In their urban ecology of sonic effects, Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue set out a novel approach to auditory experience. Noting the “surplus of feeling” in sonic perception, its ability to invoke astonishment, wonder (and, it should be added, shock and awe) within music or visual media, they aim to expand this out into an analysis of the vibrational experience of the city. They note that “as soon as a sound physically exists, it sets into vibration a defined space.” For them, the fixed categories of the sound object, as minimum perceptual unit of hearing and the soundscape as macrocategory descriptive of the entirety of audible vibration, are inadequate.1 Rather, they argue, the sonic effect as an open concept constitutes a new paradigm of analysis. In a sense, it runs in parallel to Greg Lynn’s topological move within the realm of architectural form against the unique and the general. The concept stands “halfway between the universal and the singular, simultaneously model and guide.... Rather than defining things in a closed way, it opens the field to a new class of phenomena by giving some indication of their nature and their status.... It characterizes the modal or instrumental dimensions of sound.”2 The effect, for them, intervenes between cause and event: “The effect is not an object in itself. Noise or sound, for instance, do not physically ‘change’ in the Doppler effect; it is the relation between the observer and the emitting object that is modified, when the former or the latter is moving at sufficient speed ... the effect not only indicated a necessary cause; it is also the mark of an event.... The context surrounding the object and its appearance ... the perceptible ‘effect’ is directly linked to a circumstantial cause.... Outside of the logic of objects and attribution that became familiar to us in the West, the Stoics were developing another logic dealing with events and actions in progress.”3 Augoyard and Torgue therefore submerge the sonic event in an ecology of vibrational effects, out of which, the subject and object emerge. They write that “the sonic effect, sometimes measurable and generally linked to the physical characteristics of a specific context, was not reducible either objectively or subjectively. The concept of the sonic effect seemed to describe this interaction between the physical sound environment, the sound milieu of a social-cultural community, and the ‘internal soundscape’ of every individual.”4
The result is the revision of the notion of the sonic city “as instrument” as merely possessing “passive acoustic properties,” replacing it instead with a “sonic instrumentarium of urban environments”—an idea of playing the city via its design, and thereby modulating its vibrational effects. The effect, rather than a sound object as such, approaches, in William James’s terms, a sonically pure experience, an experience of relation and thereby stands as an affective fact in its own right, in addition to the sensed sound.5 Most of their text in Sonic Experience is devoted to providing a glossary of effects, including resonance, echo, rumble, and reverberation, analyzed in terms of their relevance across the scales from acoustic physics, socio-psycho-physiology to aesthetic, architectural, and urban design.
Despite appearing to break with the politics of silence of the acoustic ecology movement, Augoyard and Torgue’s notion of sonic experience remains centered on a phenomenology of sonic perception in which human audition is given primacy. As a notion of postcybernetic warfare entails wars between media, machines, as much as it does between human bodies, then this notion of sonic experience should be extended toward an ecology of vibrational affects. To their sonic phenomenology of effects, an environmentality of affects is preferable, resting on an ontology of vibrational force in which a body becomes merely another actual entity in a vibrational event, assuming not necessarily any more significance than the resonances between other entities within this nexus. However, the helpful insight of Augoyard and Torgue’s theory that can be retained here is that the body is rendered as a multi fx-unit, as transducer of vibration as opposed to a detached listening subject isolated from its sonic objects. Brian Massumi has described the affective sensorium in parallel fashion:
It is best to think of it as a resonation, or interference pattern. An echo, for example, cannot occur without a distance between surfaces for the sounds to bounce from. But the resonation is not on the walls. It is in the emptiness between them. It fills the emptiness with its complex patterning. The patterning is not at a distance from itself. It is immediately its own event. Although it is complex, it is not composed of parts. It is composed of the event that it is, which is unitary. It is a complex dynamic unity. The interference pattern arises where the sound wave intersects with itself. The bouncing back and forth multiplies the sound’s movement without cutting it. The movement remains continuous. It remains in continuity with itself across its multiplication. This complex self-continuity is a putting into relation of the movement to itself: self-relation.... Resonation can be seen as converting distance, or extension, into intensity... . With the body, the “walls” as sensory surfaces.6
Sonic warfare therefore is concerned with the generation, modulation, and dampening of vibrational carrier waves of sonic affect. This is as much about the amodal, nonsensuous, the abstract, cross-mediality of rhythm as the sense of sound itself. If amodality is taken to ontologically precede the designation of a sensation to a specific exteroceptive sensory channel (the five senses), then the clinical conception of synesthesia would have to be inverted from pathological condition to foundational of the affective sensorium.7 Such a discussion opens the sonic onto the vibrational substratum out of which it individuates as a specific sensory modality. Interestingly, many ascribe to the sonic a strange intermediary sensory role. Deleuze and Guattari assert that perhaps sound plays a piloting role in synesthesia.8 Stephen Connor has argued that this derives from sound’s interstitial qualities, that it has the tendency to drift in between the other senses.9 French film theorist of audiovisual perception Michel Chion argues that the sonic, within film, possesses a strange power to render a block of sensations that includes both the tactile and the visual. He notes, for example, that “some kinds of rapid phenomena in images appear to be addressed to, and registered by, the ear that is in the eye, in order to be converted into auditory impressions in memory.”10 For him, “the ear’s temporal resolving power is incomparably finer than that of the eye,” and this allows cinema to go beyond a mere correspondence between the senses toward what he called an “intersensory reciprocity,” transposing a “sonic velocity into the order of the visible.”11 More important, he points to rhythm as the locus of sensory transposition. Moreover, he prefers the trans-sensorial to that of the intersensorial.12 It is an “element of film vocabulary that is neither one nor the other, neither specifically auditory nor visual... when a rhythmic phenomenon reaches us via a given sensory path—this path, eye or ear, is perhaps nothing more than the channel through which rhythm reaches us.”13
In any sonic experience therefore, it is primarily the vibrational (microrhyth-mic) nexus of sensory modalities that constitutes an encounter. The affective sensorium of an entity becomes a rhythmic transducer composed of not just the five exteroceptive channels that open onto the external environment, but also the viscerality of interoception, which is sensitive to intensity minus quality and in a sense preempts exteroception in that it makes decisions before the consciousness of extensive sensory objects fully emerges. Where there is a visceral perception initiated by a sound and in a split-second the body is activated by the sonic trigger, then the gut reaction is preempting consciousness. Interwoven with the proprioception of the feeling of the moving relations of the body, a tactility facing inward, the affective sensorium as polyrhythmic nexus is a synesthetic synthesizer. For Massumi, synesthesia constitutes the perspective of the virtual. It can therefore be concluded that if synesthetic perception is intersensorial, it is so only to the degree that it faces the actual, whereas amodality proper, facing the virtual, is trans-sensorial and, as Chion maintains, rhythmic. This tension between transensoriality and the sonic produces the concept of unsound, the not yet audible, the dimension of sonic virtuality.