Ever been stung by a Mosquito?1 If you are over twenty-five, then probably not, according to the press release for one of the latest commercially available weapons in ultrasonic warfare. The Mosquito Anti-Social Device (M.A.D.), enthusiastically promoted by low-intensity warfare luminaries such as British daytime TV’s Richard and Judy and GMTV (a gaudy, populist wake-up show) emits a high-frequency sound with an effective range of 15 to 20 meters, and is supposedly detectable only by youths. The press release continues, “Field trials have shown that teenagers are acutely aware of the Mosquito and usually move away from the area within just a couple of minutes.... Research has shown that the majority of people over the age of 25 have lost the ability to hear at this frequency range [roughly 16 to 20 kilohertz]. It should be borne in mind, however, that the unit usually has the desired effect—moving the crowds away—within just a few minutes, at which time the unit can be turned off.” Could it be that property owners now have their own sonic weapon in the battle against hooded youth who have previously attacked their pacified soundscape with their voices, ring tones, pirate radio, and underground music infrastructures? Has ultrasonic warfare graduated to the High Street? Will anyone with the cash and inclination be zapping anyone who gets in their way? What does the commercial proliferation of such devices signal regarding current tendencies of the politics of frequency? If the pun can be excused, such emergent tactics in the modulation of populations suggest that the future of sonic warfare is unsound.
Unsound refers to the apparently paradoxical field of inaudible audio, infra-sonic and ultrasonic. The Mosquito device, an adaption of technologies initially deployed as a means of rodent control, intervenes generationally through a differential in human hearing. As recent research has shown, the narrow fold in molecular vibration that constitutes the bandwidth of audibility is much more permeable and mutable than is normally assumed. It is hardly controversial to suggest that, as more has been learned about the neuroeffects of very high and very low frequency sound, and bionic audition develops, then the perceptual battlefields of sonic warfare have broadened.
One research team of Japanese scientists has focused on what has been termed hypersonic effects.2 In this research it was suggested that not only did frequencies above 20 kilohertz affect the brain, but they also modulated human hearing within the audible bandwidth. Perceptual coding derived from psychoacoustic research led to the subtraction of frequencies that were not apparent to conscious perception, thereby, until recently, setting the standard, for example, for digital audio formats.3 Yet research that has revealed nonconscious physiological effects of ultrasound and studies that have pointed to the extremely rich frequency environment of, for example, rain forests, have led many to begin to recognize the affects of virtual, inaudible sound using electroencephalogram and positron emission tomography scan techniques and by tracking the modulations of blood flow through the brain.
The hypersonic experiment was carried out on subjects noninvasively monitored while listening to Balinese Gamelan music that is said to be rich in ultrasonic frequencies. The frequencies were split into those that were audible and those that were inaudible. Brain activity was monitored when the person was exposed to one or the other, or both. When the ambient baseline of background sound and the higher-frequency sound were played together, it was clear that the very high frequencies were consciously unrecognizable. The conclusions of the research suggested that playing both the higher (inaudible) and lower (audible) bands together enhanced neuronal activity in the alpha frequency range,4 in a way in which playing them separately did not. Subjects found exposure to both the audible and inaudible together more pleasing. The research found that what they called the hypersonic effect was not merely a neurophysiological response to certain high frequencies, but specifically the nexus of the these inaudible frequencies with the audible lower ones. The pleasing effect came from their complex resonance. This frequency nexus in steering alpha rhythms modulated the degree of relaxation and arousal.
