4th Generational Warfare: the Use of Waveforms as Weapons by Government
www.nimrodderosario.com
Bruno Cariou
note: the following is translated from the original French via DeepL machine translation software
Sonic, infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies: the use of waveforms as weapons, devices for psychological manipulation and instruments of physiological influence by industrial organisations, the entertainment industry and military organisations
The ear does not favour any particular "point of view". We are enveloped by sound. It forms a
transparent web around us. We say: "Music fills the air". We never say:
"Music fills a particular segment of the air."
We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to concentrate. Sounds come "from above
"We can't mute the sound automatically. We can't mute automatically. We simply don't have
earmuffs. Where a visual space is an organised continuum of a uniform and connected kind, the
The world of the ear is a world of simultaneous relationships.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding the Media
For once, we will leave it to the author, Director of the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester
Metropolitan University, to present his own text, a thesis submitted in 2011 to Liverpool John Moores
University for the degree of Professor of Philosophy, not without first attempting to identify, or, to use a
term that recurs frequently in the language he has forged for himself to meet the needs of the
investigation he is conducting into the limits of perception, "... the limits of perception".
locate" the character, by briefly tracing his or her current career.
Toby Heys is involved in a dozen projects, both subsidised and unsubsidised. Let's take a look at six of them.
"AUDIENCE WITH A HERO: INNOVATE UK AUDIENCES OF THE FUTURE", which benefited from a
grant of £1 million, aims to "use virtual reality to develop and test new production processes inspired by
history, to enable the public to
meet a 'hero' in virtual space, who will tell his or her personal story and answer questions in real
time. (The project) is based on a National Holocaust Center programme that allows the public to
speak with a virtual witness to the Holocaust".
"LIKELY STORIES: AHRC FUNDED STUDENTSHIP" responds to a lack of research on the use of machine
learning to understand the aesthetics of persuasion in
audiovisual narratives in the short videos that are commonplace in social media, particularly where
marginalised audiences are concerned".
v UNHEALTHY BIAS: WELLCOME TRUST SEED FUND PROJECT " " uses media theory and its
methods for informing machine learning approaches to the effectiveness of public health videos put
online by the NHS for South Asian audiences
".
"MOOD/MUSIC: HELPING YOUNG CARERS COPE WITH LONELINESS" is an artistic project (...) that seeks to
get a small group of young carers to use artificial intelligence to co-create emotion-sensing muscial tools
that express their experiences as a group and as individuals.
"A HISTORY OF ACOUSTIC SURVEILLANCE: COLLABORATION WITH THE DIGITAL STORYTELLING LAB" is aimed at
to "develop an interactive experience on acoustic surveillance and spying in the context of AIactivated
listening devices that are ubiquitous in digital phones and homes".
"AUDINT-UNSOUND-UNDEAD" is "a research unit that studies how frequencies
Ultrasonic, sonic and infrasonic sounds are used to demarcate territory in the soundscape and how their
deployment in war and civil war modulates psychological, physiological and architectural states".
The second member of AUDINT (AUDIO INTELLIGENCE) is Steve Goodman, Senior Lecturer in
Music Culture at the School of Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London,
member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and founder of the Hyperdub label.
Not without humour, the only two current members of AUDINT claim that this research unit was
created in 1945 by former members of the "Ghost Army", the US army unit responsible f o r
conducting sonic psychological warfare operations against German troops at the end of the Second
World War.
Second World War (a).
AUDINT releases "encrypted" records, has its own record label, puts on concerts and videos, holds
exhibitions and art installations, gives lectures and maintains a website.
computer software, etc., all forms of techno-cultural production that "bring together a
a blend of whispers and non-sounds in an audible journey that links the underground groove of the
Large Hadron Collider to the vaults of the Bank of Hell (c); connects the Dead Record Network (d) to
the Phantom Hailer (e); and traces the evolution of the Wandering Soul Tapes (f) into the viral
dynamics of the
spectral software (spectrumware) called IREX2 (g).
In other words, AUDINT investigates the ways in which "ultrasonic, sonic and infrasonic frequencies
are used to demarcate territory in the soundscape and the ways in which their civil and warlike
(martial) deployments modulate psychological, physiological and architectural states" (h). This
exploration led to the publication of an anthology entitled Unsound: Undead (Urbanomic, 2019) (i),
from which the following is an extract of the introduction: "Since 2007, popular culture has been
marked by the phenomenon of dead rap and rock stars being revived by holographic technology.
From Elvis to Tupac, these examples are emblematic of a necromantic culture.
It is an emerging art form that problematises the taken-for-granted idea that artists shouldn't stop
breathing, and thus disrupts the relationship between sound/music and life. This technology-induced
renaissance raises a series of intriguing questions, informed by theories of the post- and the inhumanism,
concerning artificiality, mortality and virtuality (what we call the living dead). High-frequency
crowd-control systems and audio technology
From ultrasonic directional sensors to haptic feedback devices using vibrations in t h e context of Virtual
Reality, our understanding of sound is constantly being restructured. These extensions o f hearing to the
imperceptible and the not-yet-audible (what we call the Unsound), and their relation to the Undead, delimit
the domain of the contributions (to this book). At the end of
On this account, the book examines what it is about the sonic that has provided cultures throughout
history with channels to the beyond.
Whether or not sound, infrasound and ultrasound - a hypothesis we took up in the second part of
https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2019/04/25/marshall-mcluhan/ - offer the possibility,
particularly when produced by electricity, of access to transmission zones between the realms of the
living and the dead, the fact is that Heys is not the only one to believe this, nor to be experimenting in
this direction, since what he calls the 'military-industrial complex' and the 'military-recreational
complex' are conducting research in this field which, in turn, could lead to the creation of a new world.
have led to the development and construction of acoustic, sound-wave, infrasonic or ultrasonic
weapons whose power to bring the living closer to the dead is so great that some are capable of
killing and others of manipulating crowds and individuals.
The scarcity of works published in French on acoustic weapons (j), fully justifies, despite everything (in
particular, the samsaric and even demonic nature of the conceptual weapon, called 'transmitterbody',
which the author proposes to build and use in order to retaliate against sonic, ultrasonic and
infrasonic attacks), the publication of his investigation. It would be an understatement to say that, like
all 'transcendental hysterics', an expression coined by Evola to designate those who have 'chosen' to
be born into an era as chaotic as ours, to indulge in and revel in an external chaos that is merely a
reflection of their massive inner chaos, - It would be an understatement to say that the author is on
the same wavelength as his time, and that he is participating in the blindness of the human material
that is massing there, as shown by his involvement in the development and application of sub-human
technologies such as Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, yet, most certainly in
because of the predominance of "vertical heredity" over "horizontal heredity", lucidity o u t w e i g h s
"bull-faced" blindness, making it capable of shedding light on shadowy areas
This is not only true for the most lucid of those who continue to insist on seeing, understanding and
explaining the world through the sole prism(s) of facts, causes and actors that belong to the two
superficial dimensions of time and space: never has the occult war raged so fiercely as it has since the
introduction and use of the 'new technologies' on a planetary scale - but also to those who, while
capable of reducing historical events to their hidden causes, in the case of those that are of a
'political' or 'social' nature, are able to see, understand and explain the world through the prism(s) of
facts, causes and actors that belong to the two superficial dimensions of time and space.
political, cultural, economic or religious, lack the necessary knowledge of information and
communication technologies to understand and circumscribe those that fall within the remit of the
European Union.
this increasingly pervasive technology and, consequently, to gain an overview of the increasingly
complex and virtual processes that are intertwining to give a truly monstrous and even, let's say it again,
trisomic character to the conditions of today's world and of the future.
the corresponding state of existence.
The author is an insider.
The introduction, the literature review and the methodological section, in which the author
exposes, or rather, to use a term dear to him, 'composes' his philosophy, which is neither a system nor
even a doctrine in the strict sense of the word, are published to a certain extent to enable readers who
so wish to familiarise themselves with the rather unique terminology (here, all terms that have a
scientific and technical meaning - whether they relate to music, physiology, surgery, geophysics,
architecture, electro-acoustics or telecommunications - must first be understood in this sense) and no
less personal style of the author. If this is not the case, you can skip to the first chapter.
This study is a trans-disciplinary and trans-historical investigation into the civilian and military contexts in
which loudspeaker systems have been used by the military-industrial complex and the militaryindustrial
complex.
military-entertainment to exert pressure on mass social groupings and individual bodies. Inspired by
authors such as the historian and sociologist Michel Foucault, the economist Jacques Attali, the
philosopher Michel Serres, the political geographer and urban planner Edward
Soja, musician and sound theorist Steve Goodman and cultural theorist and urban planner Paul
Virilio, this study orchestrates his arguments by drawing on a wide range of texts. By presenting viral
theory in new forms that resonate with the architectural, neurological and political domains, this
research provides a new and original analysis of the composition of wave geography. Ultimately, this
study investigates how the use of
past and present of sound, infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies as weapons and devices for
The use of psychological manipulation and instruments of physiological influence by military,
entertainment, civil and industrial organisations anticipates future techniques of socio-spatialised
organisation. In the first chapter, it is argued that, since the appearance of wired radio loudspeaker
systems in American factories in 1922, the development of sound strategies based primarily on
the orchestration of architectural spatiality, the cycles of repetition and the enveloping dynamics of
ambiophony can be attributed to the practice of sonic torture at Guantanamo Bay during the
first decade of the 21st century. This argument is developed in the second chapter through
an exploration of the FBI's use of surround sound techniques during the siege of Waco. In the third
chapter, it is further argued that the acoustic techniques used in the torture cells at Guantanamo
represent the final modality and logical conclusion of the
strategies that have been developed in civilian and military contexts over the last eighty years. In the
fourth chapter, the instrumentality of the loudspeaker system of the HSS ultra-directional sound
generators - commissioned after Guantanamo - comes to symbolise an epistemic shift in the
application of wave pressure; for the dynamics of directional ultrasound technology signal the
orchestration of a new set of relations
between the transmitter and the receiver, between the loudspeaker system and the architectural context,
and between the civilian environment and the wartime environment.
The study's final proposition is that wave mapping - a representation by
In order to achieve this, it is essential that the forms of recording, amplification and resistance be
composed and arranged in such a way as to make them coherent. In view of the new set of non-sound
policies announced by the HSS, this
he philosophy of frequency mapping will need to reassess the taxonomy and indexical nature of
spatial relationships. This discipline will be a wave psycho-geography, a frequency modality that
heuristically maps spatial concerns relating to the neural environment as well as to the surroundings
of the material and the built. As a field of research, it will have the ambitious task of exploring the
spatial, psychological, physiological, social, economic and
waveforms have on our subjectivity. Its methodology - as the structuring of this study suggests -
will be multidisciplinary and multichannel. It will create new forms of knowledge about LRADs,
iPods, Mosquitos, Intonarumori, megaphones and
Acoustic Sequential Arc Discharge Generators (see glossary) - meta-network of
loudspeakers through which the rhythms and cadences of power are transmitted, connected and
modulated.
This study begins its investigation into the orchestration and territorialisation of architectural
soundscapes by the military-industrial complex at the time when, in 1922, cable radio was introduced
into American factories to improve worker productivity rates. It then follows a line of deployments of
loudspeaker systems throughout the twentieth century, during which wave strategies were
implemented to reduce the number of bodies in spatially reduced circumstances - from the factory to
the barracks, via the cell. The break in this frequency trajectory of sound effects came after the
Guantanamo Bay detainees were subjected to sonic torture. After Guantanamo, there is no
architectural space smaller than a cell in which a loudspeaker system can be used, and it is not possible
to
channelling music for more violent purposes than causing the psychological and physical collapse of a
targeted body, as illustrated in the diagram below.
image
1. The radical change initiated by the military-recreative complex in the 20th century lies in the fact
that loudspeakers were replaced by ultrasonic loudspeakers and that, instead of being
arranged around the body, they are projected into the body or, to be more precise, into the skull.
Sound, infrasound and ultrasound
It is generally accepted that everything in the known world has a frequency of
resonance. The frequencies that form our perception of sound, namely those between 20 Hz and
20,000 Hz, are only a small part of the complete spectrum in which we exist. There are three frequency
ranges. Acoustic vibrations whose frequency is too low (20,000 hertz) to be perceived by the human
ear are called infrasound. As the waveforms that
are close to the ground, they are distinguished by their ability to travel long distances, through and
around objects, with minimal energy dissipation. Natural phenomena such as
earthquakes, tornadoes, waterfalls and volcanic eruptions generate
infrasound, which animals such as alligators, elephants and whales are thought to perceive and use to
communicate hundreds of kilometres away.
Acoustic vibration with a frequency in excess of 20,000 hertz is known as ultrasound. Because it is highly
directional and very easy to control, the ultrasound range is used in
medical imaging techniques such as ultrasound, to visualise internal organs and obtain information
about somatic structure. It has been used by the "Acoustic Squawk Box" (Rodwell, 1973) (a British
Army crowd dispersal unit first tested in 1973 in Northern Ireland) and as a non-lethal
weapon/communication tool by the US Army in the form of HyperSonic Sound® (also known as HSS)
technology (see glossary). The HSS system was developed by LRAD, which states on its website that it
"uses
ultrasonic energy to focus the sound of your choice on the intended listener and nowhere else".
Ultrasonic waveforms are also exploited by SOund NAvigation and Ranging. This system, known as
SONAR, was developed in 1918 and is now used by navies around the world. It is a technology that
uses the propagation of sound (mainly ultrasonic frequencies) for underwater navigation and
communications or for ship detection. Perceived by the whole body, these ranges of infrasound and
ultrasound - the acoustic vibrations that we cannot perceive - which are called non-sound or
Unsound sounds are imperceptible to the ear, which means that we are literally affected by this type
of frequency. The notion of non-sound differs from that of unsound in that it echoes the geographical
notion of non-place. It is therefore a sonic spatiality made up of transient behaviours and a negation
of emotional associations. The notion of
of soundlessness can be understood as a vibratory cosmology of affect and proactive embodied
cognition (1) at the periphery of perception (Steve Goodman discusses this in more detail in his Sonic
Warfare: Sound, Affect And The Ecology Of Fear [2009]). Excessive or targeted amplification of any of
these vibrations can cause unbearable nausea, relaxation of the body's organs and, ultimately, death.
Research into the effects that these three frequency bands (infrasound, sound and ultrasound) have on
humans was only institutionalised, in every sense of the word, at the beginning of the 20th century.
Officially, infrasound was only discovered in 1883 following the eruption of Krakatoa, which shows just
how new this field of study is.
While exploring the realm of sounds perceptible to the human ear, this study also investigates
ultrasonic and infrasonic phenomena, in order to detect the ways in which vibrations (a term that
refers to all frequencies in the infrasonic, sonic and
ultrasonic) have been used as tools and weapons to demarcate physiological, spatial and
psychological territories. This investigation calls into question the general cultural beliefs of the
the imperceptible phenomena and states of being and, by extension, underlines the importance of the
the importance of understanding marginal, liminal and peripheral phenomena. Adopting such a
position means asking phenomenological questions about the effects of frequencies on the somatic.
Taking this line of enquiry further will enable us to examine the following organisations
military, industrial and civil technologies that employ frequency strategies (see glossary) - space
technologies that reshape our understanding of the sound environment as audible. This study
proposes to publicly amplify and make manifest those technologies which, like HSS,
operate at the limits of what can be perceived by the senses, so that our undulatory bodies can
formulate their purpose, orientation and socio-spatial priorities.
Perception and the phenomenology of the wave body
The phenomenological terrain of the present study is briefly presented here to situate the
arguments, questions and theories relating to the sensory perception of vibrations. The aim of this
summary is to determine how, when and where we situate ourselves in frequency environments and at
understand the ways in which strategies orchestrated by the military-industrial and military-recreational
complexes have been (and will be) used to manipulate conscious hearing, somatic awareness and
spatial orientation. From a phenomenological point of view, human beings understand themselves.
their orientation and interactions in the world, as well as the world itself.
The senses themselves, through the perceptions transmitted to them by a number of organs and
physiological sensory systems. Of all the senses that perceive, transmit and process
information provided by the matrix of phenomena and stimuli in which man is immersed on a daily basis,
those which have historically been the subject of the greatest number of studies,
of books and experiments are sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. This traditional index of the sensory
network can be traced back to Aristotle, whose three books On the Soul constitute a "masterpiece" of
the senses.
meditation on the nature of living beings and on the theory of the five senses (Rorty and Nussbaum,
1992). While it is fair to say that this interactive set of perceptual systems provides us with the
ordinary information we need to feel that we are in control of our actions, this is not the case.
it is the information provided by sight that is privileged and that dominates the construction of our
understanding of the world. "Sight has been the privileged sense in philosophical discourse since the
Enlightenment," writes Sterne (2002: 3).
Historically ignored, sometimes marginalised and often poorly understood, other perceptive systems,
such as equilibrioception (the sense of balance), proprioception and kinaesthesia (the sense of touch),
are also important.
(sense of movement), nociception (sense of pain), magnetoception (sense of direction) and
thermoception (sense of temperature), have been recorded and studied more recently, and have not
been represented in the same way as sight. Nor have they received the attention they deserve, given
their importance in our knowledge of our states and actions. Because
that, culturally, the West tends to accept the belief that the known world can be
explained by the sense of sight, it has, to a large extent, annexed a cartography, a history and a language of
its own.
sociology of the perception, experience and interpretation of sounds, as the German sociologist Georg
Simmel noted at the beginning of the twentieth century (Frisby and Featherstone, 1997: 109-120).
Discourses
that define the spatiality of vibrations and make up acoustic psycho-geographies (see glossary)
continue to be discreetly excluded from our collective lexicon and practice
individual. This study engages in discourses that attempt to help re-establish a sensory balance
within the philosophy of Western culture; to question, analyse and challenge the disproportionate
importance accorded to ocular logic, with a view to elevating hearing and, in a
To a lesser extent, the touch in critical phenomenological indicators of agentivity, urban spatiality,
cultural chronology, collective psychological orientation and social relations.
Accordingly, the introduction to this study is based on the assertion that we need to locate and
amplify a body of lost sonic, ultrasonic and infrasonic knowledge before giving substance, in the
following chapters, to a wave discourse. Investigating this body of lost vibratory knowledge, which is
at once autonomised, alienated and networked by frequencies, requires us to sketch out its
characteristics sonically, in order to know what we are listening to and to understand the nature of
the body that will come into play in our subsequent explorations of the soundscape. Foucauldi's
notion of the 'oscillating subject' gives us, in relation to vibrations, an idea of this body of lost
frequency knowledge. Believing that the individual acts not simply as a passive receiver but also as an
active artisan - or transmitter - in a network of relations of power, Foucault asserts: "Power functions
in a network, and in this network individuals not only circulate, but they are always in a position to
undergo and also to exercise power; they are never the inert or consenting target of power, they are
always its relays" (Foucault, 1980: 98).
As it exists within a network of power relations, this vacillating subjectivity transmits,
transforms and receives information based on political micro-sound, noise and harmonies
emitted by the surrounding network of embodied loudspeakers inside which it is located.
It is within this distributed system of social influence that we are able to follow the evolution of
spatial negotiations, methods of psychological alienation and strategies of physiological manipulation
that simultaneously locate and displace our body of lost vibratory knowledge. Now that we have
discussed the capacities of our mute subjectivity and its possible localisation, we can say that it is the
body that will be studied, spatialised, historicised and ultimately enriched in the course of this study.
