations generated by this demographic transition. The Israeli Defense Force dubbed their new “nonlethal” sound weapon “The Scream”: “Protestors covered their ears and grabbed their heads, overcome by dizziness and nausea, after the vehicle-mounted device began sending out bursts of audible, but not loud, sound at intervals of about 10 seconds. An Associated Press photographer at the scene said that even after he covered his ears, he continued to hear the sound ringing in his head.”²² The device, a military official noted, targeted a specific frequency toward the inner ear. Throwing more uncertainty into this foggy history of research into acoustic weaponry, some even suggested that this was perhaps the first time such a device had been deployed out of the lab and in the field, despite the fact that one nameless official admitted that the proper tests on long-term auditory damage due to prolonged exposure to the frequencies had not yet been conducted. It was clearly such recent instances that inspired Whitehead’s Project Jericho piece.

Aside from military and police deployments, research into ultrasound in the field of commerce realizes the notions of science fiction. In Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report, personalized branding messages are beamed at passing consumers, identified by retinal scans. What kind of technologies would push these signals at individual bodies in the crowded spaces of hypercapital? One application of the highly directional qualities of ultrasound currently being researched involves a signal carried by a very focused beam. These “audio spotlights,” or “holosonics” devices, facilitated the micro-locational targeting of audio advertising, part of the arsenal of insidious sonic branding strategies in which brands become woven into the fabric of immersive, interactive, predatory environments. These carrier mechanisms, increasingly deployed in sound art installations and undergoing research and development for theater surround-sound systems, have been dubbed sonic bullets or lasers: when you pass through the beam, you hear the sound as if a mere auditory hallucination. One step right or left, and you vacate the zone of audition. Crank up the pressure, and that targeted beam becomes a hypersonic weapon. Also operating with high-frequency sound, this time as an irritant as opposed to a directional beam, is a device referred to as the Mosquito. Operating just at the edge of the threshold of audibility, between 15 to 20 kilohertz, Mosquitoes, originally aimed at repelling rodents, were recently repurposed on teenagers in the U.K.

Despite these recent news reports of confirmed deployments, a penumbra of uncertainty will always exist around military-police security research. Deception, after all, as Sun Tzu tells us, is the most potent weapon of war. What then, should be made of this confusing mesh of data, rumor, defense industry press releases, pop mythology, and news reports surrounding the concept of sonic warfare? Clearly there are big differences between biblical stories, occult research into infrasound, and the redeployment of rodent-repellent ultrasound devices on teenagers on the streets of the U.K.

A rare voice of scientific sobriety within a jungle of hearsay and rumor is the figure of German researcher Jurgen Altmann, who, at the 1999 Acoustical Society of America conference in Berlin,²³ presented a paper questioning the practicality of sonic weapons. In his report Altmann attempts to cut through the marketing hype of military journals and arms manufacturers concerning nonlethal acoustic weaponry. In one summary of his findings, he asks sarcastically, “How can one turn a threatening gunman into a retching bundle of nerves, suffering simultaneously from bowel spasms and a loss of courage before surrendering to the police? Simply use infrasound on him.”²⁴ Altmann goes on to discredit the claims of the military press regarding the potential of sonic weaponry. He surveyed the scientific data on sound sources (sirens, whistles, and explosions), strength of acoustic propagation (beam widening and absorption), the hearing and nonauditory effects on humans, and the danger of potential damage. Altmann’s general conclusions were that acoustic weaponry tended to be rather cumbersome and posed the most dangerous threat to the auditory system, which is rather easy to defend against, instead of the somewhat elusive and extravagant incapacitating physiological effects claimed in defense industry press releases and conspiracy theories.

However, Altmann’s scientific debunking does not render useless the concept of sonic warfare. The wave of LRAD and holosonic devices that has emerged in the early twenty-first century seems to be more effective than the weapons he surveyed in 1999. While it was true that experiments with infrasonics were marked by a catalogue of mishaps and general unmanageability, high-frequency beams of ultrasound have proved much easier to target. Moreover, a scientific survey such as Altmann’s in fact compels that which it excludes: an analysis that can account for the viral infiltration, the affective contagion, and the distribution of the war machine into the quotidian foldings of the sonic body, its sensations, rhythms, fictions, and desires.

