Notes

Introduction

1. Chris McGeal, “Sonic Boom Raids Cause Fear, Trauma,” Guardian, November 3,2005, p. 6. See also “Sound Bombs Hurt Gaza Civilians,” http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2005/11/04/2003278681, and “Livingwith Supersonic Booms,” http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/l,2506,L-3161359,00.html. In 1986, the United States was taken to the International Court of Justice by Nicaragua for using similar tactics.

2. See Harlan Ullman and James Wade, Jr., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1996), for the strategic manual.

3. The term ecology of fear is borrowed from critical urban theorist Mike Davis, who, in his book of the same name, discusses the impact of natural catastrophe on urbanism. See Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Picador, 1998).

4. Psychoanalytic discussions of emotion use a much narrower definition of affect. While the literature on shell-shock and trauma certainly resonates with the discussions that follow, the aim is to draw from and construct a wider definition of the term.

5. This broad definition of affect is drawn from a theoretical lineage that stretches from Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze and Guattari and, most recently, the work of Brian Massumi.

6. Such a method crashes the codes and structures that organize the cultural analysis of sonic and music culture as text, plunging instead into the materiality of sensation, revealing, on the way down, the operations of power that distribute vibration and produce sonic affects. This process of hacking opens onto a preindividual and impersonal virtual ecology. Only an aesthetic method can connect with the sensations produced through this decoding and destructuration, composing them into new modes of affective mobilization. This method intersects with that outlined by Felix Guattari in Chaosmosis, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (Sydney: Power Institute, 1995). The sense of ethics discussed here resonates also with that of Deleuze, via Spinoza. That is, ethics does not refer to a morality of the “other” but rather strictly remains at the level of the pragmatics of sonically constructive and destructive encounters. Ethics here therefore remains neither moral nor strategic. It is beyond good and evil, and therefore it is somewhat indifferent to politics as usually understood.

7. Suzanne Cusick, “You are in a place that is out of the world...”: Music in the Detention Camps of the ‘Global War on Terror.’“ Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 1 (2008): 1-26.

8. Kodwo Eshun, “Abducted by Audio,” Abstract Culture, no. 12 (1997), Ccru.

9. The military-entertainment complex suggests the shared techniques, resources, and content of these two sectors, in addition to interlocking corporate infrastructures and ideological persuasions. As Stockwell and Muir argue, it also implies the idea, hammered home by “shock and awe,” that the enemy in war is also an audience. S. Stockwell and A. Muir, “The Military-Entertainment Complex: A New Facet of Information Warfare,” Fibreculture, no. 1, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issuel/issuel_stockwellmuir.html. 2000.

10. The phrase sonic evangelism is derived from Jonathan Sterne’s depiction of the “audiovisual litany” in The Audible Past (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 14-19 in which he points to an almost religious tendency in many critiques of the ocularcentrism of Western culture, and the deification of the phenomenology of sound over the other sensory modalities, devoid of technological, history, and political inflection. The renaissance in studies of sonic culture coincides with the transformations of digital culture, particularly the ubiquity of the personal computer as sound studio, and builds on the preexisting domain of experimental musicology, cultural studies of popular music, but upgrades and moves beyond both fields.

11. The phrase full-spectrum dominance, as used here, is a deliberate generalization of a strategic concept that came out of the Pentagon in 2000 entitled joint Vision 2020, http://www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm, as a response to the problems posed by asymmetric warfare. I specifically deploy the concept to frame the field of a politics of frequency and to refer to the expanded remit of “unsonic” culture that currently exceeds human auditory perception, from infra- to ultrasound.

12. The military-entertainment complex suggests the shares techniques, resources, and content of these two sectors, in addition to interlocking corporate infrastructures and ideological persuasions. As Stockwell and Muir argue, it also implies the idea, hammered home by “shock and awe,” that the enemy in war is also an audience. Stockwell and. Muir, “The Military-Entertainment Complex.”

13. Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Pre-emption,” Theory and Event 10, no. 2 (2007), and “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13, no. 1 (March 2005).

14. Mark Fisher, “Science Fiction Capital,” 2001, http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Fisher/sfcapital.htm.

Chapter 1

1. Afrofuturism tries to break with many of the stereotypes of black music culture that tie it to the “primitive” as opposed to the technological, the “street” as opposed to the cosmic, and “soul” as opposed to the mechanical. While many have construed it to side with the last, its more compelling version focuses on the tension between “soul” and “postsoul” tendencies.

2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).

3. Gottfried W. Leibniz, Epistolae ad diversos, vol. 2, trans. C. Kortholt, (Leipzig, 1734), p. 240. The work of ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash hints at the binary mathematics implicit within Afro-diasporic polyrhythm cultures. See his articles “African in the Origins of Binary Code” and “Recursive Numeric Sequences in Africa,” Abstract Culture 4, Ccru, 1999, and “African Influences in Cybernetics,” in The Cyborg Handbook, ed, C. H. Gray (London: Routledge, 1995).

4. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), p. 103.

5. Ibid., p. 121.

6. Ccru, “Digital Hyperstition,” Abstract Culture, Ccru, Swarm 4,1999.

7. Reynolds in particular follows the migration of sonic warfare memes around the Black Atlantic. See “Wargasm: Military Imagery in Pop Music,” originally published in Frieze. These quotes are taken from the expanded director cut available online at http://critcrim.org/redfeather/journal-pomocrim/vol-6-virtual/wargasm.html (last viewed April 3, 2006). He charts in particular the influence of Hong Kong martial arts films on the U.S. hip-hop collective, the Wu Tang Clan’s mythology of “Liquid Swords,” and then into the U.K. hard-core and jungle scenes of the early 1990s. Reynolds also notes, on another U.S.-to-U.K. vector, the migration of Detroit techno outfit Underground Resistance’s notion of guerrilla warfare on vinyl to pioneering hardcore/jungle label Reinforced.

8. “Wargasm.”

9. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

10. Afrofuturism has also been understood as a response to the idea that “authenticity” in black music must necessarily be tied to “keeping it real,” to the “street,” chaining the essence of “blackness” to the conditions of depressed urban existence with all the stereo types of sex, drugs, violence, and hyperconsumption that this contemporary cliche, fil tered through a globalized hip-hop culture, entails. James Richards has referred to this simulation as the Ghetto Matrix, in which the ghetto becomes “a virtual reality (or more accurately: an actual surreality)” (James Richards, “The Ghetto Matrix,” http://blackfilm.com/0205/features/a-ghettomatrix.shtml, 2000), an image (bought into by both American blacks and whites) deployed in the lucrative perpetuation of the prison, music, sports, and fashion industries—a vast and profitable carceral archipelago. The notion of a “ghetto matrix” can be useful, especially in an era in which some are suggesting an alternative to world music that strings together those local mutant music cultures of the Planet of Slums into a meta-movement termed “global ghettotech.” With the spotlight of ubiquitous media intensifying, through the penetrating glare of everyone from global brands through to music bloggers, is the idea of a music underground, operating “off the radar,” over? Are the depressed urban conditions that have motivated invention now merely a marketing image used in the perpetuation of stasis? Sonic Warfare refuses this postmodern impasse, finding, camouflaged in the hype, a resilient set of concepts and processes.

Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic begins to hack this matrix by challenging the two positions whose dualism helps shore up its dimensionality, essentialism and anti-essentialism, black nationalism and postmodernism. But Kodwo Eshun pushes this further, bracketing this crisis of representation. The war of images and identities for Eshun peels back to reveal a sonic materialism, and a war in which what is at stake is the “redesign of sonic reality” itself: “Everywhere, the street is considered the ground and guarantee of all reality, a compulsory logic explaining all BlackMusic, conveniently mishearing antisocial surrealism as social realism” (Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 4). Instead, the Afrofuturism that Eshun identifies attempts to fabricate an “operating system for the redesign of sonic reality” through the construction of an acoustic cyberspace and a new machinic distribution of sensations, escaping the terrestrial phenomenology of the ghetto matrix for a both cosmic and submarine model of movement and sensation.

Chapter 2

1. The conceptualization of the war machine developed here is inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Guattari’s notion within A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). Specifically, the (dis)continuum of war developed here is understood as stretched out between two tendencies: the tendency of capture and that of escape.

2. Russolo argues that between the partitioned pitches of the harmonic scale lies the “enharmonic.” The scale leaves out “the true shading” of the “passage from the highest pitch to the lowest.” “These enharmonic passages, from one pitch to another, which are also found in the whistling of the wind and in the howling of sirens, are completely unknown to today’s orchestras, which can produce only diatonic-chromatic passages.” L. Russollo, The Art of Noises (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1986), p. 51. Russolo’s also drew from his colleague, Francesco Balilia in noting that futurist “enharmonism” facilitates “the natural and instinctive modulation and intonation of the enharmonic intervals, presently unattainable given our scale in the tempered system, which we want to overthrow. We Futurists have long loved these enharmonic intervals, which we find not only in the discords of the orchestras, when the instruments are playing in different systems, but in the spontaneous songs of the people, when they are pitched without the preoccupation of art” (pp. 64-65).

3. Russollo, The Art of Noises, pp. 49-50. Giving examples of the symphony of noises of war, Russolo describes the “murmuring thunder” of artillery out of range, outlining a futurist cartography of space. “But it is only when it comes within range that the artillery reveals completely the epic and impressionistic symphony of its noises. Then the pounding of the firing acquires a timbre of metallic crashing that is prolonged in the howl of the shell as it rips through the air, losing itself in the distance as it falls. Those coming in, however, are announced by a distant, breathless thump, by a progressively louder howling that takes on a tragic sense of impending menace, ever greater and closer, until the explosion of the shell itself. The whistling of the shell in the air with the different calibers. The smaller the caliber, the higher and more regular the whistling. With larger calibers, there are added other, smaller ones, with surges of intensity. With the very largest calibers, there is a noise very little different from that of a train passing nearby” (p. 50).

4. Russolo’s influential formulation of the sound/war nexus also outlines the haptic navigation in the battlefield environment: “In modern warfare, mechanical and metallic, the element of sight is almost zero. The sense, the significance, and the expressiveness of noises, however, are infinite.... From noise, the different calibers 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 who 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.” Ibid., pp. 49-50.

5. Yet we can identify a number of distinct yet overlapping definitions of noise. First, one everyday use relates to distortion in a textural surface. If we take the listening experience of pirate radio, for example, we may attribute part of the affective charge to the dose of static interference, which intensifies the sensation of the music heard, intensifies the conjunction of music and the nervous system, as if the frayed edges of percussive and verbal rhythmicity roughen the skin like aerodynamic sandpaper, making it vulnerable, opening it to rhythmic contagion. Usually, however, noise is taken negatively, in an essentially psychoacoustic fashion, which states that noise is relative and is an unspecified or unwanted sound. Within acoustics is a range of physical definitions, usually given the names of colors such as white, black, or pink, which often refers to degrees of randomness within specific distributions of frequency. A further notion relates to the use of the word noise (as entropy, for example) in information theory. Finally, and perhaps most relevant here, is the chaos theoretical deployment of “noise” as positive chaos or turbulence. This also converges with the constructive conceptions of noise being developed in scientific research into processes of stochastic resonance in which the addition of noise into a nonlinear system can, at very particular thresholds, improve, not destroy, the transmission of a signal. See B. Kosko, Noise (New York: Viking, 2006). Instead of noise chained solely to a negative definition as unwanted, nonmusic, nonidentity, or incomprehensibility, we shall pursue instead the mode of vibrational matter that exceeds the binary between noise and signal, chaos and order, violence and peace. Noise as weapon of destruction becomes a field of virtual potential. Such a positive conception of noise is actually implied, though usually underdeveloped, in any compelling notion of noise as a weapon.

6. Jacques Attali, Noise, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 27.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 343-344.

8. Schizophonia, splitting sounds from their sources, is the notion coined by R. Murray Schaffer in The Soundscape to describe the rupture that the invention of recording imposed on the soundscape.

9. From an excerpt from Varese’s lectures, “391,” no. 5 (June 1917), New York, translated by Louise Varese.

10. Simon Reynolds, Bring the Noise (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. xii.

11. Ibid.

12. On occularcentrism, see Marshall McLuhan, “Visual and Acoustic Space,” in The Global Village (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and “Acoustic Space” in Media Research: Technology, Art, Communication, ed. M. Moos (Amsterdam: G&B Arts, 1997), Erik Davis, “Acoustic Space,” http://www.techgnosis.com/acoustic.html (last viewed May 2,2005,) through to Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Jonathon Stern’s The Audible Past (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

13. See, for example, M. Bull and L. Back, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

14. The affective turn in cultural theory is most rigorously formulated by Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). Massumi understands affect as the intermodal, synesthetic perspective of the virtual. On synesthesia, see Barron Cohen, Synesthesia: The Strangest Thing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); R. Cytowic, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), and J. Harrison and S. Barron Cohen, Synesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings (London: Blackwell, 1996).

15. Massumi’s introduction to Parables of the Virtual, “Concrete Is as Concrete Does,” condenses these problematic obsessions of cultural studies succinctly.

16. Attali, Noise, p. 25.

17. See Michel Chion’s distinction between semantic, causal, and reduced listening in Audio Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

18. Attali, Noise, p. 27.

19. Curtis Roads, Microsound (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 7.

20. This refers to a basic distinction that underlies this book. This distinction can be found in the history of military thought that opposes state to guerrilla warfare; see, for example. Robert Taber, The War of the Flea (Boulder, Colo.: Paladin, 1970). In the contem-porary period, this maps on to what Arquilla and Ronfeldt described in their infamous article for the Rand Corporation, “Cyberwar Is Coming,” Journal of Comparative Strategy 12, no. 2 (1993). Cyberwar is a high-tech, state-centered militarization of network society and the electromagnetic spectrum, while netwar is an array of nonstate deployments, de centralized, and usually but not always nonviolent. The most profound and far-reaching version of this conceptual distinction can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, between apparatus of capture and the nomad war machine. Adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s schema, this text aims to reframe debates around the micropohtics of sound and music in terms of the pragmatics of sonic war machines.