We can also give it a name: the antenna b o d y . The antenna body speaks to us of being-in-theworld
of vibrations. It is imbued with an agentivity that is lacking in contemporary mediatised bodies,
in subjects such as those theorised by McKenzie Wark, who, living in virtual geographies, 'no longer
have roots',
(because) "they have antennae (aerials)" (1994: xiv), thus constituting themselves as somatic models
that can only receive signals, communications and information. Conversely, the body as transmitter is
a useful subjectivity for this study, because it constitutes the mode of manifestation of
two states of being at once, those of reception and transmission, and in so doing reveals the power
inherent in the fact of being both, of being neither one nor the other, and of being more than the two
capacities that
are part of his identity. Rather than being statically positioned, he argues that we live in the grip of
Manichaean dualistic conceptions (see glossary) of good and evil, sound and silence, place and space;
and, therefore, that we are constantly between stations and constantly changing channels. The
modulating, transforming and propagating nature of the
The body as transmitter provides us with new ways of perceiving the social in wave space. And it is these
past displacements, spatialities and mutations that form the body of lost knowledge we need to
explore to determine whether they have already been perceived or observed. A
A broader interrogation of Western thought over the last two centuries - in the form of a frequency
identification parade - will help to carry out this investigation and at the same time create a
frequency episteme (see glossary).
The group of five thinkers who will provide us with insights into the identity of the lost body of
knowledge has been chosen for a number of reasons. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Adorno have all
were chosen for their respect for musical sound and for those who have the ability to channel it. All
these thinkers write about the mysteriously powerful effect that music has on its listeners, and thus
confer special status, even genius status, on those who are able to compose and perform music.
control these wave elements. In the scenarios presented by these three thinkers, the supposedly banal
pattern of everyday life is transcended by the high art, metaphysical power and cathartic potential of
organised sound.
This study looks at how these philosophies identify waveforms with power, but instead of delving into the
idea of waveforms as a cause for revelation and celebration, it analyses how the whole range of
frequencies is used to organise, influence and torture human subjects in the circumstances of everyday
life as well as in
those considered to be exceptional. Jacques Attali was selected because he broke with the
line of thought and instead characterises music as the mechanism that defines the capitalist organisation
of everyday life. Although Attali's sono-economic theory is not part of the trajectory followed by this
study, his break with a multi-secular line of thought that attributed to music
a special place inside and outside the social body (as well as, by inference, the capacity to
to bring society to a more utopian realisation of itself) is important for this text's investigation into the
location of the transmitter-body.
The subject of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, according to whom
"music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but embodied the will itself" (Albright, 2004
253), is therefore the first wave body to appear in our modern historical range of frequency bodies of
thought. Schopenhauer saw the will as the ultimate folly of a humanity whose spasmodic expression of
its desires leads only to confusion. He claimed that living a life
of observation and reflection with detachment was the only way to understand and make oneself
autonomous from the seductive powers of emotional, physical and sexual desires; passions which,
according to him, could never be actualised anyway. The fact that Schopenhauer's attuned body is
much less concerned with external spatial preoccupations than with metaphysical preoccupations -
those that circumvent the will of the conscious mind, making the somatic a
channel of pure expression - means that it cannot be the body that receives and transmits knowledge
that we are looking for. Schopenhauer's body is presented as an instrument that channels the essences
of humanity and, as such, emits a signal that is too pure to be the body.
We are in search of a displaced sound that is as much identified, territorialised and shaped b y
dissonance, feedback and distortion as it is by harmony, melody and tonality.
The next possible witness/subject is the body of the unspeakable of Friedrich Nietzsche, a fervent
admirer of the composer and conductor Richard Wagner. This is a corporeality initially saturated
w i t h musical adoration (Nietzsche, 1967). Wagner "infinitely increased the expressive capacity of
the
music", wrote Nietzsche passionately (1966: 919). Although this body of thought can help us express the
ontological capacity of the unspeakable, it remains mute to the questions we ask it about our spatial
search; such writings are incapable of locating our body in a place, space or environment that has
witnessed military, civil or industrial sound strategies. However, the
Nietzsche's reverence for Wagner eventually turned to disdain and embarrassment, and he distanced
himself from the Wagnerian subject of his undulatory desires.
While the two bodies found so far have given us some aesthetic indications, they have hardly
provided us with any socio-political or spatial bases on which to move forward. The three
phenomenological bodies theorised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the course of his career are
are more relevant to our research. His bodies of thought - the 'lived body', the 'habitual body' and
t h e 'flesh' - provide us with relevant insights into the role played by the senses in reintegrating the
body into critical thought. The 'lived body' expresses ideas about the role that perception plays in the
interpretation of being-in-the-world, and refers to the way in which the nature of the body influences
perception in a 'real' world where realities are intimately linked. The 'usual body' is a somatic
conceptualisation that receives information and acts on it.
memories of identical or similar activities, in relation to external stimuli. In this way, previous modes of
experience become sedimented in the behaviours of the 'habitual body'. Towards the end of his
career, Merleau-Ponty developed the ontological concept of 'flesh' in order to study in greater detail
the influence of perception on our understanding of existence.
The flesh is therefore a materialism of the body that assimilates somatic constituents to the physical
composition of the external world.
These three conceptualisations form the basis of our wave body, open it up to examination and show that
clearly that everything somatic exists in a continuous state of negotiation between subject and object.
Understanding the way in which we interact with ourselves and with the world we live in is an essential
part of this process.
(in a state of constant transition) is certainly useful, but, in the end, it is not in Merleau-Ponty's ocular
metaphors, nor in his studies or theories on The Visible and the Visible, that we find the most useful.
l'Invisible (1968), that we locate our wave body. While orienting ourselves towards
observations that have been made of the body to which we are listening, the nature of the
perception - the observation - of the somatic is precisely the problem here, because, as we know, our
investigation is looking for phenomena that can be heard and felt, not those that are recorded by
visual observation.
The Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno's musically conditioned body symbolises the wounded
and disenchanted witness to the emergence of mass culture in the twentieth century. Adorno's disgust
with frequencies organised according to standard musical patterns - popular compositions that, in his
view, denied the complexity, experimentation and critical analysis that high art could offer
- increased as consumerism spread. Like many thinkers influenced b y Marxism, Adorno's highly
educated witness locates a utopian eschatology by establishing socio-historical trajectories in the wave
environment rather than perceiving its topologies.
psycho-geographical. Once again, spatiality is at the root of a temporal discourse that subjects our
bodies to disappointing rotations, failing to strike in cadence with a promise
musical emancipation from its mechanical functioning.
Adorno's critical consciousness of the body - an individual embodiment of choreographed needs -
turns apprehensively in its box, worried about being placed in a chain of production of identities.
acoustics. It is nonetheless revealing and informative about undulatory bodies, whose movements were
first heard in the socio-economic, psychological, and
political, begin to become perceptible. Adorno's musically conditioned body
provides information on how frequencies are mechanised to make societies function in repetitive cycles.
It tells us about the strategic fabrication of the collective psychology, orientation and physiology of the
civilian population through music and the creation of desires that can only be fulfilled by a capitalist
system that mutes those it cannot.
into potential markets. In a world where culture is within everyone's reach, music is used as a socioeconomic
instrument to relieve and soothe people i n financial difficulty, by enabling them to consume
and identify with its expression.
collectively commodified. Secret and insidious, the true objective of popular music is, according to
Adorno, rendered imperceptible, camouflaged as it is by "the manipulation of taste and the
pretension of the
official culture to individualism" (1978: 280).
Manipulated and influenced by music, the mass social body of which Adorno speaks tells us about
the capacity of frequencies - in the form of music - to organise spatiality and our movements within
it. We are now in a position to perceive and monitor repetitive movements.
performed by our missing wave body, without however being able to listen to a more complex analysis
because Adorno's interpreter only follows the binary rhythms that define either scholarly or popular
culture. The antagonistic aesthetic of this body is seductive, because it echoes our concerns about
manipulation through the airwaves, the cultivation of psychological needs and industrial strategies of
pseudo-individualisation; but, in the end, the
The somatic character of the musically conditioned body rings hollow, because it does not allow us to
spatialise its presence. It centres the body in the perceptible, thus denying the ostensible dynamic
imparted to affect by the liminal, the marginal and the unknown. We cannot recognise any
agentivity, influence or orientation, we can only listen to it through the logic of the totality of the
locked groove from which it can never escape. Caught up in repetitive cycles of existence, sometimes
tense, sometimes relaxed, Adorno's musical body of thought forms a schematic interpretation o f
the relationship between cause and effect, as its subject, sometimes lulled into the deep sleep of
Stravinsky, or awakened by Schoenberg's revolutionary call (see glossary).
The three chronologically orchestrated witnesses of the economist Jacques Attali signal the last
characters of our poster. The sacrificial body, symbol of the original body of music, "[appears] (...) as
originating in ritual murder, of which it is a simulacrum, a minor form of
sacrifice and harbinger of change. We shall see that in this it was an attribute of political and religious
power, that it signified order, but also heralded subversion" (Attali, 1977: 10); the representative body
- which, after having "(entered) into commodity exchange, (...) participated in the growth and creation
of capital and spectacle" (Attali, 1977: 10); and the repetitive body, which saw music become "(a) a
symbol of order, and (b) a harbinger of subversion" (Attali, 1977: 10).
fetishised as a commodity' (Attali, 1977: 10); its consumption has become so widespread that it has
become an object that '(is stored) until it loses its meaning' (Attali, 1977: 10).
While each of these bodies of thought is clothed in the characteristics of a different historical period,
all three are designed together to suggest that music is t h e most socially revealing and significant
form of cultural expression, "because it is prophetic. Since time immemorial, it has contained in its
principles the announcement of times to come" (Attali, 1977: 8). Attali suggests
that all the cultural modes of creating, perceiving and disseminating music are implicitly linked to - and,
even more, symbolically foreshadow - the wider social practices of production, storage and distribution.
Each body therefore represents a model of coordination
It is a model of future modes of social organisation. In the end, Attali's three models of musical and
social organisation tend to reveal a model that is more in tune with the culture from which it springs.
A body of thought without socio-economic theorising, which he called a 'body of composition'. Its
analytical characteristics resemble those of the frequential subjectivity we are looking for. Basically, it
is a body of thought that considers sound from the point of view of the logistics of social organisation,
the restructuring of economic networks, the paradigm shifts it creates in socio-political registers and
the speculative potential of waveforms.
In the end, Attali makes a socio-economic reading of the musical construction of the body and its
capacity to be commanded, directed and monitored according to the needs of the labour market. Faint
whispers of our lost body begin to resonate in Attali's statement (1977: 9) that he intended not just to
"theorise about music but to theorise through music (...).
Today, theorising through language or mathematics is no longer sufficient, because it is too heavy
with prior signifiers, incapable of accounting for the essentials of time: the qualitative and the vague,
the threat and the violence".
These statements acknowledge the existence of the missing wave body and our collective need to
define its capacities, movements and potentialities. If our dislocated subject shares some of the
characteristics of Attali's compositional body, it still does not represent the one we expect. Urgent
questions have still not been asked about the compositional body's acoustic capacity to organise itself
in space - in the theatre of operations, i.e. on the field of
battle, in the workplace or in the street. Imperceptible waveforms are completely ignored by Attali,
making his fourth model a one-dimensional body of thought devoid of the dimensions that ultrasound
and infrasound entail. Most significantly, while detailing the socio-economic effects of music, Attali's
missing fourth model makes no coherent statement about the body itself and the effect that
waveforms on it.
The list we have drawn up of the somatic modalities of wave thinking has taught us a great deal about
the areas in which we need to seek out our body of wave knowledge
We must now explore new fields and philosophical parameters in order to provide more information
about the movements of the body-transmitter and the military, industrial and civil networks within
which it exists. We now need to explore new terrains and philosophical parameters in order to
provide more information about the movements of the body-transmitter and the military, industrial and
civilian networks within which it exists. A new set of questions needs to be addressed in order to
locate its agentivity, its potential and its socio-political register; the first of which is who is developing
the frequency technologies for the purpose of capturing, indexing and exploiting the
imperceptible frequencies and how they are used to shape social, temporal and cultural space.
private; how to define behaviour, the carnal interface and the extension of the body in a field o f
vibratory relations; how to name, record and cross the thresholds between sound and silence,
between presence and absence. Only when we have answered these questions will we be able to say
that we have begun to map the sensory topologies of the transmitter-body.
to draw up a map of influence, manipulation and torture that will enable us to better
define its movements and transgressions, as well as our own sense of space and orientation in relation
to it.
Wave language and hearing
We cannot hear others hear. We can watch others look and form an opinion about how they look, but
we cannot do the same for sound. As such, the action of hearing is a mute interaction, because
through the sensory register of hearing, one person can never perceive another perceive. Hearing is
therefore a sense that serves as a refuge for what is hidden, liminal and auricular; it creates a
contradictory sensory spatial dynamic that is hidden and unspeakable, but whose limits are porous and
malleable. Consequently, it is permissible to
to bring other types of discourse into the same analytical space as that occupied by physics,
phenomenology and neurology, in an attempt to describe the characteristics of hearing. The territorial
boundaries of the perception of wave space cannot therefore be effectively sealed off by facts,
observations or recordings. The intrinsic and constant negotiation of the unspeakable and the
unnameable by the inhabitants of these environments means that the boundaries are constantly being
recomposed and are never rigid. It is precisely this
fluctuating dynamics that allow unofficial, unscientific and unrecognised languages to translate
waveforms into exchangeable knowledge; narratives that tear apart and dislocate
simultaneously the definitions of these translations. Subsequently, it was in this context - in which the
oscillatory and transitory nature of meaning was highlighted - that conspiracy theories, conjectures
religious discourse and science fiction attempt to explain the liminal states of frequencies. These
discourses coexist with official bodies of knowledge, rubbing up against them and irritating them,
because they undermine their rhythmic methods of erudition, their forms of rationalisation and their
assumptions.
epistemology of the soundscape.
Throughout this study, it is asserted that we have not yet fully developed a
socially accepted language that explains the topological characteristics, psychological orientation and
physiological violence of waveforms. The fact that there are no words to explain phenomena,
whether they are based on frequencies, objects or actions, has the following corollary
the attribution to these same phenomena of a meaning that is rooted in anxious discourse about the
supernatural, apparitions and conspiracies. These shifted and misunderstood interpretations are
often not translatable into the existing wave language that is supposed to evaluate them. By
As a result, the narrative and interpretive discourses that aim to explain frequency phenomena are
marginalised and attached to the nervous dispositions of culture. Not being able to name a
thing, an experience or a vibration dislocates us as the rational and central subject of the world in
which we live. Our comfortable position as individuals capable of understanding, judging and applying
ideas to their environment on the basis that they are capable of knowing and naming is threatened
by our inability to express what we perceive. It is the unspeakable that we bury violently in our
subconscious, it is the unspeakable that we strive to forget, because what we don't remember talking
about is what is half dead to us.
It is here, between the transfer of the signal and the monotony of the flat line, that undulating
memories, channels between the expressed and the unspeakable, operate in the undead networks
of perception.
Being on the periphery of the living and the dead is a power. The power of frequencies lies partly in
their disorientating capacity to displace the language, description and perception of the two states
of being. From a spatial point of view, Foucault defines the cemetery as "a space that is (...) in
connection with the whole of all the sites of the city or society or village, since
every individual, every family finds itself with relatives in the cemetery" (1967: 48). It is in this place of
transition that he recognises that a change is taking place, a transmutation of understanding, of
mapping and of the distinction between the living and the dead, because 'from the moment when we
are no longer very sure of having a soul, that the body will rise again, we must perhaps carry a lot more
of attention to this mortal remains, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence among the
world and among words" (Foucault, 1967: 48). It is this sense of uncertainty that drives us to
also to characterise the soundscape as a refuge from the dark, an ambiguous spatiality that harbours
phenomena and interactions that we are unable to rationalise, whether they be the nocturnal noises
that cannot be explained (and which are interpreted as being produced by the movements of the
dead) or the inner voices that we attribute to the mentally ill to help us understand the noisy, multichannel
nature of schizophrenia (see glossary). If we take this account - which orders the sonic in the
afterlife - to its abominable conclusion and
When we listen to his musical composition, we find the typical example of our cultural anxiety and
concern about the purgatory power of frequencies.
Allegations (often made by Christian-affiliated organisations) of messages recorded backwards on vinyl
records reveal the full extent of our moral, social and bestial fears about music's ability to convey
information from places of perdition. Many popular singers, including Britney Spears, ELO and Eminem,
have been accused of recording songs using backmasking techniques. The most infamous trial o f
defendants who alleged that backmasking inspired their actions was that of Charles Manson for the
murder of Tate and LaBianca in 1969. During the trial, it was claimed that Manson believed that an
apocalyptic race war would engulf the country and that the Beatles had
songs like Helter Skelter contain hidden messages that herald this violence.
Manson's delusional response (to these messages he thought he had perceived) was to record his own
prophetic music and murder (among others) Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and actress Sharon Tate, in
order to trigger the conflict in question. In 1985, Vokey and Read carried out psychological tests to
determine whether subliminal messages in music influence behaviour. Their study concluded that there
was no evidence to support such an idea and that the
The perception of such messages in music tells us more about a subject's will to invent than about the
actual existence of implicit content (Vokey and Read, 1985: 1231-1239) (2).
Fears about the power of organised sound are only fully satisfied when subliminal messages (see
lexicon) are credited with the ability to drive mentally unstable subjects such as US serial killer Richard
Ramirez to commit horrific acts of violence. This anxious disposition then attributes to music - and by
extension to frequencies - the ability to incite evil acts and, even more, the power to transfer the
somatic and the spiritual to the vicinity of the underworld itself. In this context, music can be
perceived as a phenomenon that
operates in the conduit between psychological suffering and its physical expression; between the
scientifically monitored state and the unthinkable act; as a force that transgresses the material world of
things, while profoundly influencing and directing actions within it. It is, then, the contradictory symbolic
index of music - as an expression of both religious celebration and
transmission of the devil's will - which makes waveforms phenomena to b e feared and venerated at
the same time.
Anxiety about the way frequencies move and transfer us from one place to another
are still inherent in Western culture. As we have already said, this is partly due to the fact that our
ontological and epistemological lexicon lacks words for communicating and
encourage feedback on the deadly, tumultuous, embodied nature of waveforms. If this is the case, it
is incumbent upon the writer who theorises the spatiality of frequencies to understand why we need
such words; to amplify the concepts already composed; and to create new syntax, vocabularies and
registers for developing discourses about frequencies. In terms of creating words, terms and ideas
about waveforms and their organisation, a number of thinkers have had an impact on the writing of
this study.
R. Murray Schafer (1977) coined a number of fundamental terms that are used regularly
t h r o u g h o u t this thesis; "soundscape", "schizophrenia" and "auditory witness" are among these
neologisms; "soundscape" can be paraphrased as meaning the whole world.
Schafer defines "schizophony" - which is to sound what schizophrenia is to the psyche - as "the split
between an original sound and its electroacoustic transmission or reproduction" (1977: 90); the
"auditory witness" is "one who testifies or can testify to what he or she has heard" (1977: 272). The
French composer, writer and engineer
Pierre Schaeffer coined the term "sound object", later interpreted by Michael Chion (1983) to
mean any sound event that can be interpreted as a coherent sum, independently of the
production or interpretation of the sound.
There are already glossaries of terms relating to auditory effects, such as À l'écoute de l'environnement :
Répertoire des effets sonores (2005) by Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue. The recent
publication of numerous dictionaries of this kind reflects a broader desire for indexes aimed at
rehabilitating our knowledge of sound by acoustically mapping the daily soundtrack o f urban space.
