Noise, Affect, Politics Conference

“Bigger than Words, Wider than Pictures”: Noise, Affect, Politics

Conference, University of Salford (Old Fire Station) & Islington Mill, 1-3 July 2010

Call for papers ends 28 February 2010.

In the crowded top floor room of the Felix Meritis, the moderator asks what the composition of the crowd is. Raise your hands. They go up at music labels representatives, managers, producers, artists, IT people, some students of this or that. Possibly the single most unifying aspect of this melange is the frequent ownership of an iPhone… Music & Bits was a pre-emptive kick-off to the Amsterdam Dance Event unfolding from the 22nd to 25th of October 2009. It consisted of a Hack Track in the morning for the technically inclined, and of a conference in the afternoon. In the following, I will loosely sketch out the course of the conference.

The talks begin by an exchange between the Berlin-based SoundCloud’s Eric Wahlforss and the DJ Speedy J. They strike quite a relaxed pose; no powerpoints and no notes, just an exchange to which the audience was invited to participate quite heavily. First, Wahlforss is describing how he’s been involved with music and “web stuff” for 15 years to date. But these have largely been parallel tracks for him. Frustrated with the limiting landscape of Yousendit and MySpace on the web for the purposes of sending and being exposed to new music, and the rote of sending/downloading/emailing in order to participate in it, his musicianship was beginning to move into the direction collaborative software creation. Music had become links that you pass around on the web since 2005, and SoundCloud began two years later. Wahlforss notes that there’s a big value for instant exchange and the new opportunities that technology provides. At this point, a manager of some kind from the audience prompts him about the legality of the matter – “how is this allowed?” In response, Wahlforss acknowledges that there is a grey area of content on the web, and there are certainly mashups of pieces that haven’t been cleared legally, but these form only a fraction of what SoundCloud contains.

Speedy J notes that it’s rather surprising that the first audience question should gauge the legality of grey use only. Importantly, a lot of the musician’s craft is in abusing technologies, and pushing these to uses not set up for them. Stretching these to their limits does the difference, it makes music interesting. At the beginning of his career, about 10 to 15 years ago, he had to often wrap his head around non-musician systems which meant often trying to enter the head of the instrument producer in order to create music. To this respect, SoundCloud is distinguishable by its musician-friendliness: it’s exploiting its possibilities to the fullest.

As concerns the audience question about the limited publicising capacity of SoundCloud, Wahlforss notes that the platform is not really oriented towards it: for the moment it mostly caters for people who already have a network. “We are before viral spreading yet, there is no “viral button” you can push.” Its use is as a tool with which to solve specific problems. SoundCloud’s business model is rather like that of Flickr – one can buy a pro-account in various forms, from single use to labels for their back catalogues but what mostly constitutes it is free use. A live application might be coming out soon, but at the moment it is not too mobile, computer-based, perhaps soon one can use the iPhone as a field mike…

Muxtape’s Justin Ouellette is next with a history of his application. He traces the beginnings of Muxtape in about 2003 when he hosted a college radio and wanted to have log of the tracks he played online for other people. Further, even before that the concept of sharing and mixtapes was inspired by the late 90s culture of turntablism, DJs and remix culture. Muxtape launched in early 2008 as a site hosting mixes of other people’s music but was shut down in late 2008 by the RIAA. In 2009 it resurfaced again as a platform for bands. Ouellette expands upon this aspect. As well as, importantly, on his preoccupation on keeping it stylistically simple.

To with: 5 things about design that dealing with Muxtape has taught him:

1. Focused design is all around.

It is centered around experience and engages the everyday. To this purpose, he devotes some time to what seems like an ode to the Galanz microwave in his NY apartment. It fits the space and the controls are simple and present a good user interface. This fascination with simplicity translates into Muxtape’s outlook.

2. Clean does not equal simple.

3. Event or the context are important for the experience.

For instance, in most car stereos there are too many buttons. Using it to listen to music therefore becomes a kind of exercise in frustration; and when an application frustrates you already before you start listening, there’s something off with the design.

4. Don’t throw away old models.

Muxtape itself is modelled after the analogue cassette tape. There is charm to old forms.

5. Limitations can be deceiving.

Mixtapes are 90 minutes long, which makes it easy to understand its limits. One packs concentrated effort into creating a mix in stead of trying out a few off the cuff like with a digital playlist now. The maximisation of choice, like in huge supermarket, is not necessarily the best; the charm of mixtapes was always about how people collaborate to delimit choice.