In the hyperstitional project Hexen 2039, artist Suzanne Treister speculates on this virtual future of unsound.5 Revolving around semifictional time-traveler Rosalind Brodsky of the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATi), Hexen projects the historical intersections between the military and the occult into the future, paying particular attention to sound technologies and their deployment within the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Treister’s project and its corresponding exhibitions, equal parts history and science fiction, entailed a series of diagrams that both complicated and mocked the remote viewing sketches of military intelligence agents. The project illuminated a number of coincidences and resonances in the history of sonic technological innovations by Hollywood studios (such as Fantasound), generating a vortex of fact and fiction that spirals out deliriously. Hexen travels forward in time to 2039 to speculate on the use of the “Silent Subliminal Presentation System” patented by Oliver Lowery in 1992. As Richard Grayson points out in his essay on the Hexen 2039 project, there are a number of sources that tie Lowery’s invention with actual experimental deployments of such “unsound” devices by the U.S. military in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. In the patent, Lowery’s system is described as a
silent communications system in which non-aural carriers, in the very low or very high audio-frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded or stored on mechanical, magnetic or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.6
In his book investigating the recent alleged psyops activities of the U.S. military, Jon Ronson noted that by 1996, Lowery had posted a note on his Web site stating that “all schematics have [now] been classified by the US Government and we are not allowed to reveal the exact details.... We make tapes and CDs for the German government, even the former Soviet Union countries! All with the permission of the US State department, of course.... The system was used throughout Operation Desert Storm (Iraq) quite successfully.”7 Refined and perfected by 2039, the silent subliminal presentation system in Hexen has become a refined instrument of preemptive power, a weapon of sharpened suggestion able to implant memories of a future not yet happened.
Back in the present, ultrasound deployed in the service of highly directional audio helps initiate this preemptive mode of audiosocial power. This holosonic control marks a qualitative shift in the nature of perceived acoustic space. Holosonics, audio spotlights, or sonic lasers, as they are often called, work using inaudible, ultrasonic frequencies, which, due to the nonlinear yet predictable properties of air, become audible to those who stand in front of the beam.8 Holosonic power constitutes perhaps the most significant phase shift in capitalism and schizophonia since the invention of the loudspeaker. It scrambles McLuhan’s classic analysis of the opposition between acoustic and visual space, in which acoustic space is immersive and leaky, whereas visual objects of perception occupy discreet locations. Holosonic control shifts us therefore from the vibrational topology of the ocean of sound to the discontinuous, “holey” space of ultrasonic power.
Holosonic control operates through the nexus of directional ultrasound, sonic branding, viral marketing, and preemptive power. As such, it aims not merely to haunt you with acousmatic or schizophonic voices detached from their source. Neither, in its most invasive mode, does it merely seek to converge with mental voices from the past to form some kind of hauntological mode of capital. Instead, in line with the affinity to futurity of preemptive power, holosonic control intervenes to catalyze memories from the future—audio memories of events you have not actually experienced yet. Holosonic control’s weapons of choice are “acoustic time anomalies,” often resulting in symptoms of déjà entendu, literally the already heard. This sonic equivalent of déjà vu, the side effect of the propagation of audio viruses, sets up a structure of allure for products for which you had no desire, not just because you have not yet been seduced into desiring them but also because they do not necessarily actually exist yet.
Such high-frequency, hypersonic, and holosonic research also convergences with the speculative fiction of English writer J. G. Ballard who in his 1963 short story, “The Sound-Sweep,” described the condition of inaudible, yet directly neuroaffective, music based around ultrasonic frequencies. Ballard described how, in this version of the future of music,
ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music... raised above the threshold of conscious audibility.... A second advantage of ultrasonic music was that its frequencies were so high they left no resonating residues in solid structures, and consequently there was no need to call in the sound-sweep.... The whole thing was inaudible, but the air around Magnon felt vibrant and accelerated, charged with gaiety and sparkle.9
These weird schemes like silent discos (where dancers wear headphones),10 ultrasonic concerts, and the holosonically generated acoustic time anomalies of the capitalized generation of desire all embody a micropolitics of frequency that favors higher-frequency (un)sounds, with desired effects ranging from eardrum-piercing pain through to enhancing “presence” and the clear delivery of messages, that is, efficient communication, and mitigates against messy, leaky, low frequencies with an affinity to hapticity, immersion, and congregation. It should be remembered that in Ballard’s short story, the silent, yet directly neurally affective, ultrasound concert is set against the backdrop of the noise pollution of infrasonic rumbles, murmuring, reverberations, and other sonic detritus.