Prior to these new manifestations of cultural interest in sound, Attali had
reminded us of the need to develop new forms of language to explain the mutation of being-in-the-worldof-
waveforms. He had suggested that visual languages had lost their
reactivity due to overuse and the fact that they were overburdened by the belief that they could
explain phenomena that did not fall within their remit. For Attali, this means that "(i)t is therefore
necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms to speak to the new
realities (...) It (music) reflects the making of society; it is the audible tape of the vibrations and signs
that ƙont society. As an instrument of knowledge, it encourages us to decipher a sound form of
knowledge" (1977: 9). As we have seen, this sound form of knowledge remains
necessary, but there are two other registers of understanding to which Attali makes no allusion, those
of the ultrasonic and the infrasonic. So the new form of knowledge conveyed by this thesis is thirded
knowledge, because it is made up of the three registers of wave perception; and it is the sociospatialization
of wave perception that is explored by the
deploying neologisms such as 'thirdsound', which refers to a sonic spatiality that challenges our dualistic
understanding of waveforms as heard/unheard, real/imagined, painful/pleasant.
The study is indebted to a number of theoretical developments in the concept of "tiercéisation".
"thirding" as a methodologically and analytically formatted tool for dismantling the
dualistic thinking. Of particular note is Michel Serres' suggestion that noise is the inevitable 'Third Man'
between two interconnected parts. He suggests that, in an exchange of sound information, noise is in an
ambiguous position, being a presence
We are immersed in the noise of the world (...). Serres writes that "... we are immersed in noise (...)
We are in the noise of the world, we are not in the noise of the world.
In the beginning is noise" (1980: 170). The dynamic of 'tiercéisation' employed by Hélène Cixous in
her novel The Third Body (1970) is also useful. She introduces it (on the first page of the text), in
order to define the somatic relationship
between two lovers, thus breaking down the dualistic understanding of agentivity and sublimation, as
the two bodies, at once identical and other, end up constructing a third identity. For Homi K. Bhabha
(1994), the third space represents a hybrid spatiality of antagonisms, constant tensions and potential
chaos. He argues that, from this place, it is possible to destabilise the binary oppositions that construct
the First and Third Worlds, including those that exist between the First World and the Third World.
centre and margin, civilised and savage, capital and labour. Through this theoretical act of associative
dislocation, he argues, it would be possible, by employing techniques of tiercéisation, to reconstruct
discursive political discourses that would help to disempower systems of colonisation.
The viracoustic channel
The viracoustic channel of this study is a formalised instrument for investigating how viral dynamics
can be mapped from the sonic environment to provide new methods for navigating its shifting
marginal and miasmatic territories. Given that the modality of the virus within somatic,
computational and capitalist networks is generally recognised as the most efficient vehicle for
propagation, it is useful to examine how this infectious paradigm operates in the organisation of
frequencies. Using the conceptual apparatus of viral modulation to analyse waveform phenomena we
will
allows us to understand the perpetual changes that occur in the way humans perceive the world.
Documenting the transient and constantly changing nature of the soundscape also amplifies the
problems inherent in virology, particularly those relating to prediction, detection and protection. The
complex and difficult issues involved in attempting to classify the spread and dissemination of viruses
can therefore be understood as analogous to those that arise in exploring the evanescent nature of
frequencies. Ultimately, it is the dilemmas and paradoxes implicit in deploying a viral approach
as the viracoustic channel which, as much as the most obvious metaphors that can be drawn from such
an analysis, define its relevance for this wave study.
The term "viracoustics" is a cross-breed of "viral" and "acoustics". It is a conceptual methodology which,
in this study, provides information throughout the four chapters. From a conceptual point of view, the
word 'viracoustic' suggests that the itinerant nature of frequencies gives them the amplitude they need
to mutate, modify and reconstruct
systems of thought that give voice to space and its territorialisation. The new discourses that emerge
from listening to the viral nature of space aim to reveal the networks of transmission that have been
orchestrated...
by the military-recreative complex to infect the social body with its psychological, socio-economic and
physiological objectives. By deploying the viracoustic channel, we infect ourselves with a viral
discourse that gives us critical power - the ability to understand how volumes of dissonance,
amplitudes of violence and levels of behaviour are modulated by the organisations that seek to
delimit the sonic environment. The transient, transmitting and dislocating spatiality expressed by the
second part of the term - 'channel' - is based on an inversion of the 'channel'.
Paul Virilio's notion of the vector. The present study suggests that the dromological non-place of the
vector no longer speaks to us of our socio-spatial environment or of our being-in-the-world of
waveforms. Our embodied world of frequencies is the one that is spatialised by the discursive nature
and
of the viral; and the absolute importance of speed (arrogated by the projectile) has been supplanted by
the systematic breaking down of linearity - by the techniques of deception, contagion and of
changes in production that capitalism has brought about throughout the world.
A transitional device between the chapters, the viracoustic channel links the third sub-section of each
chapter. It connects disparate chronologies, spatialities and events, and forms the centrepiece of the
work.
transmission of the conceptualisations, arguments and speculative hypotheses of the thesis. It tells us
of the unrealized possibilities that waveforms offer for constructing viral spatiality; communicating
wave networks that could help resist those who would stifle the body-transmitter's capacity to emit. The
study argues that we will understand the organisation of social space better through a viracoustic
channel than through a reflection on the temporal modality of the vector (see glossary) so ardently
defended by Virilio. Attali's suggestion that critical analysis and philosophical disposition should be
created on the basis of undulatory thought is very interesting, because "it (music) is a means of
perceiving the world....
(and significantly) is there to make mutations heard" (1985: 9). What is interesting here is the
testimonial character of Attali's 'audible mutation', for it suggests that change can only be
communicated through the composition of new ways of perceiving. Three leitmotifs shape, modify and
transform the content that is introduced into the viracoustic channel. As critical codes of conduct, the
three spatial concepts explain the topology (see glossary) of the
waveforms and their potential to shape space, networks and bodies. The three leitmotivs are
Foucauldi's conceptualisation of the 'heterotopia', Marc Augé's conceptualisation of the 'non-place'
and Edward Soja's conceptualisation of 'thirdspace'.
Originally, Foucauldi's concept of the heterotopia was that of a space existing between
real" space and "utopian" space. As such, it is an 'other' space that operates beyond the hegemonic
order - a space that is both real and imaginary, mental and material, here and elsewhere. Examples of
this are the mirror, the asylum - where deviant bodies are placed - and the ship. In his short article Des
espaces autres (1967) (published after his death), Michel Foucault set out the blueprints for what we
now call heterology: the study of the other. This has been used as a tool for critical analysis by a range
of academics and film specialists,
poetry, urban planning, contemporary art and cartography. Architects such as George Teyssot (1977)
express the heterotopia's potential to communicate the socio-political dynamics of the built
environment, and thus reveal the subversive spatial critique underlying this notion. It is useful to this
study because it suggests that the identity, socio-political structure and power relations of any
undulating space are in a state of constant mutation and renegotiation.
The term 'non-place' was coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé in Non-lieux. Introduction à une
anthropologie de la surmodernité (1992). He sees the non-place as a spatiality of transience; as social
spaces that are devoid of emotional investment, have no cultural significance and therefore do not
meet the definition of a place or a space. According to Augé, "If a place can be defined in terms of
identity, relationships and history, a
A space that cannot be defined in terms of identity, relationships or history will define a non-place"
(1992: 100). He cites motorways, airports and hotel rooms as perfect examples of non-places, which, in
his view, are becoming increasingly symptomatic of the "new world".
supermodernity - a post-modern era which (from Augé's point of view) is deeply devoted to
technology, transport networks and the transfer of information.
Edward Soja conceptualises 'third space' as a principle of his postmodern geography. The term refers to
spaces that are both imaginary and real. He defines it as follows: "'Third-space' is a deliberately
provisional and flexible term that attempts to capture what is in fact a milieu of ideas,
of events and appearances that are constantly evolving and changing... there's a growing awareness of
growing awareness of the simultaneity and interweaving of the social, the historical and the spatial, of
their inseparability and interdependence.... The challenge posed by Thirdspace is therefore
transdisciplinary in scope. It affects all modes of thought" (1996: 2-3).
These three meditations on lived space, imagined space and traversed space act as conceptual vectors in
the viracoustic channel. They raise questions such as whether 'audiotopias' (a wave-like version of
heterotopia, in which a sonic spatiality comes to represent other frequency sites within a culture, while
being itself deliberately
If so, how do they function conceptually; how do we perceive a non-sound in a non-place; where do we
critically situate the socio-political register of the third-sound. Such investigations suggest that
the sound environment must be textually re-mapped, and audible and inaudible mutations recorded, in
order to produce new forms of language. Consequently,
The messenger in this study is never static, disciplined or susceptible to instructions. He is a corrupted
carrier of perception, mutating what he comes into contact with, hybridizing existing terminologies,
notions and formulations from various fields of study in order to
form its own dynamic, complex and abstract character. The messenger of this study can then be
analysed and diagnosed as what we call the viral waveform; a contingent phenomenon that moves
and modifies itself in order to compose a space where its frequency discourses
can be reproduced culturally.
The viral waveform
Many terms are used to describe the multiple carriers of viral culture - worms, malware and Trojan
horses, in computer systems; bacteriophages, micro-organisms and pathogens, in the body matrix, where
they are carried by fluids and air; and worms.
earworms, influencers and sneezers, in the social networks targeted by viral marketing strategists (see
glossary) (who look for the people with the greatest Social Networking Potential [SNP]), in order to
persuade them to pass on the message.
popularity of demographically relevant products. Such a taxonomy of the liminal, of the barely
perceived, could also be attributed to the thresholds of oscillation, which refer to sound; to those
margins that
become blurred in the non-audible spectra of ultrasound and infrasound, particularly when used by
those working for the military-recreational complex to experiment on unsuspecting targets. The notion
of the barely perceived also evokes these thresholds, which lie at the intersection of the
the living, the undead and the dead, and the cultural belief that viruses and waveforms can open
conduits between these states of being. Viruses, like waveforms, are difficult t o control, map and
detect. As such, they both have the ability to travel
imperceptibly, to infiltrate and unlock as well as to enter without authorisation, creating networks
and unidentifiable evidence. Similarly, we can think of the virus that stealthily penetrates computer
systems; renegotiates and rewrites network protocol on the sly; creates cultures of fear and paranoia
at the mere mention of its name. As for waveforms, we can ruminate equally on: - the long-range
waveforms of infrasound and their propensity to travel thousands of kilometres without being noticed
by
the capacity of ultrasound to scan and make visible that which cannot be perceived by the naked eye;
the anxiety culture of fear and suspicion that envelops the wave body and its vulnerability to the
power of frequencies. So it could be said that waveforms and viruses have the capacity to propagate
behaviour of a transgressive nature. The fact that these behaviours are orchestrated in networks
where it is difficult to perceive where the action of the living ends and that of the living begins is a sign
of the transgressive nature of these behaviours.
power of the dead gives them the right to be explored in greater depth throughout the thesis.
Eugene Thacker (2004: 43-47) analyses the mediated links between living and dead communication
networks, when he writes: "The horror of the contemporary 'living dead' is not only the fear of being
reduced to being only a body; in the 'network society', the horror of the 'living dead' is undoubtedly
also the fear of being reduced to being only information - or not to being
be able to distinguish between contagion and transmission. In this sense, the paradox of the living dead
is also the paradox of 'vital statistics', a kind of network of the living dead that exceeds and even
replaces the 'pure and simple life' of the organism".
If we take this meditation on the disappearance of the body in the data and the associated fear of
losing the ability to perceive the somatic threshold of presence and transfer it to the networks of
ultrasonic, infrasonic and sonic waves of the soundscape, it gives us more...
useful indications of the liminal nature of frequencies and their connection with the viral. We mainly
perceive hauntings through the vibratory capacity of an entity to discreetly penetrate the
network of living beings through the manipulation of voice and objects. Our fear is fuelled by the threat
of being touched and infected by liminal presences, of being transmuted ourselves.en
waveforms. It is the difficulty we encounter when we try to contain, control and map the ephemeral
nature of the viral and the waveform that makes these phenomena so distressing, because this
difficulty reminds us of the existence we lead at thresholds oscillating between the sonorous and the
silent, the ephemeral and the static, the living and the dead.
Ultimately, in this thesis, the viral is speculatively formatted as a mode of
communication; a discourse that mutates and propagates meaning between technological, somatic and
social networks; the enfant terrible of a capitalist system that reproduces itself through channels of
absolute transience, sublimely expressing the breathless movement and inevitable crisis of stasis in
exchange systems. It is at once the perfect model of a socio-economic system that drives its
activities through the flexible organs of distributed power and its destroyer. Similarly, "music is
the medicine of the mind" (Storr, 1992: unnumbered homepage) and the killer of the mind, all
at once. In this respect, it has a similar capacity to be the ultimate celebration of the
sound transmission as well as the ultimate agent of silent suffering. Through the combination of these
apparently oppositional phenomena, which symbolise both creation and destruction, a critical
modality of discursive reasoning takes shape in the present study. A modality that is called the viral
waveform and that constantly modifies its manoeuvres, transforming itself according to its needs;
highlighting the channels in which this power resides, all in (dis)order to render in-communicable the
changes in the environment in which it finds itself.
REVIEW OF DOCUMENTATION
This review reflects the transdisciplinary nature of this thesis, as it includes texts b y
historian/sociologist Michel Foucault, economist Jacques Attali, philosopher Michel Serres, political
geographer and urbanist Edward Soja, musician and sound theorist Steve Goodman, and cultural theorist
and urbanist Paul Virilio.
The first text to be examined will be 'Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison', as its methodology and
theme have been essential to the whole process of constructing this thesis. The
The archaeological-style methodology he employs to study the formation of knowledge enables him
to trace the beginnings of loudspeaker system technologies and their use in
in conjunction with electronic amplification. While Foucault's investigation of the French penal system
has a narrower focus than the present study, his systematic analysis of how articulations o f power
allow certain changes to occur and others to be thwarted has been a useful technique for revealing
how the strategies and technologies of loudspeaker systems have been developed and transformed
over the last century.
The Foucauldian technique of mapping power relations along a continuum of thought and then
explaining the epistemic change that mutates the expression of that power has been a particular
methodological help.
The structuring of this thesis is primarily based on this type of dynamic, as it traces the use of
loudspeaker systems that are used to transmit sound waveforms in the factory, around the barracks
and in the cell, before examining, in the fourth chapter, the change that occurs, when a new
loudspeaker system exploiting ultrasonic frequencies is introduced into the military and civilian
domains of conflict relations. While Surveiller et punir examines the ways in which the body is
subjugated and transformed into an object of knowledge under the impetus of a range of techniques,
it offers little insight into the ways in which these strategies
can be thwarted or diverted. Although this thesis is not a manual of resistance
frequency, it challenges Foucault's lack of commitment to tactics of resistance, suggesting how wave
power could be used to question, re-map and challenge the hegemonic mapping of the soundscape
currently orchestrated by the military-recreative complex.
Jacques Attali's seminal text Bruits: Essai sur l'économie politique de la musique is also available in French.
important for this thesis for structural reasons. Attali constructs his study by dividing the history o f
waveforms into three distinct periods - characterised respectively by 'sacrifice', 'the
representation" and "repetition" - and suggests that a fourth period, yet to be defined and which he
This study therefore adopts a trans-historical approach, dividing the process of deploying loudspeaker
systems into three eras. Accordingly, this study takes a trans-historical approach, dividing the process of
deploying loudspeaker systems into three epochs, opening respectively with the commissioning of the
Fordist factory, the siege of Waco and the invention of the Guantanamo Bay torture cell, and then
anticipating and theorising a new period o f wave transmission and politics, initiated by directional
ultrasound beam technology. W h i l e Attali links the formatting of music to revolutions in capitalist
modes of production, this study links the strategic deployment of waveforms and the technologies that
transmit them to the changing symbiotic relationships between military and civilian organisations.
Attali's maxim that music is prophetic and predicts future forms of social organisation is important to
this thesis, as it makes the study of waveforms a discipline that can expose and create knowledge
about the past, present and future. It has been useful in conveying the ways in which the rhythms of
the wave strategies employed by the complex
military-industrial complex became the capitalist model for marrying military and civilian contexts;
future rhythms are examined in the
fourth chapter. The most valuable lesson drawn from Attali's book and elaborated in this thesis is that
it is no longer possible to depend on the eye to accumulate essential forms of
knowledge needed to understand the world in which we live, because ocular information has been
theorised into an incomprehensible and excessive abstraction. This task, he believes,
must be accomplished through the ear and the action of listening, for we need a new philosophy that
is open to listening to the changes predicted by musical production. The problem with the philosophy
of noise that Attali sets out in Bruits (a philosophy that this study challenges) is its
reluctance to examine the role that waveforms not perceptible by the ear play in our understanding
of the future world, the present world and the past world. Attali's philosophy is based on sound
theory, not on the inclusive theory of waveforms proposed in this study; and this philosophy depends
on an understanding of the roles of sound and non-sound in our perception of being-in-the-world.
Le Parasite (1982) has influenced the overall transdisciplinary approach adopted in this thesis.
Serres theorises the relationship between parasite and host across a wide range of disciplines,
including theology, information theory, political economy, anthropology and philosophy, and
through literary works such as La Fontaine's Fables and Molière's Tartuffe. The present
The study also draws on a wide range of fields of study (including philosophy, sociology, psychology,
musicology, physics, theology and geography) to examine the relationships between the different
disciplines.
between waveforms, spatiality and human presence. Serres uses this great diversity of knowledge to
trace the convergences between the natural sciences and the humanities.
Philosophically, however, the most important argument advanced throughout his text is that
the relationships between parasite and host should not be taken for granted, a s the dynamics
generally attributed to each of these positions can easily be reversed. At this
As such, individuals and groups perceived to be disenfranchised and disempowered (individuals and
groups which, for Serres, are represented by the plague) can also become voices
important in wider public discourses, as they represent diverse and essential perspectives and
ontologies. For the purposes of this study, this discursive model of social inclusion and empowerment of
parts of the social body that were previously conceived of as passive and dependent is important to the
composition of the transmitter-body; a subjectivity that is set in oscillation by external phenomena, but
which also retains the power to orchestrate movements
and rhythms of activity within any network of relationships in which it finds itself.
The transmitter-body - the protagonist of the present study - is a model of undulatory power, as it
receives and transmits information, presences and affects in the sound environment. In this w a y , the
transmitter-body is analogous to Serres's plague, for both subjects embody the capacity to
to resist, divert and assimilate the technologies of subjugation and the political pressures that writers
like Foucault identify as controlling the somatic. Serres's notion of
parasite as the third man in all acts of communication is a proposition
crucial for this study, in relation to the discourse initiated between the potential convergences of
waveform theory and viral theory. The formatted relationships between music and the mass social body
in the first two chapters of the thesis refer to the relational compositions of noise, which Serres defines
as an inevitable third presence, but, in the fourth chapter, HSS technology refutes these assumptions, as
noise/the third man is theorised as the
third voice channelled towards the subject. Thus, instead of being externalised in acts of
communication, the noisy third viral subjectivity is theorised as constituting psychological ammunition.
transmitted in the interior of the communications inside a subject's skull.
Methodologically, Edward Soja's text Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Rea/-and- Imagined
Places is central to the construction of this study. In Thirdspace, Soja adopts a trialectical approach based
on Henri Lefebvre's (1991) notion of the spatial triad in order to reinsert spatiality into the lexicon of
Western philosophical thought. By explaining the
tiercéisation as an othering methodological approach, Soja proposes to dislocate the dualistic ways of
thinking that have reduced spatial theory to a footnote to readings
of the world and of human presence and movement within it. This study accepts Soja's hypothesis
that space is a crucial and implicit constituent of the w a y all living things structure their lives, and
applies this spatial logic to the analysis of the
geography of the soundscape. Therefore, the present study extends Soja's ideas to the field o f
sound studies by suggesting that composing a wave geography is essential to
be able to explore, map and resist the territorialisation of the soundscape by organisations and
individuals dedicated to achieving the aims of the military-recreational complex. It is argued that this
mapping index would facilitate our understanding of waveforms, which are too often conceived
binary as heard or unheard, noisy or silent, painful or pleasurable.