In response to audience question of whether Muxtape was singled out as a poster boy for the copyrights crowd, Oubliette notes that there might be something in that because Muxtape always was so self-evidently about music and did not couple it with blogging or other types of uses which would have meshed with easy categories. For the moment, he is concentrating on developing the second generation Muxtape as a promotion site for bands. The first generation Muxtape cannot come back because it seems that the industry is not yet ready for it!

Next, Brian Whitman of the Echo Nest gives “a short personal history of computers listening to music, 1999-2009”. He begins with tracing out his own beginnings as a producer of IDM in the New York scene, and his eventual dissatisfaction with the dynamic of “guys sitting in front of laptops looking so serious”. Software making is something that has made him a better musician. He took a PhD at MIT in information retrieval, in an environment which was looking at music as a file and at audio like a text. Algorithms do not understand music, however, to which respect he is very much concerned about figuring out how to get music into music analysis. To illustrate, or rather to soundbite some of these concerns, he played some automatically generated holiday music based on a statistical reproduction of 1,000 Christmas songs. It’s a strange disjunction; I for one can’t hear the holidayness in the machine’s rendering of the 1,000 such songs. He argues that it is necessary to understand language and audio at the same time.

As for Echo Nest itself, it grew out of the understanding that the best music experience is still manual. Data is actually hard: collaborative filtering (recommends other things that people have clicked on) is a bad recommendation system – it “destroys music”. If only collaborative filtering is the only system of online recommendation, the popular acts will eat the minor ones. Music forums like “I Love Music” capture some of the excitement of people about music, and it forms a much better palette of recommendations.

What the EchoNest does is trying to know everything about music and its listeners by processing data, which they sell to social networks, labels, video games etc. It has produced a range of products such as Fanalytics (a toolset for artists), and maintains an open source remixing community and code base which has produced, among other things, Morecowbell.dj for adding cowbells to songs… In the end, Echo Nest aspires to be something like a Google Earth of music.

Andie Nordgren and Martin Roth of RjDj present the concept of reactive music, and the possibility of having a sound studio in one’s pocket. Music not necessarily linear, they claim: encoding music can be done so that it is different every time. They begin with something of a timeline: in 1998 the sound studio becomes software, in 2008 the sound studio is found in the personal music player. This changes the consumption, distribution and production of music.

To make this audible, they showcase recent project: Kids on DSP’s reactive minimal techno. While demoing it live, Nordgren is talking/blowing/clicking fingers into the iPhone microphone which feeds it back into the music in distorted form. Someone with an iPhone tweets their fascination about this to their Twitter account right in front of me.

The RjDj ecosystem is composed of the reactive music player, music scenes which can be uploaded to the iPhone and composer tools. There is an online recording and scene community where recordings can be uploaded and which contains a search catalog. RjDj is not composition software of itself, neither is it attempting to build this up. It is rather about tapping into a “sweet spot” for a listener, to modifying sound in reaction to the environment that a person is moving in. … explains that they were taking technological concepts from, for instance, sound installations for the creation of a mobile experience. RjDj needs artists construing a base scene that the iPhone user can download to be reactively played. So it is a way of making interesting the value of someone else’s recordings. In audience prompt about the nature of their web presence, Nordgren notes that the site does not contain networking aspects yet but it might be on the roadmap. It is an API for musicians, not developers and the app is just a transport medium.

Next Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle climbs up to talk about the online music ecosystem. He stresses that he does not want to give a historical presentation about what has been happening with the application during the 7 years since it was first inaugurated. Human years are like dog years in the Internet world, so Last.fm – as a big dog – is over 50 about now.

In 2002 what would become the Last.fm of today started as two projects: a personal online radio which learns over time and an audioscrobbler which is a desktop media player plugin that tracks what you listen to. In combining the two, the developers got a feedback loop for crowdsourced music recommendation. 2009 was tough in the ad-supported music space because Last.fm’s music licensing and revenue model was constrained to the US, UK and Germany at the same time as the radio service was truly world wide. Making radio listening by subscription only in non-ad supported countries, caused some controversy and a fair degree of hate mail but the application has been weathering this quite well subsequently.

Music is not a product and not a service, but it exists within a “shifting ecosystem of discovery and use”. Last.fm in this sense is guided music delivery, the “connective tissue for your online musical life”. Ogle notes that it is true that Last.fm must be self-critical at certain points: they must acknowledge their own ecosystem – community of users and influence – and communicate better with it. This last point was engaged better in the case of the inactivity bear sign – a bear pops out when the user has been listening for a long time without doing anything. This actually managed to engage a lot of playful response in the form of people submitting various different versions of the inactivity bear. Currently the team is working on combo radios, multiscrobbles and party radio intersections (although everyone’s average music is not necessarily the best of the people involved) as a way of making the online radio listening a more fluid concept. There is also a project for Xbox with Microsoft.