21. Brian Massumi, The Politics of Everyday Fear (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), p. 12.

Chapter 3

1. Project Jericho was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on February 25, 2006.

2. http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/153_sonicweapons.shtml (last viewed May 3, 2006).

3. See, for example, chapter 15, “War without Bloodshed” in Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). This book in fact fits into a much larger body of war research, but particularly aims to complement both Martin van Creveld’s histories of war and Manual De Landa’s materialist philosophy of war in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone, 1992) with a more affective analysis of popular culture and aesthetics. See also Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (New York: Penguin, 1992) for an analysis of the physics of crowds.

4. M. Cloonan and B. Johnson, “Killing Me Softly with His Song: An Initial Investigation into the Use of Popular Music as a Tool of Oppression,” Popular Music 21, no. 1 (2002).

5. S. Cusick, “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon,” Transcultural Music Review, no. 10, 2006, at http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/translO/cusick_eng.htm

6. Combining Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze with Marshall McLuhan, it could be argued that the mode of security has expanded from the surveillance of panoptics, which models the target in terms of its visual field, to pansonics, the subtle yet ubiquitous modulation of control in an immersive, synesthetic field closer to McLuhan’s descriptions of acoustic space.

7. Infrasonic waves are generated by an array of turbulent phenomena in the physical world, from earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, and tidal waves to meteorological entities such as hurricanes and thunderstorms. Such frequencies are known to induce anxiety among animals, which have broader auditory bandwidths and less control over their autonomic responses than humans do.

8. Hyperstition, a concept developed by the Ccru (www.ccru.net), relates to fictional entities or agencies that make themselves real. The classic example is William Gibson’s concept of cyberspace from the 1980s.

9. One of the earliest mentions of Gavreau (or Gavraud, as some sources spell his name) stems from Lyall Watson’s Supernature (New York: Coronet, 1974).

10. Gavreau, “Infrasound,” pp. 379-380, in S. Sweezey, Amok journal Sensurround Edition: A Compendium of Pyscho-Physiological Investigations (Los Angeles: Amok, 1995). See also Cody, J. “Infrasound,” 1996, http://www.borderlands.com/archives/arch/infra.htm and G. Vassilatos, G “Nocturnal Disturbances and Infrasonic Hum,” 1996, http://www.borderlands.com/archives/arch/nux.htm6 .

11. Ibid., p. 382.

12. Christian Nold, Mobile Vulgus (London: Book Works, 2001), p. 66. The Curdler was also said to have also been used by police in the Bay Area of California in the 1960s to dissolve crowds and their production of noises such as clapping or chanting.

13. “Deadly Vibrations,” in http://www.overloadmedia.co.uk/archives/miscellaneous/deadly_vibrations.php (last viewed July 5,2005).

14. John Pilger, Heroes (Boston: South End Press, 2003), p. 198.

15. “The Wandering Soul Psy-op Tape of Vietnam,” http://www.pcf45.com/sealords/cuadai/wanderingsoul.htm. This Web page features an audio clip of one of the tapes used, a number of reports on the campaign, and the Vietnamese Buddhist conception of the wandering souls of the dead on which it was based.

16. New Scientist, September 20,1973, in Swezey, Amok Journal, p. 399.

17. According to SouthCom Network (SCN) radio, which supplied the music on request by the U.S. troops, the playlist (with probably a few errors) included: “(You’ve Got) Another Thing Coming”—Judas Priest; “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”—Paul Simon; “All Over But the Crying” —Georgia Satellites; “All I Want Is You”—U2; “Big Shot” —Billy Joel; “Blue Collar Man”—Styx; “Born to Run” —Bruce Springsteen; “Bring Change” —Tears for Fears; “Cleaning Up the Town”—The Bus Boys; “Crying in the Chapel”—Brenda Lee; “Dancing in the Street” —David Bowie; “Danger Zone”—Kenny Loggins; “Dead Man’s Party”—Oingo Boingo; “Don’t Look Back”—Boston; “Don’t Fear the Reaper” —Blue Oyster Cult; “Don’t Close Your Eyes” —Kix; “Eat My Shorts”—Rick Dees; “Electric Spanking of War Babies”—Funkadelic; “Feel a Whole Lot Better (When You’re Gone)”—Tom Petty; “Freedom Fighter”—White Lion; “Freedom—No Compromise” —Little Steven; “Ghost Rider”—The Outlaws; “Give It Up”—KC and the Sunshine Band; “Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down”—Paul Young; “Guilty” —Bonham; “Hang ‘Em High”—Van Halen; “Hanging Tough”—New Kids on the Block; “Heavens on Fire”—Kiss; “Hello It’s Me”—Todd Rundgren; “Hello, We’re Here”—Tom T. Hall; “Helter Skelter”—The Beatles; “I Fought the Law and the Law Won” —Bobby Fuller; “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” —Bruce Cochran; “In My Time of Dying” —Led Zeppelin; “Ironman”—Black Sabbath; “It Keeps You Running” —Doobie Brothers; “Judgement Day”—Whitesnake; “Jungle Love”—Steve Miller; “Just Like Jessie James” —Cher; “Mayor of Simpleton”—XTC; “Midnight Rider”—Allman Brothers Band; “Mr. Blue”—The Fleetwoods; “Naughty Naughty” —Danger Danger; “Never Gonna Give You Up”—Rick Astley; “Never Tear Us Apart”—INXS; “No Particular Place to Go” —Chuck Berry; “No More Mister Nice Guy”—Alice Cooper; “No Alibis”—Eric Clapton; “Now You’re Messin’ with an S.O.B.” —Nazareth; “Nowhere Man”—The Beatles; “Nowhere to Run”—Martha and the Vandelas; “One Way Ticket”—George Thorogood and the Destroyers; “Panama”—Van Halen; “Paradise City” —Guns and Roses; “Paranoid”—Black Sabbath; “Patience”—Guns and Roses; “Poor Little Fool”—Ricky Nelson; “Prisoner of the Highway”—Ronnie Milsap; “Prisoner of Rock and Roll”—Neil Young; “Refugee”—Tom Petty; “Renegade”—Styx; “Rock and a Hard Place”—Rolling Stones; “Run to the Hills”—Iron Maiden; “Run Like Hell”—Pink Floyd; “Screaming for Vengeance”—Judas Priest; “She’s Got a Big Posse” —Arabian Prince; “Shot in the Dark” —Ozzy Osborne; “Stay Hungry”—Twisted Sister; “Taking It to the Streets”—Doobie Brothers; “The Party’s Over”—Journey; “The Race Is On”—Sawyer Brown; “The Pusher”—Steppenwolf; “The Long Arm of the Law”—Warren Zevon; “The Star Spangled Banner”—Jimi Hendrix; “The Secret of My Success”—Night Ranger; “They’re Coming to Take Me Away” —Henry VIII; “This Means War”—Joan Jett and the Blackhearts; “Time Is on My Side” —Rolling Stones; “Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die”—Jethro Tull; “Voodoo Child”—Jimi Hendrix; “Wait for You” —Bonham; “Waiting for a Friend” —Rolling Stones; “Wanted Dead or Alive”—Bon Jovi; “Wanted Man”—Molly Hatchet; “War Pigs” —Black Sabbath; “We Didn’t Start This Fire”—Billy Joel; “We Gotta Get Outta This Place”—The Animals; “Who Will You Run To?” —Hear; “You Send Me”—Sam Cooke; “You Shook Me All Night Long”—AC/DC; “You Hurt Me (and I Hate You)”—Eurythmics; “You Got Lucky”—Tom Petty; “Your Time Is Gonna Come” —LedZeppelin; “Youth Gone Wild”—Skid Row. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/DOCUMENT/950206.htm.

18. See chapter 12 in J. Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (New York: Picador, 2004). Ronson traces the recent history of U.S. psyops, including the deployment of silent subliminal sound, to the frankly unhinged First Earth Battalion Operating Manual of Jim Channon. See http://firstearthbattalion.org/?q=node/26

19. See Cusick, “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon,” and Clive Stafford Smith, “Welcome to the ‘Disco,’“ Guardian, June 19,2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo.

20. See the LRAD product overview at http://www.atcsd.com/site/content/view/15/110/(last viewed April 4,2009).

21. For a recent report on LRADs, see Jurgen Altmann’s Millimetre Waves, Lasers, Acoustics for Non-Lethal Weapons? Physics Analyses and Inferences (Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung, 2008). For Altmann’s earlier debunking of the hype over acoustic weaponry, see Altmann “Acoustic Weapons—A Prospective Assessment” (Science and Global Security 9,2001:165-234.).

22. Amy Teibel, “Israel May Use Sound Weapon on Settlers,” June 10, 2005, http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story8oi=/ap/20050610/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_the_scream(last viewed June 3,2006).

23. http://www.acoustics.org/press/137th/altmann.html (last viewed April 23,2005).

24. Ibid.

25. Rob Young, “Exotic Audio Research,” Wire, March 1997.

26. See in particular William Burroughs, “Electronic Revolution,” in Word Virus (New York: Grove Press, 1999), pp. 294-313.

27. William Burroughs and J. Page, “The Jimmy and Bill Show,” in Swezey, Amok Journal, ed. S. Swezey (Los Angeles: Amok, 1995), p. 376.

28. J. Sergeant “Sonic Doom,” Fortean Times, no. 153, December 2001, also available at http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/153_sonicweapons.shtml (last viewed September 3, 2005), chapter 12 in Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), Simon Ford, The Wreckers of Civilization (London: Black Dog, 2001), and V. Vale and A. Juno, eds., The Industrial Culture Handbook (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1985).

29. http://wwwklf.de/faq/index.php?inte_id=6 According to the KLF Web site, Cauty allegedly deployed one of his vehicles at a road protest in Devon: “As of 2300 hrs 19.10.96 the armoured division of the A.A.A. Formation Attack Ensemble established a front line defensive position at the Trollheim Hill Fort, Fairmile, Devon, in collaboration with A30 Action in defence of the threatened trees, badgers and some insects. At dawn on 21.10.96, the Triple A will activate their S.Q.U.A.W.K. 9000 sonic device in response to any offensive action taken on behalf of the Connect consortium. The autonomous communities of Fairmile, Trollheim and Allercombe have resisted the soul destroying consumer nightmare of the private profit A30 through a 2 year campaign of Non-Violent Direct Action. Now armed with the 2 Saracen armoured personnel carriers both loaded with 15 Kilowatt Sound systems and weighing over 10 tons they intend to dance in the face of the legions of destruction.”

30. When Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” was blasted out of General Kilgore’s swarm of helicopters in Apocalypse Now, it was supposed to provide a high-octane soundtrack to massacre for the U.S. troops, to get the adrenaline pumping but also to terrify the villagers below with its pompous Euro-classical bombast. In George Gittoes’s recent documentary, Soundtrack to War (Revelation Films, 2007), U.S. tank operators in Iraq were interviewed about the kind of music they liked to listen to while going into battle. Many of the soldiers hacked the wiring of their tanks so they could plug their CD players into the communication system and share the music with their comrades using their helmet earphones. The troops were roughly split along the lines of race in their preference for their killing accompaniment. While the white soldiers tended to listen to metal and hard core, the African American soldiers preferred hip-hop. In both cases, however, what was needed to help pump the adrenaline was a testosterone-driven soundtrack.

Chapter 4

1. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Penguin, 1992).

2. Julian Henriques, “Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session,” in The Auditory Cultures Reader, ed. M. Bull and L. Back (London: Berg, 2003), p. 453.

3. Jose Gil, “The Dancer’s Body,” in A Shock to Thought: Expressions after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. B. Massumi (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 124.

Chapter 5

1. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). There are numerous intriguing twentieth-century entanglements of military technology with popular music culture. See, for example, Albert Glinsky’s Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Kittler himself notes that when “Karlheinz Stock-hausen was mixing his first electronic composition, Kontakte, in the Cologne studio of the Westdeutcscher Rundfunk between February 1958 and fall 1959, the pulse generator, indicating amplifier, band-pass filter, as well as the sine and square wave oscillators were made up of discarded U.S. Army equipment: an abuse that produced a distinctive sound” (p. 97). Winthrop-Young points out how modern hi-fi technology built on innovations in aircraft and submarine location technologies and how radio stations exploited the VHF signal processing that guided General Guderian’s tank blitzkrieg. With Kittler, he goes on to use the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” as a metaphor for our immersion in a “military-music” complex. He describes how on “11 September 1944 ... US forces liberating Luxembourg and its famous radio station came across an extraordinary magnetophone that, to the amazement of Allied radio monitors, had allowed for a lifelike and scratch-free fidelity of sound that ordinary transcription records could never have yielded. While the commercial production of magnetic recording systems at Bell Labs was actively suppressed by upper management despite the fact that during the 1930s, Clarence Hick-mann had already developed them to the point of practical application, the German development was fuelled by the need for superior combat recording technologies and for improved means to analyze and manipulate secret Morse messages. Subsequently, information gathered from captured German code-breaking equipment ‘enabled EMI to manufacture tape and tape recorders, resulting in the production of the famous BTR series which remained in use at Abbey Road for over 25 years.’ The strange dispatches allegedly encoded by Abbey Road’s most famous clients including the tidings that ‘Paul is dead’—presupposed machines of German counterintelligence had used for decoding enemy transmissions ... the birth of full frequency range recording out of the technology of early submarine sound detection and identification practices. In 1940, faced with the prospect of losing the Battle of the Atlantic to German wolf packs, the RAF Coastal Command had approached the English-owned Decca Record Company with a secret and difficult assignment. Coastal Command wanted a training record to illustrate the differences between the sounds of German and British submarines. Such aural distinctions were extremely delicate and to reproduce them accurately on a record called for a decided enlargement of the phonograph’s capabilities. Intensive work .. . led to new recording techniques.” G. Winthrop-Young, “Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine: On the Dominance of War in Friedrich Kittler’s Media Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 3-4

2. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 97.