If it is to be able to produce original knowledge, it is crucial that the present study apply the
Soja's methodological technique of tiercéisation, because it uses a discursive geographical
instrumentality as an analytical tool to uncover new relationships between periphery and centre.
Since this study explores both the wave phenomena that are essential to our understanding of the
world - sound phenomena - and those that do not reach our perception - ultrasound and
infrasound - it is essential to compose a cartography of these phenomena.
enveloping the hinterland in wave phenomena. Soja, drawing on theorists such as Bell hooks, recognises
that the periphery or margins are spatialities in which modes of resistance can be formatted and
arranged. Soja's exploration of the phenomena that oscillate at the periphery of the social body is an
important line of inquiry that will be followed throughout this study, as we assess how the
boundaries of power are agitated by oscillatory movements, inverted and driven by undulatory
techniques. The post-modern fragmented body that Soja argues exists within these marginal
spatialities is, however, criticised in
this study to be an inadequate model of transmission and reception in the soundscape
contemporary. The thesis suggests that this fragmentary clue has been assimilated by a US army
determined to break down the psychological structure of the Guantanamo detainees. In this study,
what is being composed is the model of the transmitter-body that transmits and receives the complex
arrangements of the sonic environment, the synthetic body that will in future reveal the peripheral and
central concerns of a wave ecology.
As well as theorising historical and current forms of wave-like affect, organisation and violence, this
study speculates on the future of frequency ideologies and technologies. For these reasons, Attali's
writings have played an important role in constructing the proactive sonic discourse o f this thesis,
but it is Steve Goodman's Sonic Watfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009) that first
provides a futuristic wave theory (or vibratory ontology, for
paraphrasing the author) which is based on both non-sound and sound. To trace the ways in which the
logistics of perception have been, are being and will be modulated by the military-recreative complex,
Goodman
draws on authors such as Kittler, Whitehead, Bergson and Eshun, and in so doing offers a segmented
history that reveals the violent organisation of the soundscape, while investigating the rhythmic
orchestrations of fear that accompany these manoeuvres. The trans-historical approach
adopted by Goodman has an influence on the idea, developed in this study, of the viracoustic channel - a
meta-chapter device that functions as a textual brewing board through which any event or phenomenon
in time or space can connect to the undulatory ideas to which it serves as a transmitter.
If Goodman uses a fragmentary historical model in which each module can be read
separately and in any order, this postmodern approach fails to tell the whole story.
sequencing and connection of the sonic strategies developed in the name of war by the militaryindustrial
and military-recreative complexes. Ultimately, Goodman's indifference to narrative
arrangement means that he does not place the emphasis that should be on the sonic torture
strategies employed in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, where many of the sonic trajectories of control,
fear and violence that have been followed over the previous century find their logical conclusions.
This study then orchestrates a third-party methodology that tracks
the evolution (and connection) of loudspeaker system techniques and wave ideologies that influence,
manipulate and torture the social and individual body. The usefulness of Goodman's text in the
construction of this thesis lies in his realisation that a new language and a new set of concepts such as
his notions of 'non-sound', 'vibratory force' and 'audiovirology' must be devised in order to compose
a wave philosophy that explains to us the potential for anguish, violence and pressure that
frequencies entail.
Given that this study focuses on the technologies of loudspeaker systems that have been developed
and used by the military-industrial and military-recreational complexes since the installation o f cable
radio systems in American factories in 1922, it was predictable that it would draw on Paul Virilio's
Vitesse et Politique (1977). Virilio's reputation as a philosopher of technology is comparable to that of
any other post-war thinker and, as such, his proposition that the history of progress, of modes of
perception and information are directly linked to the speed of development of weapons systems,
convinced us to make it the starting point for
the study of the strategic relationships between military and industrial organisations and the
entertainment industry. His statement that a city lives constantly as if preparing for battle is seen by
some as an invitation to technological determinism. For the purposes of this study, it is argued that
this statement does not go far enough, as it is suggested that this state of readiness
is more akin to ambient violence in its own right, manifesting its undulatory intent at every level of civil
life. Speed and Politics is of great importance for the present study.
Virilio's study, given its interest in the notions of pure and total war, the speed of the war
machine and the logistics of perception, but many of Virilio's hypotheses are called into question
throughout the thesis.
The Virilian hypothesis that, in times of conflict and urban preparation, the importance of spatial
concerns fades in the face of the importance of vector trajectories and the speeds associated with
them is clearly problematic for a study that proposes the composition of a new cartography of
waveforms. This paper therefore argues, from a
The study's focus on frequency echoes the view expressed by Edward Said in Culture and
Imperialism (1993) that geographical preoccupations are never completely foreign to us. As the
peripheral terrains of ultrasonic and infrasonic vibrations are modulated by the military-recreational
complex, the study suggests that it is imperative to compose an embodied spatial index of
undulatory pressure, cadence, violence and movement. In Speed and Politics, the
Virilio's excessive dependence on visual tropes (which are more particularly
developed in later texts such as The Machine of Vision [1988] and Aesthetics of Vision [1990].
disappearance [1980]), obliterates the vital roles that waveforms play in the composition of conflict
(both in the city and on the battlefield), in perceptions of war (on the internet, television and film) and
in the potential capacity of sound and non-sound to map future theatres of violent engagement. This
study therefore runs counter to many of the ideas of
Virilio examines the way in which conflicts are generated, maintained and modulated, and develops a
wave theory to explain the raison d'être and future of the war machine.
As for the texts that had a (negative) influence on the writing of this thesis, we should mention Sound
Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (2009) by Jonathan Pieslak. This text
reinforced the idea that deploying a system of musicological/sociological methodology to
interpreting the use of music in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay is inadequate for deciphering such complex
phenomena.
The lack of theoretical analysis of the methods of sound torture used on detainees and the absence of
serious documentation on those who were subjected to torture make Pieslak's book a schematic and
biased (from the point of view of the US soldiers who perpetrated the torture) account of sound
torture. Sound Targets was useful to this thesis in that it provided a contemporary example of the
academic pitfalls into which a study of sound can fall. As such, the book's shortcomings have
confirmed the idea that a transdisciplinary approach offers the most coherent mode of enquiry for
creating original knowledge about the organisation of the soundscape.
Unlike Sound Targets, Suzanne Cusick's essay Music as torture / Music as weapon (2006) is a very
engaging and clear account of sound torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. It
is a concise overview of the noise pressure exerted by the military. Written from the perspective of
socio-political, psychological and gender studies, it stands out as one of the first works to be published
on the subject.
The book is the result of a series of academic essays on the use of music as a weapon in the US military's
'fight a g a i n s t terrorism'. While posing a plethora of questions about the undulatory affect of
torture practices, the book's brevity prevents it from analysing the cultural significance of music as a
weapon in the fight against terrorism.
how music and other forms of culture have recently been assimilated by the military.
The third chapter of this study takes up the questions posed by Cusick in 2006 and extends their
scope to look in more depth at the cultural, psychological and physiological contexts of applied wave
violence and the co-option of culture by the military.
The critical review of the literature relating to the subject of this study concludes with Julian
Henriques's essay Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of
Knowing, published in The Auditory Culture Reader. Underlining the disembodied and embodied
potential of waveforms; the role of music in changing the relationship between the rational and the
irrational ;
The idea that music is an essentially transgressive phenomenon in all social, somatic and spatial
contexts, Henriques's essay stands out as a conceptually influential text. Henriques's formation of the
highly relevant concept of the 'sound body' and his no less influential analysis of the 'sound body' are
both highly influential.
(2003: 471) - the creation and analysis through which the acoustic pressure systems at reggae concerts
in Jamaica are examined - have had a considerable impact on the composition that this study
undertakes of the historically indexed wave body, of the body as a whole.
The body of sound is a combination of the transmitter currently in use and the futuristic body of
synthesis in mutation. For Henriques, the sound body is literally "the body touched by sound. It is a
resonant, specific body,
shared, social, immediate and carnal. The term 'sound body' implies either the body of sound, or the
sound of the body, or both. The corporeality of the sound body expresses itself in sound and is achieved
through sound.
" (2003 : 471). By broadening the historical, geographical and conceptual scope of Henriques'
sound body, the new body of multidisciplinary knowledge that is composed in this study amplifies
the silences, oscillations and noises that have served, serve and will serve to delimit the spatialities
of the soundscape.
By orchestrating the aforementioned viral theory, postmodern geography and sono-economic philosophy
into an interdisciplinary research apparatus, this thesis will
studies the soundscape and its territorialisation in order to highlight the wave trajectories that have
informed the deployment of loudspeaker systems since their introduction to industrial
workp l a c e s at the beginning of the 20th century. As the constituents of the undulatory
cartography that
are developed throughout the study are informed, oscillated and modified by a wide range of
pressures, the methodology deployed is necessarily composed of such diverse knowledge systems.
The new and original knowledge derived from the use of this
These methods provide us with information on how we understand and pass through frequencies that
are considered local frequencies, but above all they amplify the frequencies that we understand and
pass through.
concerns with waveforms perceived as peripheral and liminal. As such, the present study develops new
theories of soundscape that advance the discipline of
sound studies, laying new foundations for thinking about wave-like spatiality and the presences and
pressures that shape it.
METHODOLOGY
Composition
This study is a trans-disciplinary and trans-historical investigation into the civilian and military contexts in
which loudspeaker systems have been used by the military-industrial and military-industrial
complexes.
military-recreational to exert pressure on mass social groupings and individual bodies. The thesis asks
how past and present deployments of sonic, infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies as instruments of
torture, devices of
Do psychological manipulation and physiological influence mechanisms presage future techniques of
socio-spatial organisation? It is argued that, since the introduction of wired radio loudspeaker systems (see
glossary) in American factories in 1922, the
development of sound strategies based primarily on the orchestration of spatiality
It is also claimed that the acoustic techniques used in the cells, the repetition cycles and the enveloping
dynamics of the surround effect can be attributed to the introduction of sound torture practices at
Guantanamo Bay in the first decade of the 21st century. It is also claimed that the acoustic techniques used
in the cells
The torture facilities at Guantanamo Bay prison represent the final stage and logical conclusion of the
strategies developed in the civilian and military contexts over the last eighty years.
years. The instrumental character that the loudspeaker system took on after the Guantanamo Bay episode
therefore comes to symbolise an epistemic change in the application of wave pressure; for the dynamics
of directional ultrasound technology mark the orchestration of a new set of frequency relationships
between transmitter and receiver, loudspeaker system and architectural system, civilian context and war
environment.
The methodological approach deployed throughout the thesis reflects the transdisciplinary nature of
The first is an epistemic approach based on Michel Foucault's research methods. The first
perspective is an epistemic approach based on Michel Foucault's research methods, which
document the changes and differences that occur over time in a given system; the transformations
that occur in a specific context that favours certain mutations, while preventing others. In this way,
Foucault's methodological approach is one of
A historical approach, albeit a radicalised one, which reveals how truth is conceived and how
circumstances are designed to authenticate and propagate certain discourses, certain techniques and,
ultimately, certain truths. The second perspective, a political-geographical one, is based o n Edward
Soja's conception of trialectical efficacy. The study employs a trialectical model that
is based on Soja's reinterpretation of Lefebvre's concept of the spatial triad. In Soja's trialectic system,
three forces influence each other, eliminating the fixed nucleus of sublation ("
Aufhebung") located by Hegel in his dialectical model (in a Hegelian framework, the conflict between
thesis and antithesis is resolved by synthesis). According to Soja, "the starting point for t h i s strategic
reopening and reconception of new possibilities is the provocative reintegration of
epistemology into ontology, and more precisely into the trialectical ontology of Spatiality,
Historicality and Sociality. This act of ontological rebalancing induces a radical scepticism towards
all established epistemologies. Of all the means of confidently acquiring knowledge of the world"
(1996: 81).
Thus, in this thesis, a trialectical model of analysis is used to initiate new methods of interpreting
undulatory spatiality and sociality. The third perspective is a viral approach that refers back to Michel
Serres's transgressive reading of the oscillating power relations between host and parasite (1982).
This multi-channel methodology was chosen because the present study, with its emphasis o n
temporality, technology, geography, politics and somatics considered from the point of view of
frequency, has a vast field of application. To explore the spatial, physiological, viral and psychological
effects of the deployment of loudspeaker technology in the past in the United States, in the present
Cuba and in the future globalised world, the only academic logic capable of tackling a
research on this scale is a multidisciplinary system of investigation. As a result, it is by deploying a
coherent multi-channel methodology that the sprawling information networks studied will be made
perceptible and can then be analysed; that the points of connection, of
transformation and disruption of waveforms within these information networks will be
amplified in a coherent way in order to compose and transmit new and original knowledge about the
organisation and territorialisation of the soundscape.
The use of this multi-channel methodology makes it impossible for the present study to become
simply a historical cultural survey of waveforms. If this study explores the
past convergences that legitimised the evolution of loudspeaker system strategies from the factory to the
globalised torture cell, it also speculates on how the rupture constituted by the
HSS ultrasound technology compared with sound technologies and their coercive ideologies will
change our perception of frequencies, presence and reason. In this sense, the research carried out in
this study is trans-historical, focusing as much on the future as on the present and the past. This
temporal channel is combined in this study with a spatial channel that links divergent geographical
contexts and borders.
The spatial approach adopted by the study, like the temporal approach, sees its taxonomic criteria of
investigation mutate in the epistemic rupture that occurs between the third and fourth chapters.
Thus, the mode of wave geography which maps surround-sound loudspeaker systems in the first
three chapters has to be transformed into a neural mapping of the skull (fourth chapter), to give it
the capacity to analyse an ultrasound technology which
rewrites the rules of distance, connection and spatial transgression.
So far, it has been argued that the temporal and spatial channels of investigation constitute the
methodology of the thesis. The viral channel, the third and final mode of examination, completes the
mise en
structural form of the text. It is convened to contribute to the transmission of original knowledge on
the co-development, propagation and mutation of ideologies and wave technologies through the
interaction of civil and military contexts; on the subtle and impressive movements that have
denied our ability to differentiate clearly between the two spheres. For the arguments put forward
throughout
Throughout this study the viral channel does not become a dualistic discussion between the temporal
and/or spatial nature of waveforms, it is a third-party analytical device that helps to circumvent
binary thinking about the soundscape. Avoiding such structural failures is crucial for
develop a coherent discourse that is sensitive to and aware of its own capacity to transform itself by
studying the oscillating, malleable and mobile nature of the soundscape.
The three-channel methodology formats the study in such a way that the first part of each chapter
establishes how the physiology of the mass social body and the physiology of the individual body have
been influenced, manipulated and tortured by techniques based on loudspeaker systems. Theoretically
(not literally), the next part of each chapter is the third part (called the viracoustic channel), which
bridges and blurs the distinctions between mind and spirit, propagating a spatial discourse that
challenges the binary conception that mind and spirit are differentiated elements. The third subsection
is placed conceptually between the
first sub-section, which examines the physiological effect of waveforms, and the second sub-section,
which explores the psychological transformations that occur in those subjected to
frequency strategies. Just as the sonic range of frequencies lies between the oscillation thresholds of
infrasound and ultrasound, so, by analogy, this sub-section spreads its conceptual charge by elaborating
the synthesis and dislocations that occur in the sub-sections that flank it. In this way, the viracoustic
chain re-evaluates the divisive Manichean axioms used to explain the soundscape, such as heard /
inaudible, internal voice / external command, music as torture / music as pleasure.
Arguments
As indicated above, the central argument of the present study is that an epistemic break in the ideology
based on loudspeaker systems occurs between the deployment of torture
sound at Guantanamo Bay (Chapter 3) and the future direction of sonic pressure exerted by HSS
technology (Chapter 4). It is argued that the torture techniques deployed at Guantanamo Bay signify
the unravelling of repetitive strategies that - ever since, with the invention of the phonograph in the
1870s, sound could be recorded and reproduced - have themselves become
important wave tropes in Western culture. On the radio, we constantly hear songs in 'heavy rotation'
(see glossary), a sales technique deployed by record companies. This study argues that this civil
technique of repetition has been co-opted by the
Increased rotation, the elimination of silences or conversations between musical transmissions
transforms an infectious sales technique into a weapon of torture designed to infect the mind's rational
system.
Considering that repetition is the most visible organising principle of production, storage, distribution
and social control in the twentieth century, Attali writes: "The establishment of general replication
transforms the conditions of political control. It is no longer a question of making people believe, as i n
representation. Instead, through direct, channelled control, through imposed silence instead of
persuasion, de Faire Taire" (1977: 242). The repetitive broadcasting of songs from Western musical
genres - such as heavy metal, disco and country - night and day, with the aim of depriving people of their
right to listen to the music of their own country.
inmates, disorienting them and ultimately driving them insane is the perfect embodiment, in these
torture practices, the sentiments expressed by Attali three decades earlier. An important aim of this
thesis is to monitor, record and analyse the mimetic behaviour of military and civilian networks in
order to understand how undulatory strategies and techniques are
programmed and transmitted between these coding organisations.
This notion of cultural co-optation brings us to the second important argument made in this study. It is
argued that the equation of popular music with a weapon of torture at Guantanamo Bay is emblematic
of a more widespread integration of cultural practices, products and tactics into the modus operandi of
military organisations. The art installation techniques used in military training camps in the United States
and Canada (Heys and Hennlich, 2010) and the exploitation of the philosophy of writers such as Paul
Virilio, Deleuze
and Guattari by the Israeli Defence Forces (Weizman, 2006) come to represent an organised
movement of cultural ideology into military practice. This study argues that this radical shift -
implemented by the military-recreative complex - in the way that
culture (its products, ideas and behaviours) means that culture can no longer be seen as indebted to
the resistant, anti-hegemonic, left-wing ideology with which it has traditionally been associated. In
other words, it is argued that, after Guantanamo Bay, we will never be able to look at music (and by
extension culture) in the same way again.
The third major argument of this study is that, from 1922 onwards, a network o f undulatory techniques
and strategies (which reflect corresponding wider cultural practices) has been integrated into capitalism -
through the effectiveness of the military-industrial and military-recreational complexes - to separate,
isolate and alienate the subject from the social body of which it is a part. From the example of the factory
and its w o r k f o r c e in the first chapter to that of the barracks and the extended family that is the cult
in the second, it is shown that waveforms are deployed to manipulate the subject's social and cultural
identity.
behaviours of a smaller number of subjects at increasingly decreasing spatial scales, while in the third
chapter the example of the torture cell and the isolated prisoner illustrates the culmination of this
strategy. Unable to further reduce the space occupied by the targeted subject, the new wave
techniques and technologies - symbolised by the HSS - are composed to go beyond open surround
environments and penetrate the hidden cranial spatiality of the subject's brain. Although the single
subject remained the target of the military wave instrumentality, the external spatiality in which he
was affected was reversed. The ultrasound beam therefore prefigures
the alienating environment - the future internalized geography of neural flows and transmissions -
that its target will inhabit.
The crucial proposition of the present study is that wave mapping - mapping of the
The territorialization of the soundscape by the military-recreative complex - must be composed and
arranged in order to render coherent the forms of recording, amplification and resistance. Given the
new set of wave politics heralded by HSS technology, this philosophy of frequency mapping will have
to reassess the taxonomy and indexical nature of spatial relations. This discipline must therefore be a
wave psycho-geography; a frequency modality that heuristically traces the spatial concerns of the
neural environment as well as the environs of the material and the built. As a field of research, it will
have the ambitious task of exploring the spatial, psychological, physiological, social, economic and
sexual effects that waveforms have on the environment.
on our subjectivity. Its methodology - as the structuring of this study suggests - will be
multidisciplinary and multichannel. It will create new forms of knowledge about LRADs (see glossary),
iPods, Mosquitos (see glossary), Intonarumori (see glossary), megaphones and Sequential Arc
Discharge Acoustic Generators (see glossary) - the meta-network of
loudspeaker systems through which the rhythms and cadences of power are transmitted,
connected and modulated.