Hypem or The Hypemachine (Anthony Volodkin and Last.fm’s artistic director Hannah Donovan) talk of the inevitable effects of style on music websites. Hypem aggregates what music people talk, or blog, about. In their talk about style, they start with noting that visual designers often last looked at when it comes to developing new applications. Good art doesn’t match your sofa and there are certain principles than need courting in the creation of a good website: user experience design (user needs), limitations, interaction design (user feel), content and visual design (looks). All of these have to be considered together, they cannot be separately developed and fused together later and their grouping like this should not necessarily reflect the order of importance although they are executed like that quite often.

When it comes to a evaluating a site, start with the “ooh” metric. However, it is hard to impress with style alone when this is not paralleled by content. The applications that take or track your data must create an “atmosphere of trust” with people. To this extent, Volodkin and Donovan flick through examples of sites that overstyle and detract from the point of a music site – that is, the music – to sites that are afraid of styling at all. Also, certain examples tap into a very restricted audience – there is an indie feel to the redness of Last.fm to which extent they’ve added the option to “paint it black”. Donovan argues that MySpace can actually manage to be communicative, connecting the public of a band with the music with the help of customisable aesthetics, for instance the page of the band Beirut. One can style without stylizing, which the route that Last.fm has taken.

The look of a social networking site has to contain visual shorthand for: “this site has social stuff on it”. Design culture can grow pocket-like, geographically specifically on the web, for instance Muxtape and tumblr tap into a certain New York geek look to Japanese sites disliking white space, to the extent that they are striving for being as crowded as possible. In short, sites do not exist in a vacuum, and music is messy so there is no reason why it can’t be presented in messy ways online too. Also, a site has to be conscious of what it wants to be when it grows up: does it want a mainstream audience or is it merely wanting to capture a certain audience. All in all, style does not necessarily mean stylisation.

As a last minute surprise revelation, Henrik Berggren from Citysounds.fm offers the audience the invitation to test the iPhone application to be launched next day. Citysounds.fm adds cities and location – pictures from Flickr – to music – from SoundCloud – so that cities have musical landscapes. The popularity ratings come from Twitter.

Impakt Festival Conference. Thursday, October 15 2009 / 10:00 – 18:30. Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt, Utrecht.

Contemporary science and technology have made possible a temporality which -although still based upon clock time- has exploded into countless different time fractions and speeds beyond human comprehension. Today we seem to live in several time zones at the same time, propelled by a variety of internal and external time mechanisms and innumerable rhythms which continuously vibrate, resonate, connect, oscillate and disconnect. How to grasp the temporal complexity that surrounds and occupies us? What sort of ecologies of time and speed have we developed under the influence of new technologies and what is their impact on our body and senses? This conference brings together a number of international thinkers who offer new perspectives on our contemporary experience of time and speed.

Check their site for more info and programme: http://www.impakt.nl/index.php/festival/conference

Music and Bits Conference. Wednesday, October 21 2009 / 10:00 – 17:15.  Felix Meritis, Amsterdam.

Music & Bits brings the best of both worlds: be amazed by the awesome keynote speakers we have lined up for you, or get your hack on with the coolest music API’s while the actual developers are there to help you. We’re presenting two tracks for your convenience, but don’t hesitate to swap tracks when you feel like it.Program additions are likely to follow the coming days, so keep an eye on the Music & Bits twitter stream!

Join a workshop by Twones, Cloudspeakers, STEIM or Last.fm, or listen to visionnairy stories by Echonest, Last.fm or Hypemachine amongst others. Music Hackday is an unconference format; so the program will be created on the spot. When you want to give a workshop, demonstrate your app, or discuss technologies, just do it. Moderation by Dave Haynes from Soundcloud.

Check web for the two tracks of their programme: http://musicandbits.com/program/

“When you’re frightened you stink” said Jean-Baptiste Grenouille to the prostitute – his second victim – whom he killed shortly afterwards in Tom Tykwer’s 2006 film adaptation of Patrick Süsskind’s Perfume (I’ll have to reread the book, too, someday). When a human being fears, several physical adjustments occur, among them the tightening of the muscles used for movement, perspiration (“stink”) in concert with blood being pumped from internal organs to the extremities of the body (the influx of this blood circulates oxygen and nutrients as well as heat, which triggers the moisture secretion as a cooling reaction). The heartbeat may also rise. Sometimes frightened human beings produce particular noises called screams:

• females

• males

(Rather than live most of these screams are found in horror films. These are the result of humans simulating the situations in which they would not like to be in for other people who, in turn, mostly would not like to be in them either.)