As with the perceptual encoding involved in the production of mp3s, such frequency discrimination, as Matt Fuller writes, tends toward the obliteration of
the range of musics designed to be heard with the remainder of the body via bass. This is not simply a white technological cleansing of black music but the configuration of the organs, a call to order for the gut, the arse, to stop vibrating and leave the serious work of signal processing to the head. That’s the sick part of it; another part is the way formats are decided on by “expert groups,” committees defining standards for file formats and protocols that are supposedly open in procedure but where expertise, like those of hardcore methodologies, is defined in certain ways. Here, a fat bass becomes simply a particular Fourier transform mappable according to certain isolatable dimensions. Standard formation and non-standard uses create a recursive cycle that is always ongoing but never entirely predictable.11
It appears therefore that a major axis of sonic cultural warfare in the twenty-first century relates to the tension between the subbass materialism of music cultures and holosonic control, suggesting an invisible but escalating micropolitics of frequency that merits more attention and experimentation. Moreover, these developments should be placed in the wider context of the policing of the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly radio frequencies, but also extending out into the distribution of wireless networks, radar, and other imperceptible rhythms, transmissions, and emissions. The colonization of the inaudible, the investment in unsound research, indicates the expanding front line of twenty-first-century sonic warfare. While hypersonics probes the upper threshold of audibility, which can vary in relation to social segmentations such as age, or researches the neuroscientific effects of combinations of ultrasound with audible frequencies, bass materialist cultures concentrate on the seismological dimension of music, on sonic dominance, in both its physical and incorporeal forces.
While bass materialist cultures make tangible the physicality of the inaudible via the manufacture of vortical, tactile spaces, recent technological tendencies, hand in hand with brain implantation of microchips soldered into the auditory cortex, smuggled in with their implicit politics of silence, seem to carry the desire to extinguish older modes of audition, operating instead through the direct modulation of the brain and rendering the audible spectrum redundant. Here, frequency modulation as a modus operandi of societies of control is taken literally, with cities and their populations attuned and entrained by the generation, modulation, oscillation, filtering, synthesis, and isolation of frequencies and amplitudes.
In the economy of attention, reality has become tunable. The micropolitics of frequency points toward the waves and particles that abduct consumers immersed in both the transensory and nonsensory soup of vibro-capitalism. The backdrop here is an electromagnetic environment that is saturated by radio and television broadcasting transmissions, police, military, air traffic control and meteorological radar, satellite communications systems, and microwave relay links. To the foreground lies the infrasonic and ultrasonic ecology of hydraulic gurgles, industrial rumbles, the seismology of traffic, a cultural tectonics and the synthetic birdsong of alarms, ring tones, bleeps, indicators, and crowd repellents.
For sure, a certain amount of paranoia accompanies this micropolitics of frequency and the immaterial sensuality that apprehends electronic entities distributed across the spectrum. The drift of high technology toward the imperceptible is accompanied by the deployment of technical sensors that transduce vibration, consciously imperceptible to the body, into code and neurocomputational signal. Machines that “couple and decouple with our bodies without us knowing. Working on microscopic scales, often pathogenic, many electromagnetic fields interfere with the cellular structure of the body. Paranoia accompanies dealing with such hertzian machines.”12
Yet the virtual, unsonic city in which holosonic control operates is also a field of potential. What a body can hear is a question, not a forgone conclusion, for artists as well as security experts. Because vibrational ecologies traverse the nature-culture continuum, a micropolitics of frequency is always confronted by strange, unpredictable resonances. As Dunne argues, the computer maps that show the propagation of radio waves, for example, and the footprint of their field strength “reveal that hertzian space is not isotropic but has an electro climate defined by wavelength, frequency, and field strength arising from interaction with the natural environment.”13 This vortical energetic terrain in the interzone between the artificial and natural environment constitutes the atmospheric front of sonic warfare.