3. “Records that hitherto had been used to liven up military communication in the trenches of the Ardennes now came into their own. Otherwise people themselves, rather than the government and the media industry, could have made politics.” Ibid., p. 97. As Winthrop Young elaborates in “Drill and Distraction,” “The scenario that emerges and which some would no doubt label paranoid is one of the military only consenting to the civilian use of a media technology if it is too outdated to serve military purposes or if it is certain that its release into the civilian world will have no negative impact on military operations .... Beginning in May 1917, primitive tube transmitters were used to transmit early radio programs along the trenches, but the upper echelons quickly put a stop to such abuse of military hardware. With the demobilization of almost 200,000 radio operators still in possession of their equipment and the revolutionary unrest following the lost war, however, the incipient republic was in danger of losing control of its recently acquired airwaves” (p. 835).

4. F. Kittler, “Infowar,” http://www.hydra.umn.edu/kittler/infowar-tr.html Ars Electron-ica Festival, 1998, Linz, Austria, September 7-12 (last viewed April 2, 2004)

5. See particularly Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1991), and Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone, 1992.

6. With reference to historical material, such interpretations of Kittler’s work have already been seriously undermined by showing that in fact in many cases, war often hindered technological development. See G. Winthrop-Young, “Drill and Distraction in the Yellow Submarine.”

7. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1979), and Society Must Be Defended, trans. D. Macey (New York: Penguin, 2003).

8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Nomadology,” in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988).

9. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p. 110.

10. Ibid., p. 140.

Chapter 6

1. Virilio understood both the military general and film director as strategists negotiating the “fog of war” within the logistics of perception. And their roles mutate in tandem as the vision machines assemble and connect: “To grasp the objective truth of a great battle, the camera eye ... could not have been that of the general or the director. Rather, a monitor would have had to have recorded and analysed a number of facts and events incomparably greater than what the human eye and brain can perceive at a given place and time, and then to have inscribed the processed data onto the battlefield itself. ... The level of foresight required by the geopolitical dimensions of modern battlefields demanded a veritable meteorology of war. Already we can see here the video-idea that the military voyeur is handicapped by the slowness with which he scans a field of action overstretched by the dynamic revolution of weaponry and mass transport.... The disappearance of the proximity effect in the prosthesis of accelerated travel made it necessary to create a wholly simulated appearance that would restore three dimensionality to the message in full. Now a holographic prosthesis of the military commander’s inertia was to be communicated to the viewer.” Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), p. 59.

2. Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994).

3. See R. N. Scarth, Mirrors by the Sea: An Account of the Hythe Sound Mirror System (Hythe, U.K.: Hythe Civic Society, 1995). and R. N. Scarth, Echoes from the Sky: A Story of Acoustic Defence (Hyth, U.K.: Hyth Civic Society, 1999).

4. Virilio, War and Cinema, p. 83. The notion of the virtual (as potential) here owes more to Massumi than to Virilio (simulation as substitution) or Baudrillard (simulation as the implosion of the real into the hyperreal).

5. See Douglas Richardson, An Illustrated Guide to Techniques and Equipment of Electronic Warfare (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), pp. 34-40.

6. François Julien, The Propensity of Things, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1999), p. 25.

7. Ibid., pp. 30-31.

8. Julien also sees in the difference the origins of the Greek idea of assembly versus the Chinese concept of authority.

9. Ibid., p. 35.

10. Ibid., p. 26.

11. “Chinese strategy aimed to use every possible means to influence the potential inherent in the forces at play to its own advantage, even before the actual engagement, so that the engagement would never constitute the decisive moment, which always involves risk. In contrast, after the time of the skirmishes and duels described by Homer, the Greek ideal was the ‘all or nothing’ of pitched battle.” Ibid., p. 35.

12. Ibid., p. 35.

13. Ibid., pp. 37-38.

Chapter 7

1. www.ghostarmy.org. Philip Gerard, Secret Soldiers: How a Troupe of American Artists, Designers, and Sonic Wizards Won World War II’s Battles of Deception against the Germans (Penguin, 2002).

Gerard describes in detail these exercises: “But as the night wears on, the picture clarifies. A listening post up stream reports sounds of bridge building, while the listening post miles down stream at the fixed bridge point reports hearing a column of tanks veer off the road before reaching the bridge, detouring upstream along the river behind a screen of dense trees and darkness.... Other listening posts concur. The tanks are counted as their treads rumble across the wooden bridge, still heading upstream. Another listening post counts them again as, one by one, they gear down to climb a hill. A third listening post farther on confirms the count as the sound of exhaust cuts out momentarily when they crest the hill and skid down the other side. The observers can’t see any tank movement—but they’ve got ears. They’re close enough to the river to pick up every move the Americans make, purely by sound. Finally, the listening post that reported the sounds of bridge building now reports that the racket of steel-on-steel hammering has ceased. A new sound has taken its place; tanks forming up and idling, then shutting down their engines.... Now there is no doubt. The prefabricated bridge upstream is finished. The American tanks will advance across it, trying to outflank the Germans. The General makes the decision that will seal their fate. ‘Proceed as planned’“ (p. 101). And yet the “battle just described never took place. It was staged for a top-secret training film scripted by Darrel Rippeteau, shot on location at Pine Camp, produced at the Signal Corps studio in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, starring B-movie actors and real sonic soldiers.... The sonic deception it portrayed was very real. ... At strategic points across the river, invisible behind the thick forest, stationary sonic cars played programs of sound effects specifically produced to create an impression of a tank moving up the river.. .. First, the sonic car upstream began playing the sounds of bridge building. Then, as the real tanks stopped short of the fixed bridge downstream, another sonic car switched on its sounds of tank engines. At intervals, each new car stationed farther upriver switched on its program—tanks crossing a wooden bridge with loose boards, tanks climbing a hill, tanks descending, tanks assembling at the new bridge head and then shutting down to wait for the assault. The cars downstream one by one shut down, and the sound magically ‘moved’ along the river upstream.... The sonic soldiers had rehearsed exactly such a scenario on the Black River near Pine Camp. The objective: to force the enemy to repel a sonic attack and thereby be caught unawares by the real one” (p. 102). “First, they set up their recording studio in a manoeuvre area near the Salt River. A tripod-mounted microphone—an off-the-shelf commercial studio brand—was the key. They affixed to it a wire basket covered in burlap to screen out wind noise. Cable snaked along the ground to the radar van, a hundred or so feet away. Inside the van, two technicians manned the turntables, on which a worm fear drove a recording head, etching grooves into a sixteen-inch glass-based transcription disk, the same kind used by radio and recording studios, thereby recording the input from the outside microphone.... As the needle scored the glass disk, one technician peered through a microscope at the recording head to make sure that the sound input was not so loud that it caused the stylus of the recording head to cut across one groove into the next and spoil the recording. The other kept a sharp eye on the oscilloscope, the glowing TV-like monitor that showed sound frequencies and moving waves on its cathode ray tube, offering a real-time picture of what they were recording. The technician could watch for spikes in volume and adjust the levels accordingly.... To record starts, idling, and backing up, the tanks were kept a hundred feet from the mike. For manoeuvring, he’d direct them farther and farther way, have them return, then order them to circle again and again. ... Circling around the fixed microphone was a key manoeuvre, as the Bell Labs engineers pointed out. ‘In this way, the collective sound of motor vehicles of the required type and number is obtained continuously and at high level, free of the revealing Doppler effect’“ (p. 109). The “metallic clatter of bridge building, truck and jeep noise, soldiers’ voices, artillery tractor engineers, bulldozers grading roads, and military activity that could possibly be useful in mounting a deception. Then they selected sound effects for specific training exercises and dubbed them from fragile glass disks onto the more rugged stainless steel wire.... He [Ted Cruz] could grab a platter and slip the needle into the groove precisely on the desired sound effect.... At the Army Experiment Station, they worked in a studio above the airplane hangar. But they could also create sonic programs in their mobile studio, which contained three turntables off which they could dub sound to four wire recorders apiece. Thus, preparing for action they could tailor a dozen wire spool recordings at a time to the particular mission of deception, mixing armoured noise with voices, bridge building, and so on” (p. 111).

2. “Sound propagation over distance is much better at night... because there tends to be an inversion layer which makes the sound waves bend toward the earth. The inversion usually extends from the earth up to about ten feet. It’s what is called ‘inversion fog’ which you can see in early mornings on the highway.... In practice, the sonic units would rarely try to project their music beyond six thousand yards—about three and half miles—the optimum distance for ranging accuracy. And they would target listeners between 5 and 30 feet above the transmitting vehicles. The sound ranging tables cover the three types of battlefield most ideal for sonic deception; flat open terrain, flat lightly wooded terrain, and flat heavily wooded terrain.” Ibid., p. 115.

3. “In practice, it meant that if all vehicle sounds were recorded moving past the microphone in a straight line, first sounding louder and then fainter, then projected later over a great distance, they would sound fake because the frequencies would rise or fall in a haphazard fashion. It would be impossible to project a continuous sound located in space. This was the biggest problem of commercially available recorded sound effects and the main reason the army had to create its own library of tactical sounds.” Ibid., pp. 109-110.

4. Ibid., p. 105.

5. Ibid., pp. 106-107.

6. Ibid., pp. 105-106.

Chapter 8

1. According to Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henri Torgue, the sound object as formulated by Pierre Schaeffer is “a practical and empirical point of view, it describes the interaction of the physical signal and perceptive intentionality, without which there would be no perception. From the theoretical point of view, it is a phenomenological quest for the essence of sound. Finally, from the point of view of instrumentation, the sound object is intended to be the elementary unit of general and multidisciplinary solfege of sounds.” The problems for them of the category of the sound object is that “even with the ever-increasing possibilities offered by real-time analysis, if the sound sequence is slightly complex or is spread over time, or if conditions of production are taken into consideration in situ and not simply simulated, then sound by sound analysis become extremely ponderous ... [and] can hardly be used as a fundamental concept for the description and analysis of urban sounds” (p. 6). At the other end of the spectrum from the sound object, the macroconcept of the soundscape, as opposed to the microsound object, Augoyard and Torgue reject R. Murray Schafer’s idea of the soundscape as a “masterpiece of nature.” The soundscape here is not just the “sound environment” but more “what is perceptible as an aesthetic unit in a sound milieu. Shapes that are thus perceived can be analyzed because they seem to be integrated into a composition with very selective criteria. One of these criteria, the selection of hi-fi soundscapes—is justified from both an aesthetic and an education perspective.. .. However the application of the criteria of clarity and precision discredits a number of everyday situations impregnated with blurred and hazy (not to say uproarious) sound environments, which would belong to the ‘lo-fi’ category.” So, they argue, we “lack the generic concepts to describe and design all perceptible sound forms of the environment, be they noisey stimuli, musical sounds, or any other sounds. The concept of the soundscape seems too broad and blurred, while the sound object seems too elementary (in terms of levels of organization), to allow us to work comfortably both at the scale of everyday behaviour and at the scale of architectural and urban spaces.” J.-F. Augoyard and H. Torgue, eds., Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. A. McCartney and D. Paquette (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), pp. 6-7.

2. Greg Lynn. “Blob Tectonics, or Why Tectonics Is Square and Topology Is Groovy” in Folds, Bodies and Blobs (La Lettre volee, 1998).

3. Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience, p. 10.

4. Ibid., p. 9.

5. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Dover, 2003).

6. B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 14.

7. “The word is a blend of the Greek words for ‘sensation’ (aisthesis) and ‘together,’ or ‘union’ (syn), implying the experience of two, or more sensations occurring together.” J. Harrison and S. Barron Cohen, eds., Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings (London: Blackwell, 1996), p. 3.

8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London, Athlone, 1988), attribute, in the context of this haptic, synesthesic field of affect, a specific piloting role to sound. Synesthesia is not for them “reducible to a simple color-sound correspondence ... [they] induce colors that are superimposed upon the colors we see, lending them to a properly sonorous rhythm and movement.” For them, this role is not based on the “signifying or ‘communicational’ values (which, on the contrary, presuppose that power), nor to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound), but to a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of deterritorialization ... music is plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more powerful than that of painting: a line of selective pressure” (pp. 347-348). On the relation between music and color, Messiaen remarked that he was “affected by a kind of synopsia, found more in my mind than in my body, which allows me, when I hear music, and equally when I read it, to see inwardly, in the mind’s eye, colours which move with the music, and I sense these colours in an extremely vivid manner... . For me certain sonorities are linked with certain complexes of colour and I use them as colours, juxtaposing them and putting them into relief against each other.” Olivier Messiaen, Music and Color—Conversations with Claude Samuel (New York: Amadeus, 1994), pp. 16-17.

9. Stephen Connor notes that while the sonic is celebrated by the avant-garde as “the most disruptive sense,” it is “also an insufficiency, in that the auditory always leads to or requires completion by the other senses. The instability of the auditory self is such that it dissolves the very autonomy, which seems to bring about the psychic unseating of the visual in the first place.... It resonates beyond itself.... It is not in a pure, autonomous faculty of audition that the greatest effect of the revival of the prestige of the acoustic has been seen. Rather, it has been in the very principle of relativity that defines the acoustic, the insufficiency that makes it impossible for the acoustic to stand alone. So bizarrely, the most far-reaching effects of the return of the acoustic may be in the transformations it has allowed in visual concepts and ways of feeling.” Hearing for Connor operates as the switchboard/matrix facilitating intrasensory contact and mutation: “Where early modern technologies extended and amplified the powers of ear and eye, contemporary technologies offer the prospect of sensory recombination and transformation as well. The digitalization and consequent universal convertibility of information may make the synesthesias dreamt of by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a common actuality, creating new aggregations of the visual, auditory, haptic and olfactory senses. Undoubtedly the dominance of vision in the constitution of the self would be put at risk in such a new sensory dispensation, since that dominance depends upon the separation of the senses one from another, and the existence of vision as an arbitrating meta-sense, capable of distinguishing, overseeing and correcting the operations of the other senses.” Connor, “The Modern Auditory I” in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 219-220.