Idle mock-scientificity aside, however, the study of the sounds of frightened animals is a fascinating as well as multivalent field – but rather let Daniel Blumstein of UCLA Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology tell you this; “The sound of fear: implications of alarm calling and predator detection for conservation biology and national security” (Sound + Science Symposium at UCLA, March 5th, 2009).

Allied to this (although topically rather remote), in what is becoming my favourite ghost busting anecdote, Vic Tandy of Coventry University discovered the human “fear frequency” by finding out that the cold chills and paranoia experienced by several people in a lab were the result of inaudible, very low frequency sounds being generated by a recently installed extraction fan. Thus, there is a formula for the paranormal:

Infrasound can cause hyperventilation, which may lead to feelings of panic. At the same time panic can cause hyperventilation, so it is possible to establish a positive feedback loop, the final effects of which can be quite profound. Other works suggest the mechanism for the physical manifestation could be the vibration of the eyeball, which has a resonant frequency around 20Hz.

In “Ghost Story: Low Frequency Illusions. Standing Firm in the Presence of Standing Waves” (January/February 2002. Live Sound International)

Ghosts are mostly simply felt and (putatively) unscented apparitions, much like Süsskind’s Grenouille who had no smell of his own. This made him strangely absent, non-existing to everyone; not really a human being. In an interesting inversion of the Perfume story – in which Grenouille kills young women in order to collect their distinctive scent and mix it into a perfume – the Norwegian smell artist Sissel Tolaas has collected male sweat (donated, not coerced) without the intent “to shock or repulse, she says, but to re-educate our noses and enhance our ability to express what we sense with them”.

The difficulty and exertion needed to re-educate oneself, and specifically one’s senses so customarily dominated by sight, finds a parallel in Thomas A. Edison description of first encounters with the phonograph:

This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb, voiceless matter, nevertheless utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled to dust will repeat again and again to a generation that will never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm.

Novel technologies and machines are unnerving as means of re-educating the human sensorium especially when these profess claims to a ghostly life of their own. Like Grenouille who is ripped apart by the people adoring his marvellously perfumed body, the phonograph’s disembodied sound elaborates how one might be consumed through the agency of something seemingly immaterial. My speaking sound, as extraneous and cut off from me as a recording, is reiterating me.

Some descriptive mapping of sounds and smells has already been conducted; see, for instance, Daniel Rothaug’s Digital Acoustic Cartography and (a newspaper article of) scent mapping of New York city for a “bite” but their critical mapping – which is importantly to do with, as Tolaas puts it, “fear, racial tolerance and globalization” – is necessary for these issues not to remain as mute and untreaceable, and therefore as harmful, as ghosts.

Animals have a fascinatingly sensible attitude to sound. As far as I know, they don’t tend to fool around with it – and if they do, it’s to a purpose. As George Bateson (who once failed to study dolphins) explains about preverbal mammalian communication in an essay entitled “Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972) ”the cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship” (262) or, in other words, it’s about me and you and who stands where. (“Stand”; already human language turns too allusive.)

In stead of a critical and wide consideration of how humans apprehend, misapprehend and employ animal sounds, I’ll present you a mere paragraph-length stroll through biosonar via four types of animal – dolphins, humans, bats and whales.

The dolphins’ ability to echolocate by clicking their tongues up to 200 times per second is due to sending off sound waves, and then interpret them as them as they bounce back off the objects they encounter. This generates a cohesive understanding of what nearby space “looks like” and how it can be navigated. Blind people are occasionally able to adapt this method, substituting the hegemony of one sense and adapt to another – from tapping a cane (James Holman) to clicking one’s tongue (Ben Underwood) well enough to have a non-visual sense of one’s surroundings. Tapping into the sonic intelligence of animals is especially interesting for the purposes of science – bat sonar, for instance – due to the niftiness of automating a type of “vision” for machines. Lastly, two examples of arty intervention, which are reserved for the whale in this dispatch – human adulation for the sonic abilities of this animal range from delicious parody (not of whales! but of the self-importance of misemphasised bass rumble) of  “whalestep”  to inquiry in John Cage’s “Litany for the Whale”.

[This space is reserved for the absence of echo, as when a moth jams a bat’s echolocation.]

