Sonic Warfare
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"By insisting on the primacy of vibration in the nexus of sound, affect, and power, Sonic Warfare charts a transdisciplinary micropolitics of frequency that breaks with the orthodoxies of phenomenology and cultural studies and triumphantly succeeds in immersing us in the present of viral capitalism, pirate media, and asymmetric warfare. This book is rigorous, affirmative, sober, and pitiless: in its ambition, its purpose and its passion, it is nothing short of a breakthrough for contemporary sonic thought."--Kodwo Eshun, Course Director of MA Aural and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
Product Description
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread--to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the "psychoacoustic correction" aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or "sound bombs") over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard--the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
... I'm sorry but if I wanted to read someone's poorly written and obviously indulged PhD paper there are more than enough in an average university library... The only interesting thing about it is that as you read the piece individual works and phrases make sense and cohere but appear to have little relevance to what is said on either side of them... if you approach it as abstract poetry (the academic equivalent of the music of Adolf Wölfli) then it is a pleasant distraction... otherwise it just pretentious gibberish...
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I'm trying desperately hard to like this but failing. If you're expecting an explanation of crowd control or mood-altering frequency generation, well, it's in there somewhere, but buried beneath layers of semi-impenetrable high-brow academic language and politico posturing which dazzles at first but then quickly annoys. I found Richard Wiseman's work on infrasonics in Quirkology, and Mythbusters' investigation of the brown note, much more satisfying.
12 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Steve Goodman's thesis, developed from his PhD, is published here by MIT Press presumably seeking to profit from the author's celebrity status in these times of financial peril.
Though Goodman is keen to underline a clear distinction between his DJ work as Kode9 and his 'serious' work here, the text betrays a pronounced immaturity in its relentless use of buzzwords, obsession with the empowering/penetrative/masculine aspects of sound (bass; how low can one go?), and hypocritical anti-bourgeois posturings that paradoxically thrive in the institution of high culture (and, of course, sell). Employing a kind of stilted erudition often used to impress girls in university classes, one is led to suspect Goodman is overcompensating in his clinging to (faddish) theoreticians Deleuze and Guattari to offset the associated militant unphilosophicalness of his dubstep misbehaviour (born of those testicle-orientated genres snatched out the hands of their culturally deprived progenitors by moneyed trustafarians, anxious to absorb the street-cred [inverting the dread - unfair, surely?]). In the light of all this, the passages critical of capitalism read discordantly.
'Sonic Warfare' wallows in gloom and pessimism, yet beneath all the gloom and referential/deferential swaddling one feels an inkling that there may be a potentially fierce metaphysician (or even a sonic occultist?) with a maverick vision at work, constrained by certain PhD criteria.
Though Goodman is keen to underline a clear distinction between his DJ work as Kode9 and his 'serious' work here, the text betrays a pronounced immaturity in its relentless use of buzzwords, obsession with the empowering/penetrative/masculine aspects of sound (bass; how low can one go?), and hypocritical anti-bourgeois posturings that paradoxically thrive in the institution of high culture (and, of course, sell). Employing a kind of stilted erudition often used to impress girls in university classes, one is led to suspect Goodman is overcompensating in his clinging to (faddish) theoreticians Deleuze and Guattari to offset the associated militant unphilosophicalness of his dubstep misbehaviour (born of those testicle-orientated genres snatched out the hands of their culturally deprived progenitors by moneyed trustafarians, anxious to absorb the street-cred [inverting the dread - unfair, surely?]). In the light of all this, the passages critical of capitalism read discordantly.
'Sonic Warfare' wallows in gloom and pessimism, yet beneath all the gloom and referential/deferential swaddling one feels an inkling that there may be a potentially fierce metaphysician (or even a sonic occultist?) with a maverick vision at work, constrained by certain PhD criteria.
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