10. Michel Chion, Audio Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 135.

11. Ibid., p. 134.

12. “The eye carries information and sensations only some of which can be considered specifically and irreducibly visual (e.g., color); most others are transensory Likewise, the ear serves as a vehicle for information and sensations only some of which are specifically auditive (e.g., pitch and intervallic relations), the others being, as in the case of the eye, not specific to this sense. However—and I insist on this point—transensoriality has nothing to do with what one might call intersensoriality, as in famous ‘correspondences’ among the senses that Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Claudel and others celebrated .. . i.e. the idea of intersensoriality: each sense exists in itself, but encounters others at points of contact.... In the transensorial or even metasensorial model, which I am distinguishing from the Baudelarian one, there is no sensory given that is demarcated and isolated from the outset. Rather the senses are channels, highways more than territories or domains. If there exists a dimension in vision that is specifically visual, and if hearing includes dimensions that are exclusively auditive, these dimensions are in a minority, particularized, even as they are central... . When kinetic sensations organized into art are transmitted through a single sensory channel, through this single channel they can convey all the other senses at once. Silent cinema on one hand, and concrete music on the other clearly illustrate this idea. Silent cinema, in the absence of synch sound, sometimes expressed sounds better than could sound itself, frequently relying on a fluid and rapid montage style to do so. Concrete music, in its conscious refusal of the visual, carries with it visions that are more beautiful than images could ever be.” Ibid., p. 137.

13. Ibid., p. 136.

Chapter 9

1. Jacques Attali, Noise: Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 11.

2. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., in L. McCafiery, Storming the Reality Studio: Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992) p. 190. McLuhan notes that since the invention of the telegraph, humans have been putting their nerves on the outside of their bodies. This “outering of the skin” and other vulnerabilities of the exteriorized interior is the root for McLuhan of our electronic unease, and he remarks that the birth in 1844 of the first commercial telegraph in America coincided with the publication of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread. See Marshall McLuhan, Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 121.

3. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (London: Verso, 1989), p. 3. The problem of military vision, for Virilio, is related to information gathering, transfer, and processing. The more sophisticated the vision machines of war, the more overpowering the sheer weight of information to be dealt with. The more overexposed the battlefield becomes, the more appearance gives into an array of camouflage, decoys, jamming, smokescreens, and electronic countermeasures. To be seen is to be taken out. One can no longer merely invest in forces, but must also invest in their concealment. Stealth, secrecy, and the logistics of perception signal, for Virilio, that the war of images and sound had superseded the war of weaponry. The coevolution of weapons and armor is paralleled by the coevolution of visibility and invisibility—the emergence of electromagnetic weapons of rendering objects perceptible such as radar and sonar. “The projectile’s image and image’s projectile form a single composite” (p. 83). But the increasing speed of the “ballistics of projectiles and the hyperballistics of aeronautics” are counterbalanced by the fact that “only the speed of film exposure is capable of recording the military secret which each protagonist tries to keep by camouflaging ever larger objects” (p. 71). So the “problem then is no longer one of masks and screens, of camouflage designed to hinder long range targeting; rather, it is a problem of ubiquitousness, of handling simultaneous data in a global but unstable environment where the image (photographic or cinematic) is the most concentrated, but also the most stable form of information” (p. 71). The body or object disappears, to be replaced by the detected patterns, vibrations, sounds, and smells registering on technological sensors; “each of the antagonists feel both that he is watched by invisible stalkers and that he is observing his own body from a distance” (p. 72). As that which must be “acquired, pursued or destroyed,” the projectile is a screen glyph and the television picture “an ultrasonic projectile propagated at the speed of light” (p. 83).

4. Marshall McLuhan, “Visual and Acoustic Space,” in The Global Village. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 40.

5. Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 11.

6. Ibid., p. 10.

7. D. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 376.

8. Attali, Noise, p. 32.

9. Jacques Attali, “Ether Talk,” Wire, no. 209 (July 2001): 73.

10. Ibid., p. 73.

11. Jacques Attali, The Labyrinth in Culture and Society (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1999), p. xxviii.

12. Ibid., p. xxviii.

13. Ibid., p. xxiv.

14. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

15. There are significant parallels to McLuhan’s interest in the acoustico-synesthetic sensibility of the electronic age and the corresponding turbulent dynamics of twenty-first-century geotribal tension. Attacked for its technodeterminism and naive utopian neoprimitivism from within the discipline of cultural studies, it is at least worth pointing out that for McLuhan, the “global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. It never occurred to me that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the global village. It has more to do with spite and envy. The tribal village is far more divisive—full of fighting—than any nationalism was. Village is fission, not fusion, in depth.” McLuhan, “Visual and Acoustic Space,” pp. 57-58.

16. Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (New York: Picador, 1998), pp. 370-371.

Chapter 10

1. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1986), p. 25.

2. Ibid., p. 24.

3. Ibid., p. 27.

4. Ibid., p. 29.

5. Ibid., p. 50.

6. Marinetti quoted in ibid., p. 26.

7. Ibid., p. 49.

8. Ibid., p. 50.

9. F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1972), p. 95.

10. Ibid., p. 45.

11. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 1991), p. 62. Afrofuturism, at least as processed by Kodwo Eshun in More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), breaks from the futurist tradition in several important senses. First, while the Italian futurists celebrated the advance of technology without questioning linear progress, Afrofuturism has a much more sophisticated conception of time and technology. Not only is history cyclical instead of linear, but Africa is sent into the future of science, as opposed to degree zero from which Western thought progresses. On this point, see also the Afro cybernetics of Ron Eglash, “African Influences in Cybernetics” in C. Hables-Gray, The Cyborg Handbook (London: Routledge, 1995). Second, Afrofuturism’s sonic weaponry is not primarily noise in the futurist sense, but more fundamentally polyrhythm.

12. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, [1970] 1988), p. 123.

Chapter 11

1. Chris Marker, La Jetée, Argos Films, 1962.

2. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), p. 3.

3. Brian Eno, “Dialogue with Kevin Kelly,” Wired, May 1995.

4. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 1.

5. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 289.

6. Ibid., p. 289.

7. Ibid., p. 290.

8. Ibid., p. 297.

9. Ibid., pp. 296,298.

10. Ibid., p. 295.

11. Ibid., p. 291.

12. Ibid., p. 295.

13. Kodwo Eshun and Edward George, “Ghostlines: Migration, Morphology, Mutations” in Sonic Process (Barcelona: Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003.

14. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Free Press, 1925), p. 259.

Chapter 12

1. The sobering subtext of the ecology of fear is that environmental, meteorological, and epidemiological catastrophe are coldly indifferent to the economic status of populations (although the relation of wealth to taking precautionary or rehabilitative measures is obvious.)

2. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 364.

3. Ibid., pp. 366,367.

4. Ibid., p. 368.

5. Some have gone so far as to attribute the religious feeling of dread and awe experienced within cathedrals, for example, merely to the relation between their sonic architecture as resonance chamber and the imperceptible infrasonic vibrations emitted by pipe organs.

6. Bigend in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 57.

7. But it has been argued here that futurism can be built on through a reexamination of its orientation to temporality, reenergizing it as a set of tools for engaging with contem-porarymodes of aesthetic power.

8. The affective sensorium consists of the nexus of sensory modalities. The exterocep-tive (facing the external environment of the body) five senses must be supplemented by the proprioceptive (the feeling of the relational movement of muscles and ligaments, enfolded tactility) and viscerality. Interoceptive, viscerality “anticipates the translation of the sight or sound or touch perception into something recognizably associated with an identifiable object... viscerality subtracts quality as such from excitation. It registers intensity ... [and] registers excitations gathered by the 5 “exteroceptive” senses even before they are fully processed by the brain.” In B. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 60-61.

9. Joachim-Ernst Berendt, The Third Ear (Perth, Australia: Element, 1985), p. 79.

10. Olive Lewin, Rock It Come Over: The Folk Music of Jamaica; with Special Reference to Kumina and the Work of Mrs. Imogene “Queenie” Kennedy (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001), p. 158.

11. Ibid., p. 164.

12. Ibid., p. 158.

13. A useful exception from the domain of film theory is Steven Shaviro’s pioneering The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

14. Interview with Gasper Noe by Exposure Magazine at http://www.fullspectrumOttawa.com/directors/gasp ar_noe.php.

15. As R. M. Shaffer wrote, “In Greek mythology the Sirens were nymphs who destroyed those who passed their island by means of their singing, at once so piercing yet dulcet as honey. Circe warned Odysseus of the Sirens and so enabled him to elude their fatal song by plugging the ears of his men with wax and having himself bound to the mast of his ship. The Sirens thus signify mortal danger to man and this danger is broadcast by means of their singing. There is good evidence that the Greek word siren may be etymologically related to the words for wasp and bee. Modern man has re-identified the concept of danger with the wasp’s song. There is an obvious similarity also between the glissando wail of the original siren and the human cry of pain or grief, diminished, however, since the introduction of the yelp siren with its sudden switch-on-switch-off technique. ... The siren speaks of disharmony within.” The Soundscape (Rochester, Vt: Destiny Books, 1993), p. 178.

16. Heinz von Foerster, “Sounds and Music,” in Music by Computers, ed. H. V. Foerster and J. W. Beauchamp (New York: Wiley, 1969), p. 3.

Chapter 13

1. Joseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 158.

2. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002),pp. 60-61.

3. See Erin Manning, “Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic,” Fibreculture, 2006, http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue9/issue9_manning.html.

4. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1890.)

5. Brian Massumi, “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact,” in Conference Proceedings: Genealogies of Biopolitics (2005), p. 8.

6. Brian Massumi, “Fear (the Spectrum Said),” Positions 13, no. 1 (2005): 34.

7. Kodwo Eshun, “Abducted by Audio,” Abstract Culture, Swarm 3, Issue 12 (1997): Ccru, 12-13.

Chapter 14

1. Mark Bain, “The Live Room—Transducing Resonant Architecture” at http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-128820 (last viewed June 2,2007).

2. See Mark Bain interview with Josephine Bosma (1999) at http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9908/msg00023.html.

3. Ibid.

4. “Interview with Mark Bain” by Molly Hankwitz and David Cox, January 3, 2000, Artists’ Television Access, San Francisco, “qualifying this by noting that ‘to a certain degree, developers and architects are terrorists in themselves... in the sense that most common people who live in the street or who live in these buildings don’t have ownership on the properties, and so the decision to make buildings or to develop areas of cities or towns is really out of their hands.’“ http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0007/msg00069.html (last viewed June 2,2007).

5. “The Live Room—Transducing Resonant Architecture,” Organised Sound 8 (2): 163-170. In his installation work, Bain seems to be aiming at a vibrational topology: “I’m trying to find a bridge between the two, between inhabitants of a structure and the structure itself. I am using a vibrational vehicle to connect them together.” One of Bain’s installation projects, The Live Room, was described as constructing “a topological space composed of virtual objects which haptically interface with the audience. By interacting with the cycling wave forms the visitor is occupied, infested with frequencies, modulated by vibrational energy and imparted with the volumetric sensibilities inherent within the body. The audience are the activated objects, traversing the site and feeling the liveliness of themselves, others and the space within.” http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-128820 (last viewed June 2, 2007). See also M. Oliver, “The Day the Earth Screamed,” February 13, 2004, http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0„1147696,00.html.

6. J-E Augoyard and H. Torgue, eds., Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, trans. A. McCartney and D. Paquette. (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005).

7. Mark Bain interview with Josephine Bosma.

8. Hans Jenny, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomena and Vibration (Macromedia Publishing, 2001), pp. 96-97.

9. Note particularly, via sonic dominance, the transduction of bodily movement via dance.

10. Note the vibrational tendencies of flat panel speaker research. “As an example, the standard understanding of a loudspeaker’ producing sonic waves has historically been constrained by the semiotic end of the continuum. Given the liberation of forces from such constraints allowed for by the military we find here that new avenues for sound are opened up in their direct interaction with human and nonhuman bodies. Flat panel speakers are a relatively recent technology in which dynamic surfaces are agitated to produce audio waveforms. This technology is currently being developed by weapons companies as a cladding surface for submarine vessels. If the waveform pumped out by the speakers can be generated at sufficient scale it can act both as a sound dampening technology and also as a means of repelling attacks by torpedo. As with contemporary musical aid ventures, sound acts directly to save lives. But more importantly, recognising the material effectiveness of media, without constraint to merely semiotic registers or the interminable compulsion to communicate allows media themselves to become fully expressive.” Matt Fuller and Andrew Goffey, “Evil Media Studies” in Spam Book, ed. T. Sampson and J. Parikka (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2008).

11. The approach developed here sets up a parallel between bass and some of the ideas of architectural theorist Greg Lyn, especially his notion of the blob.

Chapter 15

1. It attempts to retain the exactness of concepts while leaving them vulnerable, open enough to resonate in unpredictable fashion outside of their home discipline. As Brian Massumi has argued, such an approach, for example, forces cultural studies to become vulnerable to the effects of scientific concepts, compelling change to the degree that culture is (as if it ever was not) subject to the forces of nature. He calls such a method, following Deleuze and Guattari, machinic materialism. Machinic designates not a technological fetishism but rather a preoccupation with rhythmic relation, process, connection, and trade. But it is also inflected by Baruch Spinoza’s ethology, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, and William James’s pragmatist radical empiricism.