To quote Bateson again, this time on humans: ”What was extraordinary—the great new thing—in the evolution of human language was not the discovery of abstraction or generalization, but the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship.” (1972: 262)

Yes, but how about inverting this sentence and looking at human relationships through sound, darkly –

I am reminded here of David Lynch’s early short film “Grandmother” (1970) in which the characters only speak in grunts and meaningless (better: wordless) vocalisations, drawing up a palpable picture of complex dependencies and abusiveness in familial relationships that “abstraction or generalisation” would only serve to hide.

In honour of that, I want to present you a few examples of writing about music that have managed to give me those shivers, the pleasure of experiencing the abstract voiced so well that I could sense it like a touch I had been wanting.

Erik Davis of TECHGNOSIS fame has a piece called “Roots and Wires: Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic” which mesmerised me with its descriptions of drumming:

And with the ancient mediation of the drum, this potent play between chaos and rhythm carries us outside of theory and into the dance of lived multiplicity. Polyrhythmic music provides a primary and unusually intuitive avenue, not just to conceptualize, but to draw these heterogeneous spaces, chaotic passages and communicating milieus into our bodyminds as we weave ourselves into the polyrhythmic ensemble’s fibrillating tapestry of molecular beats and criss-crossed percussive patterns.

“Bodyminds” is a compelling reptile word for conceptualising the physical, heady (both in the senses judicious and intoxicating) attraction of music – like this:

We must enter into polyrhythm; by selecting particular rhythmic clusters, and cutting and combining them with other beats, our bodyminds generate a sense of coherent flux within a space of multiplicity, a kind of balanced line of flight that constantly criss-crosses a shifting and unstable terrain. Listening and dancing to polyrhythm, we thus tacticly participate in the phenomenon of emergence, as fluid lines arise from the complex and chaotic interaction (or “communication”) of numerous smaller and simpler repetitions and individual beats.

The “bodyminds” are further corroborated by a certain reference to the dub musician Lee “Scratch” Perry:

Explaining the esoteric correspondences between rhythm and the body, Perry once wielded out the roots cliché that “The drum is the beat of the heart.” But the bass, he said, “is the brain.”[…] More than just subverting the common cultural association between bass frequencies and the “base” moves of the hips, Perry was suggesting that drums and bass make head music, with all the various resonances that term conjures up—abstraction, drugs, interiority, virtual worlds. As Perry put it when discussing his preference for mixing tracks without vocals: “the instrumental is formed in the mental.

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Jace Clayton/ DJ Rupture’s piece on Muslimgauze at Bidoun entitled

impresses me as tight-rope walk above the discontinuities in squaring Bryn Jones’ professed politics with Muslimgauze’s output.

Listening to songs like “8A.M., Tel Aviv, Islamic Jihad” helps one understand the strange genius of Muslimgauze. He had no interest in making Middle Eastern-sounding music. Jones was after Middle Eastern-sounding sound. He fetishized the poor (re)production quality of its cheap cassette tapes, obsessively reproducing those sonic effects. He made audio environments instead of songs. Distortion was his most obvious production trick, but Muslimgauze had a subtle and masterful hand with reverb-the art of positioning sounds in space. Indistinct noises swirl around, implying multiple narratives on the brink of intelligibility. If you hear his songs as space, their length and repetitive nature seem less like mistakes. But then you remember their titles. 8AM, Tel Aviv, Islamic Jihad! Regardless of one’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict, it’s unnerving to think of oneself as grooving along to a call to arms.

Perhaps it helps that Muslimgauze is one of my favourite listens (I am not that familiar with the story of the artist, aside from the fact that a blood fungus got him at 37 in 1999) but it definitely helps to round up a sometimes personal piece of writing with an anecdote about a sound check that lingers on past its welcome, and beyond the essay as a constant alarm that marks out Muslimgauze’s territory.

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Manuel DeLanda (whose A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History should form a part of high school history education, I believe) wrote a short piece on music under the rubric “The virtual breeding of sound”. I cannot find it online, but you can find in (ed.) Miller, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (2008). Although philosophical texts are hardly reduceable to a few soundbites as in them sentences tend to structure themselves as building blocks of a more or less self-sufficient ziggurat (and this ziggurat in particular makes no sense as a collation of its parts), I’ll try to hazard a clumsy summary: DeLanda is mapping how the conversion of human genes (the genotype) into bodily traits (the phenotype) is (some)where topological turns into metric in music. No great, bearded white males colonise this space.

*

Then there is Susan McClary, who is one of my favourite women who bothered with specifically gendered and body-