Location
This study is methodologically situated on similar oscillating grounds to those of wave psychogeography
explained above, more specifically at the crossroads of spatial, psychological, physiological
and viral disciplines. It is an interdisciplinary approach that draws on all these fields of knowledge but
is not subservient to any of them in the sense that it does not defer to predetermined sets of principles
or expectations. Steve Goodman's text
entitled Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear mobilised related modes of enquiry, which,
crucially, were deployed from a radically methodological point of view
different from that adopted in the present study, resulting in the creation of divergent forms of
knowledge. Whereas Goodman chose to propagate his ideas by presenting
fragmentary modules of post-modern style, the present study develops original knowledge by tracing
the undulatory trajectories that led to the techniques of sonic torture deployed at Guantanamo Bay.
In this sense, the methodology of this study presents a meta-narrative of wave pressure, whose
origins it locates in the factory, the conflicts to which it is currently prey in the (crucial) epistemic
rupture provoked by the Guantanamo torture cell, and the future in the ultrasonic hecticity of
ventriloquistic transmissions.
While creating a viracoustic channel that functions as a non-linear and ideologically shifting device that
allows the boundaries between chapters to be crossed, the overall structuring of the present study is
sequential precisely because the scope of the research threatens to divert it from its narrative axis, an
axis that finds its fullest expression in the passage from
sound efficiency to ultrasonic efficiency. The three fundamental arguments (cited above) of
The study depends on being able to follow ideological, spatial, technological and political
trajectories, to highlight their evolution from the military to the civilian sphere and t o amplify
subsequent changes in the evolution of wave techniques, which are being
occur when the old strategies have reached the peak of their usefulness. The methodological imperative
of the study - the driving force behind this research and the desire to create
original knowledge of the soundscape - explores the complex synthesis of phenomena, interactions,
perceptions and indexes that make up any wave event, from listening t o music on the radio to the
ultrasonic diffusion of information camouflaged in the skull.
This is why the traditional meditative philosophical methodology of writers such as Anthony Storr in his
book Notes for Music and the Mind (1992) is not used in the present study; it does not have the
capacity, unlike multidisciplinary enquiry, to explore the convergences, mutations and ruptures that
constitute the organisation of the sound environment (of the whole range o f frequencies and not just
audible frequencies). These are only perceptible when they are listened to from a wide variety of
research perspectives. A new
methodology, such as the one presented in this study, is necessary to understand the infectious,
disembodied and transformational nature, not only of music, but also of other forms of expression.
waveforms at the limits of perception. For similar reasons, a
musicological/sociological methodology such as that used by academics like Jonathan Pieslak in
Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (2009) was not chosen for the present
study, as the results of this approach are the presentation of models
statistical analysis of behaviour based on an extremely schematic analysis o f wave causes and
effects. The creation of original knowledge and detailed theorisations about
waveforms, which are necessary for a better understanding of the ephemeral and transformative
nature of the spatiality of the soundscape, cannot be recorded by means of digital diagrams and
anachronistic modes of musical analysis, which are in particular musicological approaches that do not
come to grips with the somatic index of multiform frequency pressure.
After being considered, the wave philosophy linked to the methodological imperatives of socioeconomic
theory was rejected because it was not considered to have the qualities required to study the
spatial and viral composition of the soundscape. While the temporal structuring of theories proposed
by Jacques Attali in 'Bruits' is important for the methodology of the present study, his arguments
about the functionality of music are too determinate. Attali's assumptions turn composition into a fait
accompli, making the (only) instrumentality of sound too smooth and linear from the point of view of
the fiscal relations that, according to him, exist
between the musical forms of production and t h e distribution and rhythms of the social
organisation they announce. Waveforms bleed and spread, that's their nature. As such, the
A philosophy that expresses all their possibilities will be able to convey their disordered and chaotic
tendencies, as well as their ability to be controlled and directed.
The approach adopted throughout this research is imbued with an ability to discern the spatially
transgressive disposition of frequencies and the strategies that exploit them. In fact, the methodology
employed - although multidisciplinary - owes much to the modalities
of investigation passed on by geographers such as Henri Lefebvre in texts such as La Production de
l'espace (1974), by Edward Soja in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real- and
Imagined Places (1996) and by Foucault in his essay 'Des autres espaces' (1967). Alongside thinkers
such as Foucault, Soja and David Harvey (2001), Lefebvre presented philosophical reflections on what
a methodology of wave psycho-geography might look like, when he developed his theory of
'rhythmmanalysis' (see glossary) and suggested that
Space is first perceived by the ear (1974: 200). It is precisely because waveforms must move in space
that, more than any other phenomenon, they express the nature of space.
the violence inherent in the transgression of borders.
The pressure and force expressed through waveforms always seek to extend the interests, presence
and action of those who transmit them, and they do so in a way similar to that in which territory and
space are the object of conflict and contestation. The methodology used
in this study explores the claim that frequency violence is inextricably linked to the notion of extension
and, by association, geography; for wave pressure is always exerted in and on space and, whether
static or transitory, what inhabits it. Wave pressure inevitably means the dynamics of spatial conflict,
whether that space is interpreted as psychological, geographical, social, sexual or economic. This study
indicates that the associations between sonic warfare, wave pressure and frequency violence have not
previously been linked to the dynamics of geographical theory at such an essential level. This is why a
multidisciplinary methodology with a main channel of spatial analysis is the investigative modality
chosen to amplify and conduct original knowledge on the soundscape and its organisation. The
Postmodern geography and critical reflection on spatial analysis lacks in-depth investigations into how
space, territory and place are denoted by waveforms. This investigation of how architectural space has
been, is and will be amplified, decomposed and modulated by frequencies offers unprecedented
insights into wave spatiality that advance the disciplines of geographical, architectural and sound
studies.
How the transmitter body works
It is the discipline of the study of sound which is supposed to represent mainly the fields of
the sound environment. Given that sound, infrasound and ultrasound territories are constituted by
physical, conceptual, ephemeral, political and geographical attributes, this field of research is
necessarily interdisciplinary. This study creates new knowledge in the field of sound studies by
amplifying this diversity of channels of investigation a n d conveying new theoretical orientations
within the field. A vehicle
body" is used to explore these new evolutionary trajectories and is subsequently exploited
throughout the text; its conceptual anatomy has been reformatted and those of
Its resonant parts have been transplanted, so that it echoes and reveals the synthesis of the
constituent elements of wave environments.
If the skeletal characteristics of the political anatomy of this investigative body have been
retained, his consciousness, limbs, desires and nervous system were removed and a set of philosophies
taken from the somatic were grafted onto him.
The conceptual surgery performed throughout this study makes the proposed body a kind of wave
mutant - a theoretical Frankenstein constructed from parts of a divergent range of writers' thoughts on
the somatic viewed from a frequency perspective. It is essential that the body spatialised by waveforms
be grafted into the larger body of Western philosophy (just a s it was recognised that the 'body of
space' needed to be inserted into the tradition of Western thought at the turn of the last century). Our
mutant form will be the sworn enemy of the post-modern pin-up - the fragmented body - because it will
incorporate a plethora of wave components and the
It will orchestrate a coherent voice. In so doing, it will contribute to the formation of an undulating
ecology that neither disdains nor shies away from blending the perceptions, pressures and arguments of
all the different players.
fields of research - from neurology to geography, from sociology to legal studies, from musicology to
thermodynamics.
This conceptual surgery begins with the thinker who not only links the spatialised body to the
synthetic body, but who has also played a decisive role in efforts to introduce their presence into the
continuum of critical thought. So it is from Henri Lefebvre that we transplant the first part of the body
of our undulatory mutant, the man who teaches us that "... the spatialized body is the body of
synthesis".
space does not consist in the projection of an intellectual representation, in readable-visible, but that it is
first heard (listened to) and acted upon (through physical gestures and displacements)" (1974: 231;
http://www.uppae.fr/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Uppae_LeBris_Espace-et-politique.pdf). Initially,
then, space for Lefebvre is heard rather than seen, and it is this essential affirmation that increases
the effectiveness of the synthetic body as a cartographer and wave ecologist of wave environments.
In a spatiality where listening constitutes the mode
In the case of the predominant cognitive association, it is the ear of Lefebvre's somatic modality that
will be grafted onto our carnal structure.
The next procedure concerns the replacement of the eyes, and so it is to Michel de Certeau that we
must turn, since the ocular system - the cornea, iris and pupil - will not be the dominant form of the
sensory apparatus that informs our bodies. The hierarchisation of the perceptual apparatus requires a
radical overhaul, given that for de Certeau - who has a perceptive view of our sensory behaviour -
"our society carcinises sight, measures all reality by its capacity to be seen".
It is an epic of the eye and the urge to read. It is an epic of the eye and of the impulse to read" (1980, t.
1: 23). The new system of measurement proposed by this body of synthesis is vibratory in nature and
concerns both what we can perceive and what we cannot register through our sensory organs. De
Certeau explicitly states that it is necessary to
compose an alternative set of relationships to be able to understand and speculate about our
environment and our movements in our environment. As our mutant subject anticipates new ways of
perceiving spatiality, the self and the evolution of all the relationships that carry presence, the
transmitter-body offers an infectious and affective channel for re-imagining the practices of everyday
life.
For our investigating body to be fully aware that it can transform itself again, its cognitive apparatus will
be provided by the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who asserted that the "
the mental world - the mind - the world of information processing - is not limited by the skin" (1973
: 429). For Bateson, the notions of perception and activity are not only orchestrated by
They also depend on the subject's modulating and oscillating presence in the environment and on the
relationships that are formed between them. They also depend on the subject's modulating and
oscillating presence within the environment and relationships that are
orchestrated by this form of incarnation. The synthetic transmitter-body will never be limited by its
dermal interface. It will be constantly listening for connections, confluences and echoes, as its nervous
system must be stratified by the novelist Thomas Pynchon. The modes of
The instrumental neurosis which will subsequently occur will enter into sympathetic resonance with the
general constitution of the body, which, provided by Michel Serres' modality of the parasite, will be
indispensable to the transmissible disposition of the subject, since all the newly grafted parts will be able
to be transmitted.
depend on their relationship with the new host organism and their relationship with each other. Thus,
the flows of the body will be viral, because they will link together the new undulatory organs that have
been surgically combined; any idea of prosthetic anatomy is negated, because the viral plasma of the
body-sender gradually gives it a coherent form, without borders and without extension. It is not so
much an assembled body as a positively infectious body - saturated subjectivity.
viral associations and mutations and third-party extremities.
Our body's essential instincts will be replaced by Spinoza's appetites, "the conatus
bodily, the body's effort to persevere in its power to affect and be affected, to persevere in its
possibilities. Whereas instinct generally refers to a closed, pre-programmed system where there is no
room for change, appetite is forward-looking and always in harmony with the body's relationship to an
evolving ecology, with its open relationality" (Goodman, 2009: 70). If our changing subject is to
transmit information to us about the diversity of modulating factors within the new wave ecology, it
will need such a system of innate sensitivities. For we need to equip our bodies with an unshakeable
capacity to connect and mutate in relation to their environment and the pressures it exerts, so that
"the emphasis is no longer on the body, even in its broad, technological sense, but on its powers - what
it can do" (Goodman, 2009: 36). For our transmitter body to be able to ask itself where it can be, it
must
have a curiosity - an intense desire to understand the hinterland of the sound environment and all
those phenomena that teeter on the edge of perception. To give us the last organ we need and thus
conclude our first theoretical operation, we turn to the
radio wave specialist Heinrich Hertz (see glossary), who "spoke of the narrow frontier of the senses".
between consciousness and the 'world of real things'. He stated that 'for a proper understanding of
ourselves and the world around us, it is of the utmost importance that this boundary be
fully explored'" (Johnson and Cloonan, 2009, p. 13).
As mentioned, the transmitter body will have to undergo a further transformation in order to amplify,
record and modulate the wave ecology. However, the operations undertaken will not
will not free the somatic from its carnal and intense relationship with the world in which it lives.
finds. For what we are proposing is a frequential fiction of the carnal that avoids the fetishism of the
'transhuman' predictions (see glossary) of writers such as Hans Moravec (2000), who eulogises the
eschatology of the body (and its difficulties) through an upgrading of man - done by scientific and
technological means. On the contrary, we are in the process of composing a body that listens to the
way in which the political technologies of the somatic are implemented, for it is these extensions and
restrictions of the subject that threaten to "(invest) it, (mark) it, (train) it,
(to) (torture) him, (to) (force) him to do work, (to) (oblige) him to perform ceremonies, (to) demand
signs from him" (Foucault, 1975: 30). When the protagonist of our frequency fiction can detect these
perceptible and imperceptible external pressures; when he can
hear the inaudible, touch the untouchable, and that its viral mechanics will enable it to predict the future.
future forms of socio-spatial organisation, it will have heeded the signal of the undulating forest (3) -
a clarion call, not only to arms, but also to ears, skin, hair, bones, neurons, muscles and nerves, to
mutate - "the imperative to develop new organs, in order to expand our consciousness and our
bodies into new dimensions, hitherto unimaginable and perhaps, ultimately, chimerical" (Jameson,
1991, p. 80).
CHAPTER 1: The convergence of electricity, network amplification and music: the influence o f muzak
in the Fordist factory
Section 1: The first movements of the musical body
At the beginning of the 20th century, following the start of the second industrial revolution (see
glossary), there was an explosion in the mechanisation of European factories, largely as a result of the
pressure exerted on the rhythms of agriculture, the economy and crafts by the advent of the First World
War.
The Mexican philosopher Manuel De Landa alludes to the need for fluid technological production
systems in times of conflict when he writes: "as the last two great wars have shown, victory goes to the
nation best able to mobilise its industrial power".
(1991, p. 34). While the war accentuated the need for industrialisation to organise a large number of
bodies in the form of labour, the cultural and political will to maintain regular production of goods and
the techniques for improving industrial efficiency took on a new importance.
importance. The social sciences, for their part, were mobilised in this effort to organise and
systematise the most economical means of making the individual and social body capable of
carry out specific tasks in the workplace. Methods for locating, ordering and disciplining the mass
body - what Michel Foucault called the body politic - had already been institutionalised within the
prison system and would then be transplanted to the
industrial environments. Foucault defines this somatic order as the "set of material elements and
techniques that serve as weapons, relays, channels of communication and points of support for the
relations of power and knowledge that invest human bodies and subjugate them by
making them objects of knowledge' (1975: 33). Nowhere is the desire to mark the industrialised body
as a knowable and controllable capital more apparent than in the monograph published by
the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow in 1911, The Principles of Scientific
Management (The Principles of Scientific Management), which sets out the technique, later known as
Taylorism, that did most to shape twentieth-century capitalism.
Influenced by military forms of command structures and by the inventions and writings of Charles
Babbage (1835) - in particular his defence of the advantages of the "division of labour" - the
Taylorism was dedicated to organising bodies and maximising their work potential. This is clearly
indicated by De Landa, when he states that "the methods developed by the military to shorten the
chain of command were later exported, through people
like Frederick Taylor, to the civilian sector" (1991: 229). In the United States, it was the industrialist Henry Ford
which employed the techniques determined by Taylor's studies of time and motion (see glossary). By
the time Ford became aware of Taylor's research, he had already initiated and developed the
construction of mobile assembly lines in his car factories, which led to a substantial increase in
production and sales. In 1914, he was responsible for introducing a revolutionary systematic
revaluation of wages, which enabled skilled workers to double their salaries. It took another eight
years for the shortened working week to come into effect, which only added weight to Ford's
observations that the rate of l a b o u r turnover in his manufacturing plants had become so low as to
be unworthy of evaluation (Ford and Crowther, 1922). Not only did Taylor's monograph become the
industrial handbook of scientific rationalism, helping to shape what was to become Fordist capitalism
or
fordism, but it also heralded the use of the musical media inside the factory for the purpose of
achieve the manufacturing targets and comply with the industrial practices set by management.
Although it is acknowledged that the successive transformations of the organisational principles of
Fordism became the dominant model for the practice and understanding of production and distribution
in the workplace, it is also true that it was not until the end of the twentieth century that the principles
of Fordism became the dominant model for the practice and understanding of production and
distribution in the workplace.
With the advent of mass consumption in the United States between the 1940s and 1960s, it's fair to say
that workers were influenced by this model at an earlier stage. The significant increase in the weekly
wage (which doubled to $5 a day) and the radical reduction in the price of cars were designed to enable
workers to have enough money to buy their own cars and thus stimulate the potential impact and
growth of the car market. In line with this fundamental improvement in workers' conditions was the
strategic restructuring of the
working week (shortened to 48-40 hours) and the introduction of the principle of guaranteed
employment. By 1922, these three anxieties - about money, time and the future - had disappeared and
the resulting employment practices became the dominant principles within the Fordist factory.
Despite these advances in working conditions for unskilled workers, many began to criticise the
problematic labour dynamics within the Taylorist-inspired Fordist factory. None was more incisive
than the political theorist and
Gramsci, who became famous for declaring that industrialisation had succeeded "in making the whole
life of the country (the United States) revolve around production. Hegemony is born in the factory
"(quoted in https://cras31.info/IMG/pdf/gramsci_textes.pdf). In one of his many analyses
insight into the plight of the worker in his degrading role as machine, Gramsci eruditely deconstructs
the suppression of certain important psychological aspects of the labour process and their
subordination to the singular capacity of the body to perform monotonous and repetitive actions
within the framework of the work process.
the anaemic technical regime of the conveyor belt and the mechanisms associated with it. In the
following summary, Gramsci makes it clear that he considered the process of body-building
Taylor, he argued, was expressing the idea of the impersonal, standardised mechanical - which in many
ways reflects the status of the objects produced - as a process that began with industrialisation. Taylor,"
he asserted, "expresses in effect
with brutal cynicism, the aim of American society: to develop to the highest degree in t h e worker
mechanical and automatic attitudes, to break the old set of psychophysical links of work
It was a question of reducing the production process to its purely physical and mechanical aspect. But,
in reality, these are not original innovations, they are only the most recent phase in a long process that
began with the birth of industrialism itself (...)".
Womack, Jones and Roos sum up the historical and enduring importance of Ford's industrial
methodologies when they suggest that "twice in this century [the car industry] has changed our most
fundamental ideas about how we make things. And the way we make things determines not only how
we work, but also what we
Our way of thinking and our way of living" (1990: 11). Most relevant to this thesis is the way in which,
in the early days of the car industry, factories, among others, shaped and
industrial workspace, the rhythms of work, the psychological breakdown of workers subjected to
alienating work, the collective and individual movements of the workforce in relation t o automated
processes and, ultimately, the relationship of workers to the soundscape at
within the factory. All the relational dynamics shaping these criteria were irrevocably altered when
the introduction of the electrically powered mobile assembly line was presented as the automated
conductor of workers' rhythms, techniques and power. As the worker's sound environment changed
from natural to mechanical, the continuous flow of the conveyor belt became a sonic signifier of this
change. Never allowing for silence or interruption, the industrialised sound environment had become
repetitively noisy; it constantly marked out the territory of the factory and spilled its contents out
into the street and beyond.
In 1922, the very year in which the Fordist doctrine of functional specialisation and division of labour was
propagated, and at a time when working conditions for the workforce had deteriorated, the company
was in the process of implementing the Fordist doctrine of functional specialisation and division of
labour.
With its relatively improved technology, wire radio was put at the service of the spatiality of the
automated factory. Created by the American Major General George Owen Squier, this technology
made it possible to connect factories, restaurants, small businesses and individual subscribers to
radio broadcasts. Having overcome the problems of signal loss that affected too many
regularly transmitted by radio waves, wire radio provided a continuous programme of music, without
commercials or interruptions, for which Squier made no secret of his contempt. Nor could he stand the
waves of privatisation that had slowed the development of the telephone industry. So he patented his
invention on behalf of the public
in the hope that, by legally authorising any American to explore and develop it, improvements would be
made.