2. Kodwo Eshun, More BrilliantThan the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), p. 004.

3. Ibid., p. 003.

4. B. Spinoza, The Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992).

Chapter 16

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration (Manchester, U.K.: Clinamen Press, 2000), p. 138. Bachelard goes on to describe how “rhythm is imprisoned in sound boxes. When we see a rhythm preserved in a radio aerial, we cannot stop the image of reciprocal action between the geometric and temporal from intruding into our thought. It is therefore in our interests to regard things as truly the products of stationary waves. Periods are spatio-temporal functions. They are the temporal face of material things. As it vibrates, a thought reveals both a temporal and a material structure.

“If we now add to this that periods are immediately translated into the language of frequencies and that frequencies appear as relative to one another, we see the absoluteness and the continuity of time not just fade but disappear. In any case, the continuity of absolute time that might serve as a basis for differentiating between periods is no longer the immediate continuity yielded by crude observation. The causality studied on the basis of frequencies is indeed in play above the continuity that is postulated as fundamental to duration of a period. In particular, the study of this causality through periods and frequencies could, in our view, be limited to statistics of periodic events. The regularity of an isolated vibration is postulated perfectly gratuitously, for in fact it is only the frequency of groups of vibrations that is used. Moreover, it must be noted that most phenomena which are explained by frequency are explained by a fairly large number of frequencies. The low periods of astronomy do not serve here as an explanatory motive. If the earth is considered as it moves in its orbit, it does not ‘vibrate.’ It follows its path. The time of astronomy is therefore not yet ‘structured.’ If we can consider the monotony of planetary motion, we can well understand how a uniform, continuous time came to be ascribed to it. It is precisely a time in which nothing happens. It is an inadequate schema for establishing the realism of rhythm.

“When we go deeply into the finely detailed forms of multiple causality, we become aware of the value of temporal organizations. We are less and less tempted to regard causes as just breaks in a general Becoming. These causes constitute wholes. They act as wholes, spanning useless intervals, without regard for images representing time as a flux whose entire force lies at its limits. Causal energy is not located on a causal wave font. The cause requires organic conventions. It has a temporal structure, a rhythmic action. It belongs to spatio-temporal structure.

“Alongside the cause’s organic character and in connection with this character, we must also make way for the kaleidoscopic and discontinuous character of material change. Causal relations can thus gain in clarity when we study them from the arithmetical standpoint. There must be an advantage in arithmetising causality” (pp. 78-79).

2. Ibid., p. 137.

3. Ibid., p. 138.

4. Ibid., p. 127.

5. Ibid., p. 134.

6. Ibid., p. 144.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanatysis (London: Continuum Press, 2004), p. 60.

10. Ibid., pp. 78-79.

11. Ibid., p. 67.

12. G. Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration (Manchester, U.K.: Clinamen Press, 2000), pp. 28-29.

13. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 208.

Chapter 17

1. Here marks the divergence between radical empiricism and the speculative realism of philosophers such as Graham Harman, who in Guerilla Metaphysics (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007), specifically reacts against the emphasis on relation of White-headian thought and the way in which is sacrifices the possibility of rigorous conception of the discrete, unrelated, “object.”

2. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas (New York: Penguin, 1942), p. 172.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 197.

Chapter 18

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), p. 290.

2. This is a perspective that mathematicians such as Gregory Chaitin would certainly adhere to when they describe their work as “sensual mathematics.”

3. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Penguin, 1942), pp. 163,166.

4. Ibid., p. 197.

6. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996).

7. Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 102,103.

Chapter 19

1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929).

2. A body, in this sense, like affect, can be nonorganic or organic.

3. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights, [1970] 1988), p. 128.

4. In his essay on acoustic cyberspace, Eric Davis critiques the detached, cerebral and visual model of cyberspace passed down from Descartes, developing an acoustic version in which the body is central, “Roots and Wires” (1997).

5 Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1992), p. 72.

6. P. Virilio, Speed and Politics (New York: Semiotexte, 1985).

7. Deleuze,Spinoza,, p. 123.

8. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone,1988),p. 381.

9. Ibid., p. 260.

10. Deleuze, Spinoza, p. 128.

11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 256-257.

12. Ibid., p. 260.

13. Deleuze, Spinoza, pp. 127-128.

14. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 256-257.

15. Ibid.

Chapter 20

1. Michel Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 52,54.

2. Alongside Rene Girard’s cultural chaos theory of sacrifice, Serres’s concept of noise provides the dynamic framework for much of Attali’s concept of noise. Serres’s concept of turbulence, on the other hand, is equally crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s, and later De Landa’s, dynamic notion of the war machine.

3. We can follow this Lucretian abstract vorticism vector through most of Serres’s texts, from Hermes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984) and The Parasite (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) through The Birth of Physics (Manchester, U.K.: Clinamen, 2001) to his later texts, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997) and Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).

4. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe (London: Penguin, 1951), p. 66.

5. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 306.

6. Serres, Hermes, p. 121.

7. Ibid., pp. 100-101.

8. War machines in this extended sense can therefore include configurations and consistencies in an array of populations, be they conceptual, molecular, bacterial, animal, commercial, artistic, meteorological, or passional. These war machines are not primarily concerned with resistance, and instead of taking violence as their primary object, they have a synthetic relation to aggression forced in encounters with obstacles that split speed into a space-time grid or apply a meter to an asymmetric rhythmicity, forcing a transversal spiraling movement into a barrier blockade of parallel channels. Metric apparatuses of security function through the modulation of turbulence and the control of its contagious trajectories, its escalative feedback gradients and tendencies to overflow. Yet with preemptive power, the power of the vortex is allied to control. Preemptive power produces spirals in time through the production of future-feedback circuits.

9. A war machine for Deleuze and Guattari can be constructed in any niche, and their deployment is certainly not restricted to the field of human culture.

10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988), pp. 361,363.

Chapter 21

1. The document contextualized this device alongside two centuries of scientific research on the vortices that occur in nature, such as tornadoes, aircraft contrails, cigarette smoke, nuclear clouds, and waterspouts, from Helmholtz, better known as a pioneer of the physics of sound, to Kelvin in the nineteenth century, through to contemporary engineering research. Enhanced by numerical techniques and powerful computerized simulations, fueled by chaos and complexity theory, this research into the mechanisms and dynamics of formation, propagation, and stability of vortices has only intensified. Today the simulation of turbulence continues this long-standing tangle of physics and engineering problems, relating to the behavior of systems “far from equilibrium,” the emergence of order from chaos.

2. A thermocline, a concept relating to the distribution of temperatures in hydrodynamic situations, is a volatile layer or zone of transition between two relatively stable layers.

3. See G. Lucey and L. Jasper, “Vortex Ring Generators,” in Non-Lethal Defense III, 2001 (note 2), Research report. U.S. Army, Adelphi.

4. In physics, predictability has conventionally been based on Newton’s equations of motion. Given the forces, specific initial conditions lead to specific well-defined orbits in a corresponding coordinate phase space. Laminar flow implies predictable behavior in that stream lines that start off near each other remain near each other. Knowledge of motion at one point in the flow at one point in time implies knowledge of the motion at neighboring points in space and time. However, in the fluid dynamics of nonlinear systems, actual fluid movements exhibit both orderly and chaotic flows, with the nature of the flow changing from laminar to turbulent as some parameter or combination of parameters increases through some critical value. In turbulent motion, knowledge of the motion at one location at one time conveys nothing about the motion at nearby points at the same time or at the same point at later times, rendering prediction fundamentally impossible. Turbulence is treated as one of the grand challenges of high-performance computing. This is due to the massive complexity involved in simulating turbulent structures, where a flow behavior at the most molecular scales can produce disproportionate effects over large distances. Coveney and Highfield set out the problematic of turbulence simulation in physics whose nonlinear dynamics map onto the dynamics of security in the ecology of fear:

“Navier-Stokes equations describe the flow of continuous fluids; digital computers are inherently discrete, however, so they necessarily approximate these equations by dividing space and time into a grid and only take into account fluid behaviour at points on this grid. Thus, the computational fluid dynamicist faces a dilemma: if she subdivides space too far, then the time taken to obtain a solution to the equations will be prohibitively long because she has a very great number of points to consider; but if she settles for a cut-off that is too coarse, then she will omit important details that affect fluid behaviour such as eddy structures. In fact, the time taken to perform a fluid simulation increases as a high power of the Reynolds number, a measure of propensity for apparent mayhem of turbulence. [The dimensionless Reynolds number is defined as the ratio of the inertial to the viscous forces: the weaker the viscous forces, the greater the tendency to turbulence. At values of the Reynolds number of order 100, flows are usually laminar; at values of order 1,000,000, flows possess fully developed turbulence; intermediate values indicate the transition regime between the two states- the onset of turbulent motion.] At sufficiently high Reynolds values, the flow becomes turbulent and the Navier-Stokes equations are then a major headache to solve. Even though this is not, technically speaking, an intractable [NP] problem, for any reasonably sized problem on any existing computer it is impossible to consider Reynolds numbers above around 10,000, a value corresponding merely to the onset of turbulence, rather than the fully developed form” (P. Coveney and R. Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity [London: Faber, 1991], p. 67).

It is all too common for the rhythms of global insecurity to be described using metaphors of disorder, and commotion. James Rosenau, in his Turbulence in World Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), makes the case for “turbulence” as an analytical concept as opposed to merely a suggestive metaphor. Compelling as it may be, an analogical use of “turbulence” proves, he argues, only a hindrance to the enterprise of mapping outbreaks of war. A more rigorous alternative, Rosenau suggests, would be to ground the concept in the various branches of physics in which the sciences of turbulence have recently emerged and that recognize the omnipresence of turbulent dynamics across the continuum of the cosmos: Tennekes and J. L. Lumley remind us that “Most flows occurring in nature and in engineering applications are turbulent. The boundary layer in the earth’s atmosphere is turbulent [except possibly in very stable condition]; jet streams in the upper troposphere are turbulent, cumulus clouds are in turbulent motion. The water currents below the surface of the ocean are turbulent; the Gulf Stream is a turbulent wall-jet kind of flow. The photosphere of the sun and the photosphere of similar stars are in turbulent motion; interstellar gas clouds ... are turbulent; the wake of the earth in the solar wind is presumably a turbulent wake. Boundary layers growing on aircraft wings are turbulent. Most combustion processes involve turbulence and often even depend on it; the flow of natural gas and oil in pipelines is turbulent. Chemical engineers use turbulence to mix and homogenize fluid mixtures and to accelerate chemical reaction rates in liquids or gases. The flow of water in rivers and canals is turbulent; the wakes of ships, cars, submarines, and aircraft are in turbulent motion. The study of turbulence clearly is an interdisciplinary activity, which has a very wide range of applications. ... [Furthermore,] many turbulent flows can be observed easily; watching cumulus clouds or the plume of a smokestack is not time wasted for a student of turbulence” (H. Tennekes and J. L. Lumley, A First Course in Turbulence (Cambridge, Mass.: : MIT Press, 1972, p. 1). The dynamics of turbulence, like rhythm more generally, can be abstracted out of research into liquid instabilities because “turbulence is not a feature of fluids [only] but of fluid flows [generally]” (Ibid., p. 3).

For Manuel De Landa, in his War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone, 1992), an abstract machine of turbulence transects a nature-culture continuum operating across an array of material instantiations. Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book War and Anti-War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983) argue that postmodern violence can best be understood through what they call its “Prigoginian” characteristics. In their seminal work Order out of Chaos Illya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers theorize the active matter of systems “far from equilibrium,” drawing out some of the implications of a conception of positive chaos, a patterning which does not just constitute the negative of order, but rather the emergent properties of dissipative structures, that is, turbulence. As they write in an oft-quoted moment, “For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise. Today we know this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to the coherent behaviour of millions and millions of molecules. Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar [i.e., nonturbulent or calm] flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization” (I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos, London: Flamingo, [1985] p. 41.

As H. L. Swinney and J. P. Gollub put it in Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1981), “Until recently, the practical definition [of turbulence] has been the appearance of apparent randomness in photographs of flows containing materials which permit visualisation of streamlines or other features. However, this approach omits the possibility of complex flow patterns that are nevertheless highly ordered” (p. 1). Indeed recent turbulence theory agrees that turbulence is not random, does not have infinite degrees of freedom, and is not merely “structureless meandering” but rather is “a well defined structure,” an “order in the midst of chaotic motion.” Trevor H. Moulden, “An Introduction to Turbulent Phenomena,” in Walter Frost and Trevor H. Moulden, eds., Handbook of Turbulence, vol. 1, Fundamentals and Applications (New York: Plenum, 1977), pp. 25-26; Alexandre Chorin, “Lecture II: Theories of Turbulence,” in A. Dodd and B. Eckmann, eds., Lecture Notes in Mathematics: Turbulence Seminar, Berkeley 1976/1977 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1977), p. 41. For a similar conclusion, see Trevor H. Moulden, Walter Frost, and Albert H. Garner, “The Complexity of Turbulent Fluid Motion,” in Frost and Moulden, Handbook of Turbulence 1:3-4.

5. On this point, Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Penguin, 1984), is particularly insightful in his description of the rhythmic crowd through an analysis of the New Zealand Maori Haka, which while usually understood as purely a war dance, is actually a mode of collective expression of a wide range of affects.

6. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Continuum, 2004).

7. P. Turetsky, in “Rhythm: Assemblage and Event,” in Deleuze and Music, ed. I. Buchanan (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2004), pp. 143-144.

Chapter 22

1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 77.

2. M. S. Howe, Theory of Vortex Sound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1.

3. Ibid., p. 1. Howe continues that “the sound generated by turbulence in an unbounded fluid is usually called aerodynamic sound. Most unsteady flows of technological interest are of high Reynolds number and turbulent, and the acoustic radiation is a very small byproduct of the motion. The turbulence is usually produced by fluid motion over a solid boundary or by flow instability” (ibid., p. 25).

4. The concept of the rhythmachine should not be confused with the musical machinery for making beats, the drum machine, but rather refers to the algorithmic entities that organize music cultures from within.