Despite the welcome note of extreme caution that Altmann’s “voice of reason” inflicts on the militarized male fantasy of efficient nonlethal sonic weaponry, it was not surprising that a series of somewhat erratic, nomadic, and nonmilitarized infrasonic schemes were dreamed up by musicians operating at the periphery of the vibratory continuum, imagineering another minor, microcultural, distinctly cyberpunk (“the street has its own uses for military tech”) orientation.

In a 1997 article in Wire magazine, “Exotic Audio Research,” all manner of peripheral sonic research into imperceptible frequencies of the audio and radio spectrum was reported, including investigations into infra- and ultrasound, which attempted to redirect the energy of the military-industrial-entertainment complex, to channel its own energy against it, and make audible its most concealed activities.²⁵ But this interest in the frayed edges of sonic perception in an artistic context dates back much further. In the 1970s, during a conversation regarding infrasound between writer William Burroughs and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, Burroughs, notable here for his writings describing sonic tactics for instigating riots,²⁶ revealed his interest in the potential of harnessing the mantric potential of low-frequency audio vibrations, wondering “whether rhythmical music at... the borderline of infrasound could be used to produce rhythms in the audience.”²⁷ His curiosity was shared by many related to industrial music in the postpunk period, most infamously, the “Wreckers of Civilization,” Throbbing Gristle, whose deployments of ultra- and infrasonic emitters on neighbors is well documented in the almost mythological literature that surrounds the history of the group.²⁸

As with the many references to military research into sonic weaponry, the pop manifestations often seem equally veiled by mis- and disinformation. One story in the now-defunct music newspaper Melody Maker told of how prankmaster, the KLF’s Jim Cauty, was testing his own audio weapons system. This system was allegedly borrowed by Finnish artists Panasonic who road-tested the devices in Brick Lane, East London. In a fax to the music paper from an imaginatively named Mr. Smith, it was reported that the

test took place to establish the parameters of the new vehicle solo and in tandem with its sister model, SS 9000K+L. The test featured new software generated for our latest commercial client, EXP LTD, and is described by Mr. Cauty as featuring “the ultimate battle between sound and commerce ending in the death of all musicians and their ascension to rock-n-roll heaven or hell as befits them.” Yesterday we received communication with ex-Government employees who, in the Sixties, worked on audio weapon development with an offer of help and some ex-classified equipment. We regret any such death or damage that has resulted from our tests, but there are casualties in every war. The Triple A Formation Attack Ensemble will perform “Foghorns of the Northern Hemisphere” as part of an educational program supporting our research shortly.

After a spoof report on Cauty’s sonic weaponry experiments was published in Big Issue magazine, Cauty was allegedly briefly put under surveillance by British authorities and spent some time in custody.²⁹

These artistic deployments of infrasound within the occult undercurrents of pop musical history, and the experimental deployment of pop and rock hits by the military for the purposes of irritation, manipulation, and torture, underline the convoluted fabric of sonic warfare. Any simplistic opposition between standard and nonstandard uses of sound, music, and technology becomes confounded very quickly in relation to the complexities of the military-entertainment complex.³⁰ For sure, ideological motivations aside, the military deployments, while aiming toward closing down situations as opposed to opening them up, are often as speculative as those of the self-conscious tinkering of artists. Yet the abuse of military technology by artists and musicians is one thing. The abuse of music by the military is another. Alongside artists such as Joe Banks and Mark Bain, who hack and redeploy the technologies of the military-industrial complex into unforeseen uses, aesthetic experimentation with perisonics, or dangerous sounds, becomes increasingly essential as patents are locked down and uses legislated. It is therefore necessary to be clearer about the overlaps of military and sonic culture and to begin to pick apart the active forces from the reactive ones.