Radio is often praised for the driving role it played in creating a social body
by the simultaneous transmission of sound communications to a large number of listeners.
people over long distances. This desire to destroy space and time by technological means has long
been a priority in the continuum of human ambition (this desire to break the linearity of space and
time is illustrated by the public development of the Internet by the US military over the last three
decades). The invention of wired radio
would to some extent contribute to the formatting and shaping by sound of this coherent social body in
the form of a workforce in its industrial environment. Squier did not live to see the first successful
application of his broadcasting technology - at
which, in the meantime, he had given the name muzak, by which it has been generally known ever since
(see glossary) - in commercial outlets in New York in 1936. Shortly after the sale of
The Second World War broke out, and the ability of muzak to help orchestrate and direct the rhythms of
factory work became clear as it became the natural soundtrack to the manufacturing environment.
The electrically-powered cabled arteries that broadcast music to every part of the w o r k p l a c e
became the sonic equivalent of the electrically-powered assembly line that used and defined every
space in the factory. The whole space of the building was composed around the
sequence of the assembly line production process. N o industrial production area was spared the logic
of movement, rhythm and repetition of the assembly line.
In this way, the factory space and its open layout deconstruct the cellular logic o f spatial
organisation, because the assembly line must be freely accessible to mark and touch each space, each
subjectivity, and its vocation is to bring together all those present a r o u n d its modal logic of diffuse
transience. The repetition imposed on this flow brings the body into a
The music orchestrates the body in a long symphony of staccato manoeuvres.
In the new musical soundscape, rhythms, spaces and workers were linked by a cellular melodic
structuring of time as the workday was reorganized and the work of the day was transformed.
categorised by the harmonious formulas of the muzak and by the (musical) "silences" (the word is put in
inverted commas because a factory was never silent unless the machines stopped working) between the
musical programmes. This is how the architectural form of the cell, which is so important in Foucault's
analysis of the history of the prison in "Surveiller et punir" (to the extent that he declared that "the space
of the disciplines is always, at bottom, cellular" [1975: 145]), came to be used as a "space" in the history
of the prison.
redeployed by the muzak in a comparable way, i.e. in the form of waves, in
the temporal ordering of the factory's sound environment. As a result, the cellular programming of
silence became a means of producing temporal, physiological and psychological effects within the
factory, and a way of classifying the logic of the sound that preceded or followed them.
Analogous to the conveyor belt's capacity for spatial networking, the loudspeaker system's wires
construct and rationalise the architecture of the industrial sound environment b y means of a new transcellular
ordering system. The loudspeakers at the end of each
A set of wires became the sound portals through which workers entered and exited the tangled
soundscapes of natural machine noise and the amplified camouflage of the
parasitic musical programming. Viral in nature, the epistemic modality of the soundscape created by
the loudspeaker system required the systemic architecture of the spatial logic of capital to function as
a vector.
Under these conditions, the factory found itself dotted with a new nervous system, a network of wires
capable of propagating and redistributing its sound charge. The first nervous architecture of the
industrial workplace was now able to respond to those within its walls. From the outset, this sensory
apparatus was effectively capable of restructuring the factory's sonic spatiality, which until then had
been embodied in the dislocated and chaotic sonic by-products of the machines,
was made submissive and predictable. Just as Ford was the first to use an electric motor to drive the
assembly line, Squier's muzak was the first functional industrial music to be amplified and broadcast
throughout the working environment by electricity. In this way, electricity radically re-spatialised the
flow of manufacturing in the Fordist workplace and, for the
for the first time, allowed a piece of music to circulate simultaneously in all the spaces of its
architecture. In this way, the spatial code of the industrial soundscape was rethought by Squier as the
relationships between the peripheral latitudes of the factory and the centralised concerns were
recomposed by the radio-controlled pathogens of the muzak.
The rhythmic sequencing of audio-analgesia
The rationalisation of time and space by the logic of capital had found its soundtrack in the muzak.
For writers like Joseph Lanza, however, muzak in the factory was more about healing workers than
organising them, as evidenced by his assertion that "music was not entertainment but
'audioanalgesia' to kill the pain caused by the urban din" (2004: 11-12). In this analysis, the diffusion
of muzak in the workplace is
presented as a gesture of harmonic empathy on the part of management, an undulating method of
soothing the body in its new inhuman relationship with machines. This statement is
problematic in more ways than one. To begin with, it is extremely revealing that the pain to which
Lanza alludes was not so much caused by the fact that the body was being subjected to a new
mechanical soundscape as by the need to respect these new noisy territories.
composed of staccatos that made the body a numb note in the overall symphony of the
production line. The muzak would eventually become the automaton's lullaby, the dystopia of
random noise covered by the capitalist utopia of repetitive melody. The factories were
the places where these incongruous modalities of sonic spatiality would merge for the first time to
produce bodies subjected to a rule that went against their natural rhythms; it was therefore the forced
industrial choreography of the working day that demanded a musicality in the sonic environment to
shape the body's new rhythms and mechanised movements. The
he territory of the soundscape was skilfully understood by the French politician and economist Léon
Faucher (quoted by Foucault [1975: 246-7]) as being the spatiality in which it was easiest to perceive
the disjunctive power relationship between the machine and the body, when he invited us: 'Enter a
spinning mill; hear the conversations of the workers and the whistling of the machines. Is there a
world a more distressing contrast than the regularity and predictability of these mechanical movements,
The predictability of mechanical movements became the kinesthetic cornerstone of industrialisation's
relationship to the body. The predictability of mechanical movements became the kinaesthetic
cornerstone of industrialisation's relationship with the body, structuring and domesticating its
activities from the minute employees arrived at their workplace to the minute they left. According to
De Landa
(1991: 138), this process of subjecting the organic unpredictability of the human body to the logic of
the machine had been part of army practice for a very long time. He states: "The military process of
transforming soldiers into machines, combined with campaigns to organise the management of human
bodies (in military hospitals), made it possible to obtain a great deal of information about the internal
mechanisms of the organism. The 'great book of the man-machine' was both the outline of the human
body created by doctors and philosophers and the instruction manual for obedient individuals
produced by the great Protestant military commanders - Maurice de Nassau,
Gustave Adolphe and Frederick the Great, etc.". De Landa maintains that the military-industrial complex
had materialised after centuries of dialogue, practice and logistical exchanges between the civilian
economy and its military apparatus (its army). As the economic and social organisations of the
military inventions, such as the muzak, could also contribute to the organisation of a country's
economy.
of the workforce in direct support of the war effort. The ultimate aim was t o mass-produce objects
made up of interchangeable parts using a workforce that would
was itself dispensable and - through music - standardised; a set of precursory techniques that highlight
the contemporary obsolescence inherent in the production and distribution of music, architecture and
objects in general.
The standardisation of music marked the first historical attempt to quantify, categorise and classify
waveforms by their functional arrangement in a
industrial environment. This ordering of frequencies also concerned the movement of workers'
bodies at specific times of the day (and night) and, as such, found its raison d 'être in work. the
'scientific' logic at the crossroads of industrialised temporality, somatic engineering and architectural
routines. While elucidating the founding principles of the
penitentiary system, Foucault (1975: 139-40) identifies the disciplinary strategies and techniques that
would then be transferred to the industrial domain of the workplace. In the following quotation, he
clearly explains how the body was to be subjected to utilitarian political, social and political methods:
"The human body enters into a machinery of power that searches it, it
disarticulates and recomposes it. A 'political anatomy', which is also a 'mechanics of power', is coming
into being; it defines how we can take hold of the bodies of others, not simply so that they do what we
want, but so that they operate as we want, with the techniques, according to our will.
the speed and efficiency that are determined. Discipline thus produces submissive, exercised,
'docile' b o d i e s ".
To explore the 'docile body' further, it is useful to refer to De Lanza's concept o f audio-analgesia
and explore the composition of the numbed body. Lanza inadvertently stumbles upon the notion of the
sedated body - the body that wants to kill pain by using music to
to soothe its industrial organs. The body is laid bare, vulnerable in its new composition, in
waiting for sound operations. What is interesting here is that the process that Ford applied to mass
production and consumption, namely its system of standardisation - of manufacturing techniques and
components - was also applied to the sound environment in order to achieve a
recorded interchangeability and repetition. Serial numbers were inscribed on objects such as firearms
and cars, so that they could be classified and easily changed or repaired if necessary. In the production
of the undulating object that was the muzak, all the shifts of the working day were also serialized and
categorized in much the same way, so that muzakal shifts could be broken down, replaced or repaired
if they were deemed dysfunctional (for example, because they were too stimulating or too
unstimulating for the workers). In the same way that the conveyor belt moved the object repeatedly so
that it would
could be processed step by step, so the muzak transported sound pieces one after the other in
fifteen-minute cycles, at the end of which a sound object was produced that acted on the employee.
The process is almost an inverted reflection of the conveyor belt technique, an embryonic wave-like
heterotopia in which all the parts of the scientific logic of the muzak
can be included in any song, because each of them propagates a particular
functionality linked to all the other songs broadcast during the fifteen-minute segment, hour after hour,
day after day. At the same time, on the fringes and at the crossroads of music, the industry and
of the social sciences, the muzak becomes an audiotopia - the sonic equivalent of the contradictory
mirror that Foucault makes the paradigm of the heterotopia. The muzak reflected the power of music
to unite, to motivate, to shape patterns of economic and social behaviour and to compose somatic
rhythms, but nevertheless it had no social connotations outside the workplace, w h i c h made it at
the same time an unreal undulatory spatiality, because its contradictory identity, which
resided in the fact that it expressed both the unity of employees and a logic of industrial work, meaning
that it was both a utopian analgesic and the dystopian agent of embodied discipline.
By attempting to quantify, temporalise and rationalise what was previously considered to be the
most unscientific of spaces - the soundscape, muzak aimed to make wave territories knowable,
controllable, perceptible and available for the purposes of indexing and stimulating human actions
within their emotional boundaries. The body becomes the object of scrutiny, affect and, ultimately,
control within these newly defined sites of experimentation that constitute the industrial workplace.
"The body
Foucault, by becoming a target for new mechanisms of power, offers himself to new forms of
knowledge. The body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; the body manipulated by
authority, rather than traversed by animal spirits; the body of useful training and not of rational
mechanics, but in which, by that very fact, a certain number of natural requirements and functional
constraints will be announced" (1975: 157). The useful body of the worker, alienated from the objects
he produces and, to quote Georg Lukacs, "incorporated as a mechanised part in a mechanical system"
(1922: 95), finds itself in a new sound environment composed of new collective rhythms and
coordinated movements. Such somatic organisation echoes the strategy of the production line, a
context that Georg Lukacs defines as "completed and functioning in total independence from it, to
whose laws it must submit" (2002: 95). As the muzak ensures that these new laws, charts and maps are
consigned to the libraries of knowledge, which aim to perceive, predict and, ultimately, know the
behaviour of the organism, the somatic is recomposed in hitherto unknown waves of industrial
movement. Thanks to the filter
of muzak, music was designed to draw the body into and bend it to relationships with disciplinary
methods that would render the industrial subject even more incapable of acting independently in the
workplace.
Transnational harmonies
Just as the 'multiplexing' technology of muzak (see glossary) became cable - one of the ubiquitous
communications technologies that gave rise to the notion of the global village (see glossary) - so the
Fordist techniques of standardisation became the modern practices that led to what we now call
economic globalisation within capitalism. Just as Squier dreamed of being able to amplify music in
workplaces and homes across the United States and around the world, so Ford contributed to the
advent of a set of economic principles that defined an era of transnational trade. It was through the
introduction of information systems such as cable and the industrial processes of mass production (in
Starting with Fordism) that notions of what constituted a nation, a territory and a community changed
irrevocably.
The American sociologist Saskia Sassen (1998: XXVIII), who follows a similar line of reasoning, points out that
"(l)oglobalisation - as illustrated by the spatial economy of the advanced information industries - is a key factor
in the development of the information society.
denationalises the national territory. This denationalisation, which to a large extent is taking place in
the big cities, has become legitimate for capital and has indeed been presented in an advantageous
way by many government elites and their economic advisers".
By redefining the spatial dynamics of the soundscape and the landscape, industrialisation and its
and productivist technologies that went hand in hand with it, definitively abstracted our culture.
relationship with the body and its place among wave forms. For the first time, sound - with the secret
intention of organising the rhythms of the workers in space - was amplified on a large scale,
announcing
in the sound environment the ways in which bodies would be displaced en masse through globalistinspired
treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (see glossary). Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels (1848: 18) were the first writers and philosophers to realise that capitalism would turn
into a system of global expansionism in the long term, when they
perceptively predicted: "The hallmark of the bourgeois age is the
incessant upheaval of production, it is the relentless shaking of all the conditions of production.
The result is perpetual insecurity and turmoil. Gone are the social bonds, unchanging until then and
frozen in their rust, with their trail of ancient and respectable ideas and beliefs; worn out without
even having had time to ossify solidly, the bonds of recent formation... The need to open up everwider
outlets for its products incites the bourgeoisie to a frantic race to the bottom.
surface of the globe. It must insinuate itself everywhere, establish itself everywhere, hang up the
network of its exchanges everywhere" [1901: 17-8]. Particularly relevant to this study is the last
sentence of this article
a quote that could be applied to the muzak and its creator's desire to correlate a dense mass with the
programming of a scientifically produced sound environment. The range of musical programmes
offered by the muzak - soundscapes designed for the workplace,
home and free time - required those who listened to it to be permanently connected and validated,
so that it could spread and proliferate. Adherence to globalisation does not require as much,
according to Marx, for whom history would come to an end when Western technological development
took place at an exponential rate. The rapid expansion that would follow
would lead to replication of the same processes and a subsequent fall in manufacturing and selling
costs, which in turn would lead to a fall in profits. Thanks to his perceptive economic analysis, Marx
predicted that the entrepreneurial answer to this conundrum would be to have goods manufactured in
less technologically developed countries, in regions where labour, land and available resources were
cheaper, thus guaranteeing entrepreneurs higher profit margins and at the same time allowing them to
create economic systems based on global logics of geographical appropriation. By transforming the
least developed cultures with which it came into contact, the process of globalisation would inevitably
reproduce the dynamics of the global economy.
This, in Marx's mind, would lead to all nations dissolving into a progressive global matrix before the
inevitable transmutation into a world communist system. This, in the spirit of Marx, would lead to all
nations dissolving into a progressive global matrix before the inevitable transmutation into a world
communist system.
For theorists of globalisation such as Sassen, "globalisation is a process that generates contradictory
spaces, characterised by contestation, internal differentiation, the emergence of new identities, and the
emergence of new forms of social cohesion.
continual crossing of borders' (1998: XXXIV). This notion of connected spaces that are by definition
contradictory is reminiscent of the soundscape of the muzakale factory - the master plan of the
industrial globalisation - and the attempt to suppress noise and dissonance through melody and
harmony. Muzak proposed to deny the random, chaotic and disquieting nature of the industrial
soundscape, arguing instead for military-inspired technologies that could p r o d u c e new malleable
soundscapes; frequency formulas that could be arranged to work in any geographical context and
orchestrated to bring orderly collective reasoning and harmonious compatibility to all that touches
life.
or working conditions. The context of the soundscape created by muzak is thus a context that
produces new, contradictory compositions, based on dynamics that were previously understood to
be oppositional, that of noise (of machines) and that of melody (of muzak). Through electricity, the
spatial partitions of the juxtapositional aesthetics we so readily accept today - that of harmoniously
organised sound (i.e. that which is connected) and that of randomly discordant cacophonies (i.e. that
which is alienated) - were forged into each other for the first time within the factory, the worker's
body becoming the anatomical mixer that served as a channel and amplifier for all frequencies.
Section 2: The "it's all in the head" industrial logic
At the end of the 19th century, cathedrals and churches were the places where the mass of society
gathered. Within these buildings, religious practice, instruction and community ties were made
manifest and validated by groups of believers who celebrated the visible signifiers o f faith - the
cross, the paintings, Scripture - and, perhaps more importantly, the signifiers of faith in the church.
frequencies - choral singing, organ recitals, prayer, the very low infrasonic roll frequencies of the low
notes of the organ, which created a sense of fear and apprehension in many believers. When
industrialisation arrived and factories and workshops offered the
By creating new architectural gathering places for the mass social body, the wave techniques used to
organise large numbers of people were transferred from the place of worship to the workplace. Aware
that the methods used by religion to spatialise and territorialise the soundscape were assimilated by
industry, Lanza asserts that "modern capitalism has beaten religion to a pulp. If background music was
enough to orchestrate the houses of God, why can't it orchestrate the houses of commerce? (2004: 11-
12) Another way of looking at this rhetorical question would be to rephrase it as follows: as religious
values were pushed into the background of everyday life by modern capitalism, how did music help to
orchestrate the psychological demands of the houses of commerce in the 21st century?
To the detriment of the needs of the houses of God? As a space for broadcasting the airwaves, the
church - previously socially consecrated as the most important sound producer in every town and village
- lost its domination of the architectural soundscape to industry. Suddenly, the frequency plans that had
been developed by religion were orchestrated by the socio-economic imperatives of capital. Of
particular interest for our purposes are the wave techniques that aim to influence and psychologically
manipulate the mass social body; practices designed to unite the individual in a collective composition of
beliefs, while alienating him through the negation of space.
necessary for individual expression. As workers took on new
In their relations with machines, they were driven by the rhythms of automation rather than by those
produced by nature. This meant that they had to react to the demands of a factory manager or foreman
(who did not want interaction, but simply submission) and no longer to the signs that had previously
prompted them to sing collectively in the fields or repeat the words of a priest. It was at this point that
the industrial worker began to question the rural and religious belief systems that had previously
defined the architectures of his life.
It also began to break down its relationship with the old wave structures of perception.
In the factory, a whole new world of spatialities, temporal modalities, soundscapes and social
relations came into being. These were partly the result of the repetitive organisation that
religious systems. As Foucault remarked, "(t)he use of time is an old heritage. The monastic
communities had undoubtedly suggested the strict model. It spread quickly. Its three main
procedures - establishing scansions, forcing people to
determined occupations, regulating rehearsal cycles - were found very early on in colleges,
workshops, hospitals" (1975: 151). He continues. "For centuries, religious orders were masters of
discipline: they were specialists in time, great technicians of rhythm and regular activities" (1975: 151-
2). As a new dictator of social and work rhythms, Fordist capitalism entered into competition with
religious organisations; it was a matter of who could win the most followers. Instead of a church and a
set of beliefs for life and a factory and a job for life; instead of pious congregations of the faithful,
trade unions brought employees together to give them the means to fight against unjust forms of
oppression. The preacher was supplanted by the foreman and, more pertinently for this study, the
promise of God's omnipresent heavenly voice by omnipresent music that similarly encompassed the
entire space at all times as it emanated from the factory's network of elevated wired speakers. The
arrangement of the wall-mounted loudspeakers at head height thus imitates the religious longitudinal
order of waveforms in which the "voice of God" comes from "Heaven", a predetermined arrangement
that has its frequency origin in the
Psalm 18:13 ("The Lord thundered in heaven; the Most High uttered his voice").
It is no coincidence that the frequent power relations that were established between the Church and
its subjects - the huge organ pipes that make up the psychologies of respect and fear within the
congregation - can be found in the factory. The architecture of the cathedral is partly based on the
function of getting the faithful to adopt collective models of associated behaviour by generating
a sense of threat by the sheer size of the building in which they are transmitted.