5. L. Russolo, The Art of Noises (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1986), p. 25.

6. Gilles Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988). p. 364.

7. Oliver Messaien, Music and Color—Conversations with Claude Samuel (New York: Amadeus Press, 1994), p. 68.

8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313. William McNeil explains, in Keeping Together in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), that the interface of war, rhythm, and discipline is complicated.

9. Chernoff, African Rhythm, African Sensibility, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981).

10. Erik Davis, “Roots and Wires” (1997), http://www.techgnosis.com/cyberconf.html.

11. See, for example, S. Goodman, “Contagious Noise” in T. Sampson and J. Parikka, Spam Book (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2009).

12. See K. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), for the Afrofu-turist uptake of Paul Gilroy’s conception of the Black Atlantic as diasporic network of cultural trade and transmutation.

13. See Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (New York: Picador, 1997).

14. Camilo Rocha, “Global Ghettotech: fresh music’s from a post-colonial world” at http://wwwnorient.com/html/show_article.php?ID=114. (2008)

Chapter 23

1. Brian Massumi, “The Superiority of the Analog,” in Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

2. Pierre Levy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (Perseus, 1998).

3. H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 322.

4. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: HarperCollins, 1960), p. 100.

5. Aden Evans, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 68.

6. Ibid., p. 66.

7. Ibid., p. 64.

8. Ibid., p. 69.

9. Ibid., p. 70.

10. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 143.

11. Evans, Sound Ideas, p. 71.

12. Evans applies the concept of the surd to sound signal processing and defines it as “a discontinuity that represents the specificity, the unique moment of the original signal—...[ ensuring] that no wholly accurate recreation is possible, that no analysis can do justice to the original signal” (p. 229). Such glitches force engineering to deal constructively with the problem, for example, the local intervention of the Lanczos sigma as a response to the Gibbs phenomenon. Aden Evans, “The Surd,” in Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, ed. S. Duffy (Manchester, U.K.: Clinamen Press, 2004).

13. Evans, “The Surd.”

14. Ibid., p. 231.

15. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 142.

16. See C. Roads, Microsound (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), p. 55.

17. “Rhythm is perhaps the most primal of all things known to us.... Music is, by further analysis, pure rhythm; rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation in rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony, the blending of these varied rhythms.” Ezra Pound, 1910, quoted in ibid.

18. Philip Sherburne from Clicks + Cuts 3 sleeve notes (2003).

19. K. Pohlmann, Principles of Digital Audio (Indianapolis, Ind.: Sams Publishing, 1992), pp. 21-22.

20. Ibid., p. 23. Pohlmann continues, “The theorem specifies that the sampling frequency must be at least twice the highest signal frequency. More specifically, audio signals containing frequencies between 0 and S/2 Hz can be exactly represented by S samples per second.... When the sampling theorem is applied to audio signals, the input audio signal is lowpass filtered, so that it is bandlimited with a frequency response that does not exceed the Nyquist (S/2) frequency. Ideally, the lowpass filter is designed so that the only signals removed are those high frequencies that lie above the high frequency limit of human hearing.... Consider a continuously changing analog function that has been sampled to create a series of pulses. The amplitude of each pulse, determined through quantization, ultimately yields a number that represents the signal amplitude at that instant. To quantify the situation, we define the sampling frequency as the number of samples per second. Its reciprocal, sampling rate, defines the time between each sample. For example, a sampling frequency of 40,000 samples per second corresponds to a rate of 1/40,000 second. A quickly changing waveform—That is, one with higher frequencies—would require a higher sampling frequency. Thus, the digitalization system’s sampling frequency determines the high frequency limit of the system. The choice of sampling frequency is thus one of the most important audio design criteria of a digitalization system, between it determines the audio bandwidth of the system” (pp. 22-25).

21. Roads, Microsound, pp. 57-60, and D. Gabor, “Acoustical Quanta and the Theory of Hearing” Nature 159 (4044), (1947): 591-594.

22. R. Mackay “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Wildstyle in Effect,” in Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, ed. K. Ansell Pearson (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 255.

23. Gregory Chaitin, Conversations with a Mathematician: Math. Art, Science and the Limits of Reason (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2001).

Chapter 24

1. Brian Eno famously makes the analogy between generative music and military strategy, pointing out, “I was quite fascinated by military strategy for a long while. I gave a talk about the difference between the traditional Western European army and the guerilla army. One of the things that I realized from that study was that, for a traditional army, every emergency was ... an emergency. Every lump in the ground, every deviation from the right time of day or season for the battle, was an emergency. For the guerilla army, every emergency is an opportunity. Every bump in the ground is a place to hide. Every hole is a place to hide. Every spot of bad weather is a place where the regular army is going to get bogged down.” Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian in Reality Hackers, Winter 1988.

2. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3. David Toop, Haunted Weather (London: Serpents Tail, 2004), chap. 5.

4. Kodwo Eshun, “An Unidentified Audio Event Arrives from the Post-Computer Age,” in Longplayer, ed. J. Finer (London: Artangel, 2001), p. 11.

5. E. R. Miranda, Composing Music with Computers (Burlington, Mass.: Focal Press, 2001).

6. See P. Todd, “Simulating the Evolution of Musical Behavior,” in The Origins of Music, ed. N. L Walling, B. Merker, and S. Brown (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); E. Bilotta, P. Pantano, and V. Talarico, “Synthetic Harmonies: An Approach to Musical Semiosis by Means of Cellular Automata,” in Artificial Life VII Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Artificial Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).

7. Todd, “Simulating the Evolution of Musical Behavior,” pp. 361-389.

8. Miranda, Composing Music with Computers, p. 119.

9. Miranda is particularly cautious of linear, progressive models of evolution: “Evolution is generally associated with the idea of the transition from an inferior species to an superior one and this alleged superiority can often be measured by means of fairly explicit and objective criteria: we believe, however, that this notion should be treated with caution. ... With reference to prominently cultural phenomena, such as music, the notion of evolution surely cannot have exactly the same connotations as it does in natural history: biological and cultural evolution are therefore quite different domains. Cultural evolution should be taken here as the transition from one state of affairs to another, not necessarily associated with the notion of improvement. Cultural transition is normally accompanied by an increase in the systems’ complexity, but note that ‘complex’ is not a synonym for ‘better’“ (ibid., p. 140).

10. C. Darwin, The Origin of the Species (London: Murrary, 1859). R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 1986).

11. Miranda, Composing Music with Computers, p. 131.

12. Ibid., p. 136.

13. Ibid., p. 145.

14. This idea combines the Musique Concrete notion of the sound object (Schaeffer) with the breakdown of semantic and causal modes of listening (Chion) and R. M. Shaffer’s notion of schizophonia as sound object detached from its cause, and therefore unidentifiable. An audio virology explores the affect of such sounds. See The Soundscape. (Rochester, Vt: Destiny Books, 1993).

15. Eshun, “An Unidentified Audio Event,” p. 11.

Chapter 25

1. See, for example, in the field of media studies, Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (New York: Ballantine, 1996). In the field of marketing theory, a number of texts have explored the dynamics of hype in cultural virological terms, including Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus (New York: Simon & Schuster, , 2001), Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: BackBay Books, 2002), and Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion: How Ideas Act Like Viruses (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

2. David Cronenberg, Cronenberg on Cronenberg, ed. C. Rodley (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p. 82.

3. A typical definition of affective contagion within the sonic dimension has been outlined within developmental psychology. Daniel Stern outlines it as “automatic induction of an affect in one person from seeing or hearing someone else’s affect display. This process may well be a basic biological tendency among highly evolved social species, which becomes perfected in man. The earliest affect contagion that has been demonstrated involves the human distress cry. Wolff found that two-month-old infants showed ‘infectious crying’ when they heard tape recordings of their own distress cries.” Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 143.

4. Back in those turbulent bubble days, June 1999 to be precise, during the height of the excitement over the insurgent potential of mp3, West Coast gangsta rapper Ice T participated in the second annual MP3 Summit in San Diego. Sitting on a panel examining the implications of the virulent and uncontrollable spread of digital music across the Internet, entitled “Music as a Virus: Biological Warfare,” Ice placed his bets on the virus winning out against the corporation’s autoimmune response of tightening copyright control. For a summary of proceedings, see http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/fmp/mp3_summit2_highlights.html and http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,20279-2.00.html.

5. On capitalism as composed by markets and antimarkets, see Fernard Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: Structures of Everyday Life, vol. 1 (New York: HarperCollins, 1981), and Manuel De Landa, “Markets and Anti-Markets in the World Economy” at http://www.tO.or.at/delanda/a-market.htm.

6. See Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), for descriptions of some of the early adventures with indeterminacy in music.

7. The Human Genome Project has generated much basic DNA sequencing data, including virus codes and bacterial and protein sequences. Some digital sound design projects have sought to exploit such resources of data in order to generate musical parameters as a direct transposition of molecular parameters. The general idea is that DNA code dictates the particular configuration for the production of amino acids. The physicochemical instructions provide an evolutionary set of rules for sonic composition when fragments of DNA are transposed into, for example, MIDI events. One such example is the collaboration between artist John Dunn and biologist Mary Anne Clark, who collaborated on the sonification of protein data. The elaborate process of transcoding is described in an article at http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/lifemusic.html.

8. Infection is generally used here as synonym for affection, although clearly with an added sense of insidiousness. The target is close to rhythmic analyses of possession or, in Kodwo Eshun’s terminology, abduction.

Chapter 26

1. According to the Elggren’s sleeve notes, this article was written by Alexandra Mir in the New York Daily News, September 11,2002.

2. A number of versions of the project’s explanatory text were published in Slovenian, Norwegian, and Austrian newspapers in 2001, and the photographs that accompanied the project were exhibited in Finland and Norway.

3. The kind of device that would make possible such recordings are being researched. “There’s a whole world down there,” proclaimed scientist Flavio Noca at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California in 2001. In order to capture the sonic hydraulics of microcellular machinery, of swimming bacterium and viruses, a special “nanomicrophone” is being developed. Based around the principle of the stereocilia, the layers of tiny hairs that line the inner ear (as opposed to the membrane of the eardrum, which apparently gets too stiff as you attempt to miniaturize it), they are composed of billions of tiny filaments that respond to minute fluctuations of pressure. Noca noted that “in nature, membranes are present only as coupling devices between the acoustic environment and the zone, typically the cochlea, where the signal is picked up by stereocilia. Nature has evolved toward this solution, probably because of the unique properties of stereocilia at very small [submolecular] scales.” Stereocilia are ubiquitous. Interestingly, even “nonhearing” animals (e.g., hydra, jellyfish, and sea anemones) possess them as early-warning, directional-pressure sensors. But it is the model of a fish’s lateral line audition for prey detection, localization, and identification that most interests military researchers. See the interview between Alan Hall and Flavio Noca at http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2001/n£2001012_818.htm (last accessed June 3, 2005).

4. W. Burroughs, “Electronic Revolution,” in Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1999), p. 295.

5. Ibid., p. 301. In Neil Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1992), the virus is able to smoothly shift between hacker brains, computer systems, and physiology via a drug. A recurrent Burroughs-type theme throughout Stephenson’s book is the idea of language as a virus from an alien world.

6. The engram, as the “basic pathogenic building block” of Hubbard’s system of dianetics, corresponded to a pathological version of the Socratic demon or independent internal voice or monologue. L. R. Hubbard, Dianetics (Austin, Tex.: New Era, 2003).

7. D. Schacter, Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory (Hove, East Sussex, U.K.: Psychology Press, 2001).

8. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat (Cambridge, Mass.:: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 313-214.

9. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (Oxford Publishers, 1989).

10. Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind.” at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html, (1991).

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. A more sophisticated memetics that moves beyond Dawkins’s almost religious scientism is developed by Robert Aunger who tries to discard with the hardware model of human memory, which often seems implicit to many memetic approaches. In The Electric Meme (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), Aunger argued that memes were essentially a specific subspecies of memory. He compares the movement of memes with the movement of information patterns through the brain; when a particular skill becomes embedded as habit, “a meme may migrate through the brain as it goes from being a sensory stimulus to a short term then a long term memory”(p. 213). For Aunger, the birth of memory involved the emergence of a set of specialized neurons that, opposed to receptor and motor neurons, would fire only on certain types of input fed to them from other neurons; these were in a sense “interneurons,” or connectors (p. 179). He maintained that memories were distributed across neural networks and were therefore always relational. The exact process of this distributed memory storage was thought to vary most importantly between long-term and short-term memory and went straight to the heart of the primary raison d’être of memetics: the autonomy of cultural evolution from biological evolution and, in fact, culture’s ability to adapt biology. Memetics attempted to break with the dominance of genetics, which had repelled cultural studies from most other varieties of social Darwinism.

Crucial to understanding the varying functions of memory, Aunger maintained that the “primary difference between short-term and long-term memory is therefore the direct involvement of genes” (p. 190). These memories were thought to be stored as variations in synaptic connections between neurons. These changes in the topology of the network could occur because new cells (networked nodes) or new connections between existing cells were added, thereby adjusting the physical wiring of the brain in relation to feedback from the environment. Requiring new cells or parts of cells, these storage systems related to more long-term memories. Finally, the plasticity of the synapses, that is, the microtemporally varying strength of the synaptic connections themselves, were thought to relate more closely with short-term memory, which, as Aunger argued, functions “independent of new protein synthesis” (p. 190), and therefore defined a zone of relative autonomy from genetic interference.

14. In “Viruses of the Mind” Dawkins’s major polemic is against irrational belief systems, specifically religions. When describing the symptoms someone would display if infected by a thought contagion, he notes their irrational, faith-based convictions, their intolerance to rival memes, and their lack of interest in factual evidence that might undermine their belief system into question. “Scientific ideas, like all memes, are subject to a kind of natural selection, and might look superficially virus-like. But the selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favour pointless self-serving. They favour all the virtues laid out in textbooks of standard methodology: testability, evidential support, precision, quanti-fiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability, universality, progressiveness, independence of cultural milieu.... For scientific belief, epidemiology merely comes along afterwards and describes the history of its acceptance.”