The same applies to the factory. Foucault acknowledges this in part when he states that
"The factory explicitly resembles a convent, a fortress, a walled city" (1975: 144). What is obviously
problematic about this statement is its blatant disregard for the divergent sound architectures of the
two structures. The factory at that time was perhaps the most
The cathedral was the noisiest environment ever created by man outside the tumultuous cacophony of
war, and was in no way comparable to the hushed soundscape of the monastery. The cathedral was part
of a radically different sound policy to that of the monastery, a dynamic that was to be relayed by the
industrialists who filled the vast airspaces of the factories with amplified waves of authority. The
The presence of a power superior to the collectively alienated singularity of a human body was
thus represented by music, which existed in the space previously reserved for the voice of God.
The spatial sanctity of the cathedral, and in particular the area higher than the average man, was and
still is reserved for surveillance and sound expression.
of omnipresent intelligence. In the early 20th century, this dynamic was strategically deployed in the
churches of capitalism - the factories. While transmitting supposedly 'comforting' psychological
messages to workers as they toiled among the machines, networked louds p e a k e r s subtly
reminded each employee that a power greater than themselves possessed the power to amplify
their presence in every square centimetre of the building, from wall t o wall, ceiling to floor. In this
set of architectural relationships, the presence of an invisible intelligence is announced. An
undulating phenomenon that can extend to any place at any time, and that can choose to provide an
audible sanctuary or a sonic battlefield at its own discretion. It is precisely this composition of a
frequency presence that creates a
A feeling of self-monitoring in the industrial subject, as he is constantly informed that he has a passive
role - that he is liable to be recorded and that his capacity for action is stifled - within the envelope of
the factory's loudspeaker-fed power relations.
An important point to make here is that the installation of networked loudspeaker systems in factories
at the beginning of the twentieth century made it possible to control the sound architecture of a given
space and thus allowed authorised individuals to influence, direct and manipulate the physiology and
psychology of its inhabitants. Just as important as the quantitative and qualitative claims about how
networked loudspeaker systems influenced workers through their musical content is the observation
that this technology worked covertly. By their very nature, the wired auditory arteries of the
transmission network allowed authorised individuals to do things that were once considered
supernatural, i.e. to have the ability to be present in many spaces at the same time. The orchestration
of this decentralised spatiality and
The architecture of the factory became the dynamic theatre of industrialisation, in which the
owner sonorously attributed several roles to the worker as an individualised and alienated actor on the stage.
a crowded stage. This worker performs contradictory roles on an oxymoronic stage that encourages
speech as a source of pleasure, yet inhibits it by stifling silence with a camouflaged soundtrack.
Extending the metaphor chronologically and technologically, the notion of the factory as a theatre
of industrial operations could lead inversely to the notion of the factory as a theatre of industrial
operations.
factory as a silent film, in which the worker/actor, directed from above - the parts of the role that a
character speaks in a theatrical dialogue being replaced by the parts of the assembly l i n e - finds
himself performing an atomised set of actions and activities that have no discernible meaning in the final
production, in front of a (hidden) audience of consumers with whom he has no apparent relationship.
Top of the hit parade - The emotional terrain of the worker
In large industrial production plants, the shifting terrain of the status of workers' emotional and
psychological states was objectified as a subject for phenomenological study in its own right. Research
and tests were undertaken on the cognitive dynamics and behavioural patterns of workers faced with
repetitive tasks, and taxonomies of interpersonal relations were drawn up.
formatted to help systematise harmonious functionality. In short, the worker's psychological landscape
was identified as a source of natural energy that had to be
cataloguing and understanding so that plant owners can make the most of its brand new status and
potential. In this way, the emotional reserves of
This resource was channelled through the distribution of muzak.
In the factory of the 1920s, we hear one of the first attempts to connect a neural mass network of
productivity to the influence strategies of the muzak; each mind became a functional reference point
of ultimate industrial efficiency. Just as each worker is simultaneously subjected to the same sonic
influence for the same length of time, so the soundscape acquires the status of a systematic field of
relationships applicable to all those who exist within it. In the acoustic laboratory of the Fordist factory,
the epistemological strategies of localisation,
of recording and manipulating mass psychology mark out the sonic colonisation of a somatic industrial
rhythm. As a distributed system, muzak was formatted to rationalise activity and presence, capturing
and influencing the minds and bodies of those forced t o listen. The network system created by
Squier had produced a recordable soundscape and
It was in this psychological spatiality, now cognisable, that the sequencing of somatic tempo could be
programmed and the rate of productivity controlled. It was thanks to this psychological spatiality,
now cognisable, that the sequencing of somatic tempo could be programmed and the rate of
productivity controlled.
As already mentioned, with the advent of industrialisation, the emotional and psychological
behaviour of the body during periods of pressure, stress and calm became objects of scientific study.
A myriad of laws, theories and experiments were presented under the name of industrial psychology
to prove that the human mind could be influenced and manipulated in the workplace and that the
resulting rates of bodily efficiency could be 'improved'.
The idea of using music as a stimulant in the workplace had been proposed before many of these
theories w e r e developed and, before 1915, the inventor Thomas Edison had developed some
a number of ideas about the power of music on the individual as well as the mass body. He conducted
experiments to determine whether or not the use of music could reduce or suppress the specific
frequency ratios of the factory's big machines, and to see whether it had any influence on the way the
machines worked.
music had a positive or negative effect on the morale and motivation of workers. Encouraged by his
early discoveries, Edison recognised music's ability to influence the listener's behaviour and began to
take a close interest in its capacity to direct emotions and actions in the workplace.
The criteria for the experiments undertaken by Edison as part of his research into how formatted music
programmes (broadcast by a phonograph) could be used in an industrial environment included
indications of how to camouflage the humming and pounding of industrial machinery with sound.
Trials in the factory's newly compartmentalised workspaces failed because of variations in signal strength
in the emerging transmission and l o u d s p e a k e r technologies. However, it is in this industrial context
that we can place the first notes and amplified compositions of the psychological manipulation of a
distributed workforce via a
networked system of electric loudspeakers. Never before had it been envisaged to be able to
simultaneously transmit music to a plethora of different spaces. So, for the first time, the burgeoning
technology of loudspeakers allowed engineers to think about building
soundscapes in multiple spatialities with identical or different content over orchestrated durations.
Edison's research into the controlled psychological manipulation of the mass body and its repetitive
routines was the first of its kind and provided the superficial 'acoustic' (see glossary) fingerprints of
the functional use of sound in industrial architecture.
Two years before George Owen Squier's loudspeaker technology became commercially viable in 1922,
Edison and his Compagnie Nationale de Phonographie had carried out a series of studies on the use of
loudspeakers.
intensive research into the heuristic application of music. Incidentally, Edison motivated his
his employees and collaborators to derive as many functionalities and utilitarian applications as
possible from all his inventions. Given his desire to market the multifaceted effects of music to a wide
range of industrial, social and cultural groups, he employed Walter Van Dyke Bingham, assistant
professor of applied psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later to become an industrial
psychologist). With regard to the company's rich archive of phonographic recordings, the young
psychologist's contract led him to study and quantify the effects of music, defined by three
fundamental criteria: research into song selection, research into mood changes and research into the
influence of music on muscular activity. Bingham's earlier psychological and philosophical research
revolved around the question of why certain sound arrangements constituted the melodic and musical
unity of the music.
how these melodic stimuli then influenced human motor movements. This convergence of interest in
the functional quality of somatic and industrial motricity between 1910 and 1920 was not without
significance for authors such as Eleanor Selfridge-Field, who documented the
efforts to rationalise movement within the industrial workspace. In her research, she traces how
Bingham exploited the potential of the motor and reconfigured the incoherent zones of industry into a
fluid spatiality of perpetual monophonic flow. Selfridge-Field (1997: 293) goes on to explain how these
movements are mapped analogously to the movements of the nervous system of the human body,
when she quotes Bingham's conclusion that 'the motor theory of melody provides a clear explanation
of the nature of melodic 'relation'. Two or more tones are considered 'related' when they trigger the
same organic response (...) The origin of (...) feelings of 'relationship' (can be attributed to) two main
forces (...) The first of these, the phenomenon of consonance, is innate (...) But, a l t h o u g h the
basis of consonance is inherent in the structure of the nervous system and the acoustic properties of
vibrating bodies, the history of music and observation show abundantly that these same innate
tendencies are subject to enormous modifications in the course of existence.... "
The discursive locus inferred from all this is the distributed sensorium of the resonant body. The
body, historically influenced by external stimuli, is placed by Bingham at the crossroads of scientific,
phenomenological, musical and industrial discourse. His tests consisted of assessing the way i n
which his subjects' moods changed as they listened to music recorded by Edison; he represented the
results in the form of graphs and tables; he had accumulated a large number of them. In a follow-up
report to Edison dated 1 February 1921, Bingham expressed his hope that his research would
produce "new information on the power of music on the mind
(Selfridge-Field, 1997: 297). On 13 October 1920, Bingham announced that a prize would be awarded to
any researcher who had undertaken a 'meritorious' investigation into one of the following 'appropriate
subjects
:
1. Classification of musical selections according to their psychological effects.
2. Individual differences in musical sensitivity.
3. Types of listener.
4. Validity of introspection in the study of affective responses to music.
5. Moods altered by music.
6. Effects of familiarity and repetition: durability of the emotions produced by different types of
selection.
7. Effects of different types of music on muscular activity.
8. An experimental study of music as an aid to the synchronisation of routine industrial activities.
In 1921, dissatisfied with the direction Bingham's research was taking (the fact that the results of the
study of subjects' responses to tests could not contribute directly to the distribution of the results of the
tests), Bingham decided to launch his own study.
Edison's catalogue of specific recordings), a company vice-president by the name of William Maxwell
took the initiative of creating a Change of Mood Chart to remedy this apparent deficit of utilitarian
spirit. In a single-page chart, the subject is asked seven simple questions, including the following:
"What is the most noticeable change in mood that has occurred in
(Did you go from serious to happy, from happy to serious, from worried to carefree, from nervous to
calm? Etc.) and "please comment on how your mood changed".
(Maxwell, 1921). Maxwell's 'mood tests' were taken so seriously that they were conducted at Yale
University, although the analysis of these sound surveys was reported somewhat fancifully by the New
York Sun, whose prediction Eleanor Selfridge-Field (1997: 300) quotes as follows
The day will come, Yale predicts, when pneumonia will be treated not only by fresh air and malted
milk, but by
a few discs of winged waltz. If a man has broken his arm and is worried about it, a military march or
perhaps an excerpt from a comic opera could be given to him after each meal. Another article on the
Yale experiment was published in the Journal Courier on the 22nd, which expanded on the idea by
stating that 'the tests were intended to determine what kinds of music can be used in the
treatment of neurotics' "
By the 1920s, the desire to understand, classify and explore the psychology of the worker had
become firmly rooted in socio-scientific research. The presence, movements and rhythms of the
physical body were no longer the only characteristics of the worker that management wanted to
understand.
was careful to treat and order. From a psychological point of view, the directive that explained
management's desire to change a worker's mood is analogous to the way a supervisor can
speeding up or slowing down a conveyor belt or a phonograph. This desire to increase the company's
levels of psychological influence over its workforce was disguised to achieve the apparently harmless
objective of "boosting morale"; by effectively presenting
phenomena such as music as collective experimental stimulants that would shape and improve a
person's behaviour, and implicitly holding out the prospect of an improvement in their emotional life, as
if the act of listening were more beneficial to workers than to companies.
By redefining the temporality and spatiality of the factory, the muzak can be perceived - through its
the results of Hawthorne's experiments (see glossary) and, by extension, through the 'school of the
In this sense, the muzak becomes the inversion of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (see glossary) in
industry. In this sense, the muzak becomes the inversion of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon (see glossary)
(4) in industry. Networked loudspeakers are dispersed, amplifying and inhabiting every space. They
propose a peripheral ideology in the workplace rather than the centralised organisation of the
penitentiary panopticon, which observes the surrounding cellular spatiality. The behaviours that
resulting from being subjected to these systems - if read in the light of the conclusions of Hawthorne's
studies - are similar. What is most important here is the redefinition of the
psychological spatiality of the prison in the case of the panoptic and of the factory in the case of the
muzak. In the prison, it is the panopticon that threatens to transform the voyeur's vision into a
relationship with the prisoner's activities, while in the factory, it is the loudspeaker system that
propagates the sound of authorised persons into the spatiality of the workplace and the emotional
terrain of the workers' minds.
Systematic attempts to rationalise and predict the physiological and physical mappings of the
Psychological studies of the worker had been undertaken before the invention of the muzak. For
example, James-Lange's theory (see glossary) proposed that emotions were triggered by changes in
the way we perceive the world.
that are manifested in experiences in the world, whereas the theory of
Cannon-Bard's theory of emotion (see glossary) argued exactly the opposite. The aim of the multitude of
theories of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that attempted to understand, systematise
and organise the mental behaviour and psychological activities of mankind was to
to rid men and women of their chaotic states of mind, their capricious habits and their rebellious
social behaviour in order to regulate everyone's movements
of them and to drive them by a set of socio-scientific motivations. To make a l l minds think and all
bodies move in unison was and still is the dream of those who want to persuade, produce and
distribute the mass body, which is linked to capitalist and military concerns. In the factories of the
twentieth century, we can hear how the industrial elite standardised the irregular body (of each
individual) into a repetitive and reproducible production cell. We
we can listen to how they exploited cultural production to influence outcomes
economic. Orchestrated by the rhythms, tempos and spatial timbres defined by their mechanical
partners and accompanied by the muzak, the mass industrial body of work was recomposed and
reinserted into the psychological roles that had just been composed within the Fordist chorus of the
conveyor belt. The attempt to psychologically condition the masses through sound was heard not only in
the factory or in the Stuka-dotted skies, but also in the radio propaganda that the British and German
governments regularly broadcast in an attempt to
to deceive each other and to increase the degree of confidence of their own population in the State
and the degree of camaraderie that was theirs. With regard to the ability of frequencies to promote
cooperation and to facilitate the compression of multichannel frequencies into a singular rhythm,
De Landa (1991: 64) argues that "(p)any population whose individual members oscillate or vibrate is
capable of reaching a singularity and thus of beginning to oscillate in a synchronised manner.
When this singularity is actualised and the rhythms of the population as a whole are
The individuals who make up the 'team' acquire a natural esprit de corps. This 'team spirit' enables
them to behave as if they were a single organism".
Although it is clear that De Landa is analysing here the ability of military groups to move
It is in the sound environment that we can hear these strategies and techniques bleeding noisily
between the military and industrial bodies of thought. It is in the sound environment that we can
hear these strategies and techniques bleeding noisily between the military and industrial bodies of
thought. In the present study, it is the transmissions of the military-industrial complex that we set
out to amplify and record as they are transmitted.
find a new expression and a new effectiveness in the organisation of space, bodies and time by
military-recreational complexes.
Section 3: Disconnecting the global village
Throughout this thesis, it is argued that, since 1922, frequency strategies have been used to disconnect
and alienate individuals, families and groups from their belonging or their
relationship to their social networks, architectural contexts and socio-cultural affiliations. For
thousands of years, the auricular frequencies of music have been understood to have the capacity to
bring people together to dance, sing and work. Given that we routinely see music's ability to unite
humans in a wide range of cultural endeavours, it's logical to think that such an effective and influential
instrument could be used to accomplish a number of things.
activities of a less convivial nature. The muzak broadcast in the industrial factories of modernism could
be interpreted as a source of camaraderie or consolation, but this interpretation would be superficial
and would overlook the fundamentally (in)social elements of muzak, which silenced the workforce so
that there was less communication between workers. Previously, on farms, the songs that spoke of
suffering and of
emancipation through religion and death were commonplace, but on the factory floor, these kinds of
soundscapes - like any songs that might incite revolt or dissent - were frowned upon. New machines
were more important to the industrialists than the well-being and health of those who operated them.
Most of the time, all forms of music created by employees were seen as interferences and distractions
in the workplace.
the work process. In this sense, the frequencies injected into the factories could be perceived as
as the initial melodies of alienation. In this way, the muzak came to supplant a sonic space full of
stories, complaints, laughter, collective dissonance and chatter.
sound components of relationship-building and social cohesion that are common among groups
undertaking long, repetitive tasks.
As a viral soundscape (one that is composed and transmitted to complement, hide or mutate another set
of frequencies in an urban or naturalistic context), the muzak also dissociated workers from their
architectural surroundings and from the internal and external sound markers that made up a sense of
movement throughout the day or night. By distancing the
The muzak contributed to the creation of a set of disconnected and autonomous working conditions,
the success of which depended solely on the relationship between the worker and the machines
associated with him.
As employees could no longer relate directly to the sounds emitted by the equipment in their
workplace, by people coming and going in the stairwells and corridors, or by the sounds of the people
in their workplaces, they could no longer relate directly to the sounds emitted by the equipment in
their workplaces.
work, nor to sounds outside the factory, they were, each individually, brooded over by the muzak,
which tried to suppress all the factors that could help the worker to adapt mentally to the new
situation.
industrial space and time. Lanza acknowledges this attempt to alienate the worker from everything
that was not linked to the workplace in his daily life, when he writes: "If Taylorism could
evaluate the time lag between when the clerks picked up their pencils and when they used them to
produce their paperwork, the sound engineers could also produce their version of the optimum
working range" (2004: 27).
Once the external or internal sound markers of temporality have disappeared, a new temporality is created.
dependence on the factory owners orchestrated the conditions that signalled break time, lunch time and
departure time. This new wave of dependence on management led to a further loss of independence
for the employee. Without a clear conception of his relationship to the spatial and temporal conditions
with which he is involved, it is more difficult for an employee to "get on with his job".
to have the feeling of being able to influence the world and others, especially if this feeling is
based on resistance to or questioning of those who construct and apply the rules of the said work
environment. As the movement of machines reaffirmed the employee's sense of disorientation by
forcing him or her to move in an automated fashion, the worker was forced to live at the pace of their
blind synchronicity. The machine's ability not only to
As a result, the mechanical robot became the fantasy of the production line in the industrial factory.
As for muzak, it became the sonic fantasy through which robots danced with capital, even though, at
the time, they were still the only robots in the world.
chaperoned by workers; the fifth wheel of the carriage who didn't want to take part, but who had no
choice because their hands were tied by the choreography of progress.
As the newly mechanised factories buzzed with manufacturing satisfaction, the muzak technology that
would help give birth to the collective notion of a global village was developed.
actively used to alienate employees from their colleagues and, more importantly for our purposes, from
their architectural sense of space and place. The muzak, with its duality of capabilities and purposes, is
the first example of an electrically generated soundscape to play on both the desire for mass
communication and the discomfort of alienation. As indicated in the introduction, music had always had
this dual potential in the past, but it had never had such contagious potential. Now, in fact, it aimed to
affect simultaneously
massive groupings of people in divergent geographical areas. The fact that these new radio musical
soundscapes were unknown to the workers was also a factor.
important, because the first reactions they provoked must have been waves of disorientation and
surprise. When a technology of this kind is implemented, there is always a
initial period of adaptation and learning for those who came into contact with it and, in the case of
the inexperienced wave bodies born in the factories, there was a time of
cultural and somatic metamorphosis.
Emily Thompson (2004: 2) comments on this intrinsic modulating and transitional characteristic of the
industrial soundscape as follows: "A soundscape, like a landscape, ultimately has more to do with
civilisation than with nature, and is therefore constantly under construction and in flux.
constantly evolving. The American soundscape has undergone a particularly
the early years of the twentieth century. In 1933, the nature of sound and the culture of listening were
both different from anything that had gone before."
The introduction of muzak into the citadel of spatially controlled repetitive work processes - the factory -
was approved and ratified at a time in history when the sonic territory of the workplace
was relatively unexplored, poorly mapped and politically untouched. In 1922, there were few
directives, regulations or laws relating to the soundscape and what existing within it meant
psychologically, physiologically, politically or legally for the body.