15. Manuel De Landa, One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 2000).

16. See, for example, Antonio Damasio’s development of anti-Cartesian neuroscience in The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Vintage, 1999).

17. See Gabriel Tarde, Laws of Imitation (New York: Holt, 1903), and P. Marsden’s “Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation,” http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2000/vol4/marsden_p.html, 2000.

Chapter 27

1. One online community has set up a users’ group for those suffering from earworm infection: http://www.livejournal.com/community/earworm/. One member of that community has formulated a species analysis of the worms, dubbing them “mematoda”: “Invertebrates of the phylum Mematoda vary wildly in appearance. Sometimes measuring several stanzas long, there seem to be two distinct types of average earworm anatomy: divided into four sections of four (although I have occasionally come across three segments of four, and once an unprecedented Madison, be wary of the IDM earworms for extraction seems to be nearly impossible, or completely smooth unsegmented cylindrical bodies, often narrowing at each end, where mouthparts and organs of aspiration are located). Earworms possess the power of regeneration seen in their soil bound counterparts. Located on the sides of most Mematodes are several hundred tiny ‘hooks’ that aid in locomotion (swing your hips now). Color and texture tend to vary wildly from worm to worm, but sexing an earworm is surprisingly simple; as they appear to be almost exclusively asexual, and reproduce primarily via karyokinesis .. . (karaoke). .. . Since sexual reproduction is almost unknown among earworms, the standard earworm is a solitary organism by both nature and choice ... and gorges itself on its host’s misspent potential for productive thought... . Gestation is nonexistent and generation almost instantaneous. The average earworm will utilize its host to assist with reproduction. Mitosis occurs almost immediately upon communication and the young demur unconditionally to their parent. The process of division secretes a slow acting enzyme that eventually seizes the host with an uncontrollable urge (I want to tell you all about it) to sing, hum, or otherwise vocalize the earworm’s genetic material.... The (almost identical, barring mutation) copies are propelled from the host to other unsuspecting persons. If not ejected from the host soon, the young inevitably become part of the earworm’s supplemental diet (for full maturation seems to be impossible with an older, identical earworm present).... Parthenogenesis (no one move a muscle as the dead come home) has also been known to occur on the airwaves of the radio, but reports of spontaneous earworms have been attributed to virtually any arrangement of sonic vibrations in time that produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre. Rarely are earworms read, but it has been reported.. .. Blatant, unapolo-getic, parasites, earworms dwell primarily in the brains of their hapless human hosts. But luckily, without a steady stream of conscious thoughts to feed on, the lifespan of an earworm without a host is only a few frantic moments (typically around four minutes, thirty three seconds). However, as anyone who has ever acquired an earworm can attest, once a earworm is suitably situated in a host, its lifespan increases exponentially.” http://www.livejournal.com/users/ktrey/36492.html .

2. Tom Vague, “Interview with Klaus Maeck,” Vague, 16/17 (1984): 65.

3. William Burroughs, “Electronic Revolution,” in Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1999). Elggren, Virulent Images, Virulent Sounds,

4. The military origins of Muzak derive from scientist, researcher, and inventor George Own Squier. See Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and Robert Sumrell and Kazys Varnelis, Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (New York: Actar, 2007).

5. Annahid Kassabian, “Ubisub: Ubiquitous Listening and Networked Subjectivity,” ECHO 3, no. 2 (Fall 2001).

6. Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), p. 130.

7. A company called QinetiQ has been developing NXT flat panel speak technology, based on military research, drawing on the vibrational potential of all surfaces. See the press release at http://www.qinetiq.com/home/newsroom/news_releases_homepage/2004/2nd_quarter/_Your_captain_speaking QinetiQ_makes_aircraft_cabin_announcements_clearer_and_crisper.html (last viewed on Sept. 15,2007).

8. See, for example, http://www.muzakoftoledo.com/index.html.

9. The Taylorist Hawthorne effect described the effect of an environmental change in a work setting to stimulate a short-term increase of workers’ productivity due to the feeling that management was changing or monitoring it. The effect was named after productivity experiments conducted in the 1920s on telephone factory workers at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Plant in Chicago.

10. William James argued that we feel emotions due to a change in the physiological state of our bodies, as opposed to the inverse. This idea, developed in parallel by Carl Lange, supported the idea that by affecting the body physiologically, background music could assist in keeping workers calm, and so make them more emotionally stable during the trials of war. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1890). The James-Lange theory of emotion contrasts with the more neurally mediated one developed by Walter Canon in “The James-Lange Theory of Emotion: A Critical Examination and an Alternative Theory,” American journal of Psychology 39 (1927): 106-124.

11. Sumrell and Varnelis, Blue Monday, p. 126.

12. Michael Peters quoted in C. Dowdy, “Sonic Mnemonic,” Financial Time, January 30, 2001, IT Creative Business Section, p. 7,

13. See James J. Kellaris, “Dissecting Earworms: Further Evidence on the ‘Song-Stuck-in-Your-Head’ Phenomenon,” in Proceedings of the Society for Consumer Psychology, ed. Christine Page and Steve Posavac ((New Orleans: American Psychological Society, 2003), pp. 220-222.

14. The contagiousness of these audio viruses operates on a mass scale compared with the rarefied domains of sound art and generative or algorithmic sound design, which tend to still assume an ambient aesthetic. We can only speculative on their convergence.

15. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), p. 143.

16. See “When Branding Works” at http://www.dunningsprague.com/articles/branding.htm (last viewed February 25,2006).

17. A sonic logo, or aural trademark is a small nugget of sound lasting between 2.5 and 4 seconds. Sonic brands tend to be modular and fit into “templates” that dictate where to position a sonic logo or where to use a voice over. Into the concentrated sonic logo is nested what are known as earcons (a sonic version of an icon), which may be used for particular buttons on, for example, a brand’s Web site. The sonic logo can be elaborated into a complete piece of music. Sonic branding also issues a set of protocols for engineering the voice, known as “speech fonts,” which are algorithms for selecting the right voices for brand communications.

Chapter 28

1. E. Gobé, Emotional Branding (Oxford: Windsor Books, 2003), p. 71.

2. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), p. 180.

3. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone, 1991), p. 57.

4. Ibid., p. 60.

5. Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), p. 21.

6. Ibid., p. 85.

7. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 192.

8. Ibid., p. 186.

9. Ibid., p. 188.

10. Ibid., p. 215.

Chapter 29

1. Barbara Browning’s Infectious Rhythms, while limited in its representational methodology, maps the symbiotic relationship between migration and the virulent spread of the AIDS virus through the African Diaspora. The text issues a useful cautionary note to an audio virology regarding the racialized connotations of virological discourse. While this book acknowledges such dangers, it is careful to investigate the sense in which we can talk about contagious cultural processes underneath the level of representations, significations, and unproblematized identities caught in the essentialist- antiessentialist binary that Gilroy’s Black Atlantic dismantles.

2. In his “2 Steps Back” article in The Wire, 166 (1997) Simon Reynolds noted how a number of breakbeat scientists understood their production processes as a sonic parallel to “gene splicers designing viral pathogens for biological warfare.”

3. See the sleeve notes of Interstellar Fugitives.

4. See Frank Gunderson “Applying Memetics to the Historical Understanding of the African Diasporan Music Culture of North America,” 2001, http://www.ohiou.edu/aas/blackpraxis/articles/frankhtml.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 002.

8. Kodwo Eshun and Edward George, “Ghostlines: Migration, Morphology, Mutations,” in Sonic Process (Barcelona: Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003).

9. Steve Barrow, “Version Therapy,” Wire, no. 132 (February 1995): 28-31.

10. On the mutations of the dub virus connecting the dub scientists of Kingston to early 1980s post-punk, Berlin dub techno and UK jungleism see Eshun and George, “Ghostlines.”

11. See the sleeve notes to Kevin Martin’s Macro Dub Infection.

12. From “Roots in the Music” on Prezident Brown—CD 2—Prezident Selections.

13. Gunderson, “Applying Memetics.”

14. Formerly archived at http://www.hyperdub.com/softwar/ukgarage.cfm (2002).

15. Ian Penman, “KLANG! Garvey’s Ghost Meets Heidegger’s Geist,” in Experiencing the Soundtrack: Cinesonic 3, ed. P. Brophy (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001), p. 107.

16. “Dub’s sub-sonic echo is no mere FX—it is the effect proper of a certain subjective view of the world: the dark sonic mirror reflection of Rasta’s phantasmal worldview Dub versions are the shavings of(f) the certainty of (Western) technology as the unmediated reproduction of a singer’s performance. Dub was a breakthrough because the seam of its recording was turned inside out for us to hear and exult in. We had previously been used to the ‘re’ recording being repressed, recessed, as through it really were just a re-presentation of something that already existed in its own right. Dub messes big time with such notions of uncorrupted temporality. Wearing a dubble face, neither future nor past, dub is simultaneously a past and future trace: of music as both memory or futurity, authentic emotion and technological pragmatism. Dub’s tricknology is a form of magic which does indeed make people disappear, leaving behind only their context, their trace, their outline (Where does the singer’s voice go when it is erased from the dub track?) It makes of the voice not a self-possession but a dispossession—a ‘re’ possession by the studio, detoured through the hidden circuits of the recording console.” I. Penman, “Black Secret Tricknology,” Wire, no. 133 (March 1995). Later, Penman takes his dub theory further: “We inhabit a dub world now ... a dub economy: a writing of echoes, alternative versions, negative traces . .. displacement and omission, quotation and stress; what have previously been considered the mere framing devices of Production and Mix become, through dub, the means for unsettling new emphases. Dub breaks with tradition. Dub breaks—intentionally, internally, massively—the tradition of Tradition. Dub wreaks havoc, multiplying echoes.. .. Layered ambivalence of its echowerk: how can we set store by any memorial overview once we know a ghost is loose in our ears?... Double economy of dub: agonal reverberation of that which opens><closes according to its phantasmal logic. Dub as simultaneously either-or, neither-nor; a double enunciation which unsettles such implicit assumptions as: local><universal; sacred><secular; black><white; urban><pastoral; archaic><modern; analogue><digital; Muzak><wakeup call; natural><artificial; roots><technology; homeland><exile.” Ibid., p. 107.

17. Ibid., pp. 106-107.

18. Peter Manuel and Wayne Marshall, “The Riddim Method: Aesthetics, Practice, and Ownership in Jamaican Dancehall,” Popular Music 25, no. 3 (2006).

19. Digital music was being produced in Jamaica from the early 1980s onward (e.g., Prince Jazzbo productions and Horace Ferguson’s Sensi Addict).

20. A short list of the viral spread of the amen funk break as DNA of hip-hop and jungle may track the migration of this drum pattern from the flip side to the Winstons’ 1969 top 10 soul hit “Color Him Father” into turbulent breakbeat science of producers like Remarc via the likes of 2 Live Crews “Feel Alright Yall,” 3rd Bass’s “Wordz of Wisdom,” 4 Hero’s “Escape That,” Amon Tobin’s “Nightlife,” Aphex Twin’s “Boy/Girl Song,” Atari Teenage Riot’s “Burn Berlin Burn,” Brand Nubian’s “The Godz Must Be Crazy,” Deee-Lite’s “Come on In, the Dreams Are Fine,” Dillinja’s “The Angels Fell,” Eric B and Rakim’s “Casualties of War,” Funky Technicians’s “Airtight,” Heavy D’s “Flexin,” Heavy D’s “MC Heavy D!” Heavy D’s “Let It Flow,” Heavyweight’s “Oh Gosh,” J. Majik’s “Arabian Nights,” J. Majik’s “Your Sound,” Lemon D’s “This Is Los Angeles,” Level Vibes’s “Beauty and the Beast,” Lifer’s Group’s “Jack U. Back (So You Wanna Be a Gangsta),” Ltj Bukem’s “Music,” Mantronix’s “King of the Beats,” Movement Ex’s “KK Punani,” Nice and Smooth’s “Dope Not Hype,” NWAs “Straight Outta Compton,” and Schoolly D’s “How a Black Man Feels,” http://hubpagesxom/hub/Samples-and-Breakbeats-A-Funky-Soul-DJ-Demonstration-Video-Part-9.

21. See Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (London: Picador), p. xviii.

Chapter 30

1. Simon Reynolds, “Back to the Roots,” Wire, no. 1999 (September 2000): 35. It is crucial that the polemical context of the Reynolds argument be recognized, especially since a large part of his own oeuvre in the past fifteen years has been devoted to the rapture of dancer, producer, DJ-centered worlds of electronic dance music in which a parallel denigration of human musician and singers occurs. On the other hand, the article is also characteristic of another of Reynolds’s traits, a return to his own specific brand of inverse sono-political correctness, which tends to be attached to various combinations of black, proletarian, and femininist movements within music, sometimes at the expense of and sometimes coupled to futurism. There is therefore a fascinating tension between tendencies in Reynolds’s writing and that of Eshun.

2. Ibid., p. 36.

3. Ibid.

4. Actually this is quite a bizarre argument considering that the bulk of the reception of reggae music in the Western world had revolved around biographies of Bob Marley and the intersection of his biographies with the overt politics of his music. It can only be assumed that Reynolds, as is his tendency, was aiming the argument particularly at the theoretically informed music journalism typical of Wire-related theorists such as David Toop and Kodwo Eshun, and the tendency of that magazine to focus on dub over roots reggae. Interestingly, this argument has much broader resonances, as Reynolds points out later in the article, as it extends to a general preference for instrumental over vocal music in the sound system diaspora, from dub over reggae, to drum’n’bass over jungle, dubstep over vocal 2step and grime. A repeated theme in Reynolds’s work seems to hang around an observation that there is a racialized politics of taste involved in the Western world’s reception of the musical black voice. In an earlier essay, I sought to move beyond the opposition between Reynolds’s emphases and those of Afrofuturism. See S. Goodman, “Speed Tribes: Netwar, Affective Hacking and the Audio-Social,” in Cultural Hacking, ed. F. Liebl (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2004).

5. Such an attempt in fact seems to encapsulate the multiplicity of voices contained under the umbrella of Afrofuturism, but particularly draws attention to the singularity of perspective of Kodwo Eshun’s writings and what differentiates his conceptualizations from, in particular, Afrrican American cultural studies, from Weheliye to Nelson, but also the Afrofuturism of Paul Miller/DJ Spooky. It could be argued that U.S. Afrofuturism is shaped by a very peculiar nexus of black urban experience that is significantly divergent from that of the U.K. In musical terms, it would seem that part of this divergence revolves around the sonic singularity in the U.K., the event of jungle/drum’n’bass in the mid-1990s that seemed to catalyze one of the core innovations of Eshun’s text, the futurerhythmachine.

6. A. Weheliye, “Feenin: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music,” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002), and Phonographies: Grooves in Afro-Sonic Modernity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

7. F. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 49).

8. Ibid., p. 63.

9. Weheliye, “Feenin,” 38.

10. Ibid., p. 22.

11. Weheliye also interestingly points to the “spirituals” as weapons for both white and black abolitionists in a sonic war against American slavery.

12. Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet, 1998), pp. 192-193.

13. Weheliye, “Feenin,” p. 30.

14. Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 6.

15. Kodwo Eshun, “The Kinematic Pneumacosm of Hype Williams: The Rhythm of Vision Is a Dancer,” in Cinesonic 3: Experiencing the Soundtrack, ed. P. Broophy (Sidney: AFTRS Publications, 2001), pp. 51-58.

16. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: the New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003).

17. Weheliye, “Feenin,” p. 30.

18. Reynolds, “Back to the Roots,” p. 36.

Chapter 31

1. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso Press, 2005).

2. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Picador, 1998), p. 422.

3. M. Davis, “Planet of Slums,” New Left Review 26 March-April 2004), http://ne wleftreview org/A2496.

4. Ibid.

5. H. DeSoto, The Mystery of Capital (New’York: Bantam Press, 2000).

6. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).

7. Davis, “Planet of Slums,” p. 14.

8. The early funk parties were know as baile funk de briga, in other words, fighting funk dances. As Neate and Platt describe, “In the late 1990s, baile funk was particularly notorious for outbreaks of violence between rival gangs. These were no typical brawls, however, but ritualized fights that were carefully orchestrated by the promoters using hired security to separate the different galeras into two sides.... The DJ would put on different tracks to stoke up the atmosphere and, with each track he played, the atmosphere got a little more rowdy. Then fighting would break out, with the guys at the front punching and kicking the hell out of each other. The security guards would let this go ahead but then, at a certain point, they’d hit us with truncheons to get us to stop. All the funeiros would obey.” P. Neate and D. Platt, Culture Is Our Weapon: Afroreggae in the Favelas of Rio (London: Latin American Bureau, 2007), p. 53.

Robert Neuwirth describes his visit to a typical funk party in Rio de Janeiro: “At the end of my first day in Ricinha, Paul Sneed, who brought me into the community and lived in the flat next door to mine, took me down the hill to the baile funk: an all-night dance party. Many favelas have them, usually on the weekends. Rocinha’s baile took place every Friday night in the Valao. We took a series of becos that brought us to the bottom of the hill in what seemed to me to be record time. The becos were quite active and several bars—little more than counters set into the ground floor of buildings, with stools set up on the lip of the pathway—were hopping. In the valao, a disc jockey had set up a wall of 50 speaker boxes alongside the 10 foot wide channel of open sewage that ran down the neighbourhood’s main drag and that gave the area its name. He was spinning aggressive, assault-your-ears rap and hip hop. Although it was past midnight, it was still early for the baile. Hundreds of people were milling about. Three girls who must have been 13 or 14 were doing synchronized dance steps at one end of the line of speakers. They had synchronized their outfits, too: white hotpants and glittery, gold strapless tube tops. Some younger boys had perched inside the speaker boxes and were simply sitting there, banging to the beat, and no doubt, damaging their ear drums. More of the stores were open. And why not: it was too loud to sleep and the party would continue until dawn. Far better to get some money out of the deal. Competing with the free baile was a nightclub. Emocoes, located in a Spartan cement structure along the Estra da Gavea that seemed like it might have been built as a parking garage. There, the loud rap sounds echoed off the concrete. Entry was by paid admission—R$5 (about $2)- and although women were let in with no trouble, any man entering was frisked by the sturdy bouncers. The frisk finished with a quick squeeze of the testicles, to ensure no one had a concealed weapon. It was crowded and humid inside. People pressed forward to dance or hung at the back, where there was a makeshift bar. Here caipirinhas sold for less than a buck, and there seemed to be no check at all on underage drinking. Rocinha has lots of these kinds of parties, they were magnets for thousands of teenagers who lived in the community. Twice a month, Beer Pizza sponsored a massive free dance party.... All across the favelas, few people listened to the music that outsiders think of as Brazilian. Everyone knows the samba, bossa nova, and Musica Popular Brasileira (MPB) hits. They’re the soundtrack of the telenovelas—TV soap operas- and the ever-present background of everyday life. But the mass of favela dwellers have embraced hardcore rap and funk (what Brazilians call funk is akin to what Americans know as hip hop) as their emblematic sound. This music can be raunchier than the West Coast variety that carries parental advisory labels in the US, and is often blasting from various places in the favela at incredibly high volume.” Shadow Cities (London: Routledge), pp. 38-39.

9. Matt Ingram, blog post, 27/06/2004 at http://www.woebot.com/movabletype/archives/000850.html.

10. Simon Reynolds, “Piracy Funds What?” Village Voice, February 15,2005, http://www.villagevoice.com/music/0508,reynolds,61282,22.html.

11. It is useful here to bear in mind the Afrofuturist critique of the stereotyped notion of black music that ties it rigidly to the “street,” the “ghetto,” and superficial notions of “realism.”

12. Neate and Platt, Culture Is Our Weapon, p. 48.

13. Ibid., p. 51.

14. Ibid., p. 52. They further note that “there is also a popular sub-genre of the music called funk probido or proidbiao—prohibited funk—that eulogises the drug factions, violence and criminality in general” and in which rappers will “denigrate the police and promote a particular faction” (pp. 52-53).

15. “Funk could be the colour of the city, the biggest generator of employment. It would achieve much more than the government does with all its endless projects, projects and more projects. Afroreggae works and is something that was born independently. With the mass movement behind it, if funk got organized, set up an NGO and took action inside the community, it would be the most powerful NGO in Rio.” Ibid., pp. 55.

Chapter 32

1. Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash (New York: Picador, 1998), p. 231.

2. M. Fuller, Media Ecologies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005),, p. 50.

3. See http://www.ofcom.org.Uk/media/news/2005/ll/illegal#content for recent antiviral activities.

4. See Govil in the Sarai Reader, 2004, p. 378, available at www.sarai.net.

5. G. Bachelard, “Reverie and Radio,” in Radiotexte, ed. N. Strauss (New York: Semio-texte,1993),p. 219.

6. Fuller, Media Ecologies, pp. 29-31.

7. A key site of pirate listening is often in low-frequency intensified car sound stereos. See Brandon LaBelle, “Pump Up the Bass—Rhythm, Cars, and Auditory Scaffolding,” Senses and Society 3, no. 2 (2008): 187-204.

8. B. Sterling, “The Sham Economy,” Wired 13 (March 2003).

9. Reynolds, Energy Flash, p. 230.

10. In the U.K., an interesting case study is the publicly funded digital channel BBClextra (http://www.bbc.co.uk/lextra) in which, simultaneously, underground music culture’s are incorporated into/infect the body of state-sponsored media. Contemporary capitalism is driven by the very tension between formal licensing structures and informal pirate radio markets.

11. M. Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 2008).

12. “Pirates have been the architects of new societies for centuries: they have established new genres of film and music and created new types of media, often operating anonymously and always—initially at least—outside the law. They overthrow governments, birth new industries, and win wars. Pirates create positive social and economic changes, and understanding piracy today is more important than ever, because now that we can all copy and broadcast whatever we want, we can all become pirates.” Ibid., p. 35.

13. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

14. Ibid., pp. 46-47. “When push comes to shove, copyrights PREVENT a lot of new culture, and patents PREVENT a lot of innovation” (p. 56). As Mason continues, “En-trepreneurs look for gaps in the market. Pirates look for gaps outside the market . . . pirates have proved that just because the market won’t do something, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.... Once pirates find a space the market has ignored, they park a new vehicle in it and begin transmitting. Sometimes this new vehicle becomes more important.... When pirates do something valuable in society, citizens support them, discussion starts, and laws change” (p. 66). Mason continues: “People, firms and governments are being forced to do the right thing by a new breed of rebels using a cutthroat style of competition, which combines both their self-interest and the good of the community” (p. 239). And yet, he argues, they “are taking over the good ship capitalism, but they’re not here to sink it. Instead they will plug the holes, keep it afloat, and propel it forward” (p. 239). So, for Mason, “Punk capitalism isn’t about big government or big markets but about a new breed of incredibly efficient networks. This is not digital communism, this isn’t central planning. It is quite possibly the opposite: a new kind of decentralized democracy made possible by changes in technology. Piracy isn’t just another business model, its one of the greatest business models we have.... Acting like a pirate—taking value from the market and giving it back to the community” (p. 240). Instead, he concludes, piracy “transforms the markets it operates in changing the way distribution works and forcing companies to be more competitive and innovative. Pirates don’t just defend the public domain from corporate control; they also force big business and government to deliver what we want, when we want it” (p. 38). The ambivalence of Mason’s argument should now be clear: what was radical about youth culture becomes taught in business schools as sensible strategy, and the loop between underground cultural innovation and mass marketing tightens and tightens to the point where capitalism begins to preempt innovation via cool hunters and viral branding.

Chapter 33

1. “The Mosquito has given us excellent results. We sited the equipment in the Coach parking section of one of our Multi-Storey car parks. A local hotelier has continually complained over a period of at least two years about the constant problems of youths on skateboards, BMX bikes etc. in this area. We used to have to attend site at least six times a day during the school holidays. We even went to the extent of bringing in a private security firm to permanently cover the evenings and holiday afternoons, however due to budget restrictions this has now been ceased. The hotelier went as far as reporting us to the HSE due to the risk of injury to the youths from their behaviour. As you can imagine, this has cost us tens of thousands of pounds over the last two years in staffing and remedial works to move on the youths.... Since installing the Mosquito, the reduction in the number of incidents reported to us has dramatically reduced. We even received an email from our number one complainant stating that he had experienced the quietist holiday period ever. The only problem is that the youths have moved on and are now causing trouble elsewhere! Make arrangements for its return, never. Just send me an invoice for this one and hopefully, next financial year, I shall be placing orders for additional units.” Rob Harmes, senior parking operations inspector, Mosquito press release. http://www xompoundsecurity.co.uk/.

2. Tsutomu Oohashi et al., “Inaudible High Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Effect,” Journal of Neurophysiology 83 (2000): 3548-3558.

3. Super Audio format CDs and DVD audio have frequency ranges that go up to 100 and 96 kilohertz, respectively.

4. Alpha waves are electromagnetic oscillations in the frequency range of 8 to 12 hertz arising from rhythmic electrical pattern in the human brain.

5. S. Treister, Hexen 2039: New Military Occult Technologies for Psychological Warfare (London: Black Dog, 2006). Treister’s earlier work was situated as part of a loose collection of artists referred to, particularly in the mid-1990s, as cyberfeminist, (re-)installing women, or femininity as protagonist within cybernetic culture. See, for example, Jyanni Steffensen, “Doing It Digitally: Rosalind Brodsky and the Art of Virtual Female Subjectivity,” pp. 209-233, in Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture, ed. M. Flanagan and Austin Booth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). Steffensen’s cyberfeminist and psychoanalytic reading analyzes Treister’s earlier project, No Other Symptoms: Time Travelling, with Rosalind Brodsky in which Brodsky travels back in time to try to save her parents from the Holocaust.

6. U.S. patent 5,159,703.

7. Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (New York: Picador, 2004), p. 191.

8. The two best-known implementations of directional ultrasound technology are known as the Audio Spotlight made by the Holosonic Research Labs and the Hypersonic Sound Device made by American Technology Corporation, better know for supplying long-range acoustic devices to the U.S. military for use in Iraq and New Orleans. For more technical information on how directional audio works, see http://www.holosonics.com/technology.html. Also see Marshall Sella, “The Sound of Things to Come,” March 23, 2003, http://querynytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E6D91731F930A15750C0A9659C8B63.

9. J. G. Ballard, “The Sound Sweep,” in The Voices of Time (London: Orion, 1991), pp. 51-52.

10. On the unsound spectrum, silent discos can be contrasted to deaf discos that take place in clubs with sound systems that produce strong, low frequencies so that the music is inaudible to the dancers, but its subsonic rhythms are felt.

11. M. Fuller, Media Ecologies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 40-41.

12. A. Dunne, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience and Critical Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), p. 102.

13. Ibid., p. 105.

Chapter 34

1. We can find this strand of thought passing through the acoustic ecology movement, particularly Shaffer and Barry Truax, who both tend to idealize nature, through to Vi-rilio’s complaints against the “silencing of silence” through the sonification of art, through to Stuart Sim’s frankly unhinged Manifesto for Silence, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

2. The line passes from the Italian futurists’ manifesto for noise in the Art of Noises through to Attali and recent texts by for example. It is interesting to note also that Cage stands at the crossroads of both the politics of noise and silence.

3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

4. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript to Societies of Control,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).