In Squier's 'Tayloresque' strategy of connecting through the ubiquity of musical cycles every worker in
the soundscape, there remained a meta-objective, which was to compose within the factory global
patterns of repetitive action, production and payment that would subsequently extend into a global
context as the repetitive ideology informed the modalities of distribution and marketing. Such viral
coordination and classification of time and space, from the factory to the global networks of expanding
industrial capitalism, is the embodiment of Foucault's idea that the micropolitics of the local is
transplanted and etched onto the logical map of global capitalism.
Depending in part on the sonic-political virginity of the workforce, the first muzak networks were not
interested in the exchanges of micropolitics; what interested them was defining the mass subject and
manipulating it as a single body. The muzak headquarters - where the networks originated and
escaped from - was hidden from the workers and out of their reach. Exposed to the music broadcast
over the loudspeakers, the workers could not change the sound, slow it down, manipulate it or destroy
it, because they didn't even know where it was being transmitted from. Just as the machines in the
factory alienated workers from their work, so networked music similarly separated the body from its
architectural environment by distancing workers from the hidden and inaccessible 'transmission
centre' of control (see glossary). Within these dystopian schemes, the muzak bunkers of avarice gave
rise to transmission networks that directed information.
and influenced behaviour - cementing the perception of geographical and psychological control that
amplified the ideological domination of the factory owner. It was precisely detachment - being aware
that you existed on the other side of the network interface - that made the worker a passive subject
and put the 'mass industrial body' (see glossary) in the disadvantageous position of having no power
over the composition, distribution or destruction of (wave) information.
The carnal cadence of the body-antenna
To paraphrase Schafer (1970), the universal symphony that is the soundscape is an incessant
undulating spectacle that simultaneously makes us an audience, a performer and a composer. In the
newly composed soundscapes of industrialisation, it is useful to situate the emergence of the bodyantenna
in an industrial context. Energised by electricity, the body-antenna alternated between the
promise of future information exchange systems and the usefulness of the strategies then in force to
persuade workers to surrender to the machine's embrace. Factory workers were able to become the
first bodies to generate these antithetical, wave-like ontologies.
divergent, because they were both programmed in such a way as to install silence between
The first effects of the public address system - its development, in resonance with the body-antenna,
into a carnal industrial operator that depended as much on sound as on visuals - had far-reaching
repercussions. The initial effects of the wired public address system - its development, in resonance
with the body-antenna, into a carnal industrial operator that depended as much on sound as on
visuals - had far-reaching repercussions. The electrical amplification of sound in private, public and
interstitial spaces had
the twentieth century. Ultimately, as we will see in the course of this study, the ideological,
technological and psychological itineraries of loudspeaker systems will take us on a diversion through
an undulatory network that includes Waco, Guantanamo Bay and the ultrasonic spatiality of the HSS.
By linking these points of reference through the soundscape, we will come to learn how the
capabilities of the body-antenna offer alternative readings of the world of sound.
world events and predicts future models of social organisation.
In the factory, the body-antenna finds itself in a socio-political interstice between the promise
of technological emancipation from the confines of geography and temporality and the reality of being
linked to a rhythmic attrition of industrialised production targets. Spatially displaced and mechanically
repositioned in the categorised segments of 15-minute muzak, this body is disciplined through and by
waveforms propagated electrically for the first time. It is observed, documented and analysed in a new
factory, which, scientifically designed, joins the laboratory as a modern place to study the physiological
and psychological activities of the body. While learning a spatialised sonic discourse that is organised
through the vocabulary of timbre, rhythm and
In the instrumentation, the body-antenna is invited to perceive its new role as that of an element as
replaceable as it is subordinate. Foucault (1975: 147) describes the oscillating position of workers in
the factory, when he talks about the composition of the unit in conjunction with the organising
principles of discipline: "In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the
place it occupies in a series, and by the distance that separates it from the others. Unity is therefore
neither territory (a unit of domination) nor place (a unit of residence), but rank: the place we occupy in
a classification, the point where a line and a column intersect, the interval in a series of intervals that
we can traverse one after the other... Discipline individualises bodies by a localisation that does not
implant them, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relationships."
The negation of static location locks the body into a nebulous relationship with its newly mechanised
environment. Connected to everyone and everywhere via the conveyor belt, the
The worker becomes a replaceable singularity in this industrial composition of space, redefined as it is by
the new sound discipline orchestrated by muzak.
Occupying the zones between silence and mechanically produced sound, the muzak functioned by
synthesising the loss of verbal language and the creation of a definitive undulatory cartography, and, in
doing so, it was able to create a new sound.
In doing so, he provided another reading of sonic spatiality, an unconscious topography of
frequencies that could be defined as a 'third sound'.
Muzak allows us to perceive a soundscape designed to amplify and exist between the undulating
spatialities of noise and non-sound. In the beginning, the industrialised workplace inspired fear, because
the absence of noise meant stasis, an undesirable interlude in the symphony of noise.
industrial processes of constant mechanised movement.
Silence meant an interruption in the production chain and therefore a halt in production.
A progeny of the military and entertainment industries, muzak was born by adopting the rhythmic
nature of production line needs. It has developed by channelling the desires
of workers and buyers, and has led us to equate silence with death. Lanza recalls this industrial fear of
non-sound when he notes that, "as the revolution
introduced the roar of the internal combustion engine and the hum of the
generators, ventilation systems, riveting machines and low-frequency electric lighting, silence, where it
existed, became an undesirable anomaly" (2004: 11). The muzak gave rise to
dualistic assumptions about industrial sound and silence by offering new ways of thinking about how
spatialities, psychologies and presences in the workplace might be orchestrated
by waveforms. Just as silence gives meaning to sound, muzak has given impetus to the notion of the
third sound and, in so doing, has asked us to renegotiate our cognitive relationship with it.
with each other.
Cognitive mapping of audio architecture
The prophetic hymns to future cultural survival that were the work songs were followed by
symphonies in preparation for the industrial environment. This spatial reorganisation in the
he soundscape tells us about the transition from the field and agrarian civilisation to industrial
civilisation and the factory, and informs us that we need to find new ways of mapping the world we
live in.
psychology and physiology of the workplace and to think about our relationship with waveforms. So how
do we explore, map and analyse the third sound? How do we map
frequency, which expresses the displacement and mobilisation of waveforms at the time when a
a society that was essentially agrarian became industrial (it has now become a leisure society)
? A look at the Muzak website is instructive here, because to market their product, 'Audio
Architecture' (see glossary), it expresses the mapping of space through constructed material
metaphors and speculative sound psychologies (see glossary).
Muzak is clearly announcing its intention to make functional use of music in the
contemporary society and the composition of their audio architectures leaves little to the imagination.
She talks about bypassing the conscious mind and targeting the lesser-known realms of the subconscious
and emotions. The sound-mapping system she has set up in factories has now been extended to the rest
of the world.
has gone beyond the workplace and extended its acoustic roots into leisure venues, shopping centres
and hospitals. For this study, Muzak's most relevant early intention was its attempt to map the
soundscape in order to make it knowable and manageable.
in a predefined field of recording and observation. It was thought that, when these criteria were met -
when sound could be rationalised - the visual and material domains within the factory
would find it easier to accept the flow logic of the production chain. This form of
The reasoning, which initially concerned the workplace, was later applied to other locations.
As the first electrically powered waveform mapping system, the muzak inaugurated new ways of
thinking about space, time, function and presence in relation to the wave body. It developed
topographic strategies for mapping and orienting the subject.
rather than exploring or liberating it, as the third sound proposes.
To enrich a mapping system capable of exploring the abstract territory of the third sound, we need to
be attentive to other theoretical systems of orientation. Amplified to confer a certain freedom of
action on the subject, Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive cartography encourages the undulatory
body to redefine its presence in a network of global relations, thereby escaping the subordinate role
assigned to it by muzak almost a century ago. Colin MacCabe describes the concept of cognitive
cartography in the preface to Fredric Jameson's book The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema
and Space in the World System, as "the missing psychology of the political unconscious, the political
limit of the historical analysis of post-modernism [...] The term is taken from geographer Kevin Lynch's
The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960). He uses it to describe the phenomenon whereby the
people give meaning to their urban environment. Indeed, it is an intersection of the personal and t h e
social, enabling people to act in the urban spaces through which they move. For Jameson, cognitive
mapping is a way of understanding how the individual's representation of his or her social world can
escape the traditional critique of representation because
that cartography is intimately linked to practice - to the individual's ability to successfully negotiate
urban space. In this sense, cognitive mapping is a metaphor for the processes of
the political unconscious. But it is also the model for how we might begin to define the local and the
global. It connects the most intimately local - our particular path through the
world - and the most global - the crucial features of our political planet (Jameson, 1995: xiv)
".
Cognitive mapping goes further in the reification of vibratory politics, transforming our undulatory body
into a socially and politically conscious subjectivity.
endowed with an implicit perception of space and time, and the pressures exerted on it by those who
wish to blunt these tools for understanding the urban. It is in the ruptures of this
It is through a process of transformation, from subjection to frequencies to understanding our position in
the mix of the social score, that our wave subjectivity becomes coherent.
By being connected to the independently connected domain of the active loudspeaker instead of waiting to
be connected - as its passive, submissive twin would have it - the body-antenna signals its desire to
communicate and broadcast, to transmit as well as receive.
If the idea of using cognitive mapping to distinguish the third sound seems at first sight
be linked to a sensibility too visual to discern the echoes of an abstract wave theory, to guard against
this interpretation, it is to Wegner's (2006: 267) analysis of Jameson's ideas that we must turn: "Jameson
himself warns against this idea that 'since everyone knows what a map is, it should have been added that
cognitive cartography cannot (at least in our time) involve anything as simple as a map; indeed, once you
you know what a cognitive map is for, you need to put out of your mind all representations of a cognitive
map.
It's time to stop thinking about your own maps and cartography and try to imagine something else. To
slip into the language of the map is then, Jameson argues, to give in to the hegemony of the image and
the visual (marked also by a resurgence of traditional aesthetics and ethics), which is a central
dimension of
postmodern ideology.
This reference to the over-reliance on essentially visual tropes warns us a g a i n s t making the same
mistake about the notion of cognitive mapping, and is the reason why this notion lends itself to
theorising the soundscape and exploring more precisely the practical parameters of the third sound.
The third sound requires us to understand, negotiate and listen to the historical, present and future
soundscape in an entirely new way. As
As Wegner (2006: xiv - xv) helpfully explains once again, "it is a question of ensuring that the information
(, which will always be limited,) are nevertheless sufficient to produce a map that will be
superimposed on other interpretation grids at certain crucial points, creating the conditions for an
analysis of the situation.
political and economic. Theoretically, cognitive mapping requires more than simple development - it is
fundamentally a metaphor that needs to be decompressed into a series of concepts that would link
the psychic and the social. For an exhaustive understanding of
Thirdly, the 'other interpretive grids' should surely include networks of sexual, aesthetic, somatic,
historiographic, emotional and spatial discourses. It is only when we interpret according to such a
multidimensional network of perceptions (the range of
We will then be able to 1) understand the historical importance of muzak and its role in shaping the
parameters of sonic cartography; 2) renegotiate the intimate affiliations we have with the visible and
material world; 3) understand the role of muzak in the creation of the world of sound.
sound landscape in which we exist every day; and 3) to anticipate the way in which our involvement in
the third sound can be mobilised to resist those who set up this undulatory spatiality in order to control
the absences and presences within it.
Toby Heys, SONIC, INFRASONIC, AND ULTRASONIC FREQUENCIES: The Utilisation of Waveforms as
Weapons, Apparatus for Psychological Manipulation, and as Instruments of Physiological Influence by
Industrial, Entertainment, and Military Organisations, translated from the English by B. K. (*).
(*) In 2018, Heys published a revised, reworked, abridged and slightly simplified version of his thesis
entitled Sound Pressure: How Speaker Systems Influence,Manipulate and Torture Output Type.
(Rowman and Littlefield International Limited, London).
(a) See The Dead Record Office, Art in General, New York, USA. 2014.
(b) Commissioned in 2008 in the border area between France and Switzerland, the Large Hadron
Collider is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.
(c) "Bank of Hell" is the term used to describe the simulacra of banknotes burnt at funerals in many
Asian countries to symbolically provide the deceased with money and possessions in the afterlife;
invented in China at an unknown time, this "currency of the dead" is now used to pay the bills of the
dead.
the origin of the "currency of the living", issued for the first time on earth at the beginning of t h e
Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) (see Marc Montoussé, Économie monétaire et financière, Éditions
Bréal, 2006)
(d) Dead Record is AUDINT's record label (see https://ccyte.
blogspot.com/2011/06/audint-dead-record-office-at-art-in.html).
(e) Phantom Hailer" is the name AUDINT has given to the third phase of the "global militarisation
o f vibrations", in other words the process of deploying "strategies, technologies and tools" to
create a "global vibration militarisation".
frequency programmes of mystification developed by military organisations to orchestrate phenomena
of tactical haunting in conflict zones" (Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou [eds.], AUDINTUnsound:
Undead, Urbanomic Media LTD, 2019, p. xi). AUDINT names
The study of this process is known as 'martial hauntology'. H a u n t o l o g y is a neologism coined by
Jacques Derrida in his essay Spectres de Marx (1993). As a philosophical concept, it refers to elements of
the past which, because they persist or recur in the present, can be compared to ghosts.
The first phase, known as the "Ghost Army" after the name of the US army unit which, according to
AUDINT (*), was the first armed force to use tricks and sound decoys in a military theatre in 1944,
lasted until 1965.
Vietnam by the psychological warfare operation called "Wandering Soul", during which, exploiting the
Vietnamese belief that the soul of anyone not buried in his native land will wander forever, the US army
broadcast through loudspeakers channels that
imitated those of fallen Vietcong (see https://vinageoblog.wordpress.com/2019/09/15/raffinementmacabre-
vii-operation-wandering-soul- the-americans-make-vietnamese-beliefs-a-psychological-weapon/),
ended in 1991, when, thanks to Washington's "War on Terror", the US army was the first in the world to
use its own weapons.
the first in modern times (**) to experiment with sound torture techniques using loudspeakers on
combatants held captive in military compounds
and, using high-powered directional audio systems such as sound c a n n o n s , on crowds. AUDINT
calls this third phase 'Phantom Hailer'.
The fourth, according to AUDINT, will last until 2056. AUDINT calls it Ghostcode, the title of a cartoon
transposed by AUDINT from a novel by R. M. Gonzales entitled
Holo.wars: the Black Cats (2014) and set precisely in 2056: "... societies and nation-states have merged
into a single economic and political entity. Human flesh has been removed from the messy equations
of political turbulence, leading to the unleashing of conflict by holographic and holosonic forces. The
film follows the exploits of Irex2, an intelligence
who tries to escape his undead creators to create a r t i f i c i a l intelligence, before a Colombian Black Hat
by the name of Sureshot does so, fighters...
holographic weapons called AIHolos. Powered by the sound of human pain, AIHolo weapons require
massive injections of recorded suffering. As torment becomes a
An economy in its own right, Pain © Amps is built to generate a source o f sonic energy. By amplifying
the logic of the most successful recipe of the twentieth century music industry, Pain © Amps (Pain ©
Amplifiers) is a source of sonic energy.
century - to record and sell the sound of poverty-stricken urban areas (some urban areas: as far as we
know, coal miners' songs were never of interest to houses
of records, unlike, by virtue of the alliance between the scum from above and the scoundrels from
below, rap. N.D.T.) - the functionality of suffering has been pushed to the limit. The needle is in the red,
but it is pain that is sought, not blood...". (http://www.audint.net/www/ghostcode/; see also Steve
Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou [eds.], op. cit.)
(*) In fact, the Russian army had already started deploying sound weapons during the siege of Stalingrad.
To destabilise the German soldiers, a special unit was tasked with broadcasting particularly gloomy tango
tunes over loudspeakers, as well as the throbbing ticking of a clock, interspersed with the following
message every seven seconds: "Every seven seconds, a German soldier dies in Russia. Stalingrad is a
mass grave" (see Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful
Siege: 1942-43, Penguin Books, 1998; John Naughton, "War mentality: How a man boosted the morale
in Stalingrad", 28 February 2013,
https://www.rbth.com/arts/2013/02/28/the_stalingrad_battle_how_snipers_boosted_soldiers_moral_
23337.html#:~:text=The%20ferocious%20Battle%20of%20Stalingrad,a%20savage%20war%20of%20attri
tion.&text=To%20the%20background%20sound%20of,Stalingrad%20is%20a%20mass%20grave.%E2%80
%9D)
(**) The idea of producing sound waves, shockwaves or other sounds to cause damage to a vehicle or to the
environment.
damage is nothing new. In addition to the famous trumpets of Jericho, the ancient Chinese, as far
back as the Han dynasty (200 BC - 200 AD), used to fly kites over their enemies, the bamboo pipes of
which were attached to the kites when the wind blew them.
(Richard C. Levy and Ronald O. Weingartner, From Workshop to Toy Store: A Fascinating Inside Look at
how Toy
Inventors Develop, Sell, and Cash in on Their Ideas, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 46; Sally Wilkins, Sports
and Games of Medieval Cultures, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT and London, 2002, p.. 91; among the
various military applications that the ancient Chinese found for this object that they had created, we
might also mention the "fire crow", a kite carrying incendiary powder and equipped with a stick o f
burning incense attached to a wick (Fan Zhilong, "A Short History of Kites", in China Reconstructs, vol.
33, China Welfare Institute, 1984, p. 43).
(f) See above.
(g) https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/profile/theys/projectdetails/591.
(h) Ibid.
(i) In addition to AUDINT-Unsound:Undead and Dead Record Office (see supra note a), Heys took
part in writing the collective work Infrasense / Virutorium: Viral Projects (ThirdsoundPress, 2010),
including
we know absolutely nothing about it, except that it is accompanied by a DVD; the collection of essays
Futures and Fictions: Essays and Conversations that Explore Alternative Narratives and Image Worlds
that Might Be Pitched Against the Impasses of our Neo-Liberal Present (Repeater, 2017.) edited by
Simon O'Sullivan,
Henriette Gunkell and Ayesha Hameed and in which he offers "a brief historical overview of AUDINT's
spectral archives, spanning from 1922 to 2064, a period (he calls) 'a century of his zombie'".
(j) The only two to our knowledge are Juliette Volcler, Le son comme arme. Les usages policiers et
militaires du son, Paris, La Découverte, 2011; id, Contrôle. Comment s'inventa l'art de la manipulation
sonore, Paris, La Découverte, 2017).
(1) Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise,
are shaped by all aspects of the environment.
the organism. The characteristics of cognition include mental constructs (such as concepts and
categories) and performance in various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgement). The bodily
aspects include the motor system, the auditory system and the mental system.
perceptual, the body's interactions with the environment (situation) and the assumptions about the
world that are built into the structure of the organism (see also
https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/cognition-incarnee/) N. D. T.
(2) K. T. Theus, Subliminal advertising and the psychology of processing unconscious stimuli: a review
of research. In Psychology & Marketing, vol. 11, n° 3, 1994 [p. 271-90] ; T. E. Moore, Subliminal selfhelp.
auditory tapes: an empirical test of perceptual consequences. In Canadian Journal of Behavioural
Science, vol. 27, n° 1, 1995 [pp. 9-20]; id. scientific consensus & expert testimony: lessons from the
Judas Priest trial. In American, Psychology Law Society News, vol. 17, n° 1, 1997 [pp. 3-14] b o t h
reach opposite conclusions, N. D. T.
(3) The allusion is to The Call of the Wild by the American writer Jack London.
(4) See Jeremy Bentham,
https://elementsdeducationraciale.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/une-genealogie-de-la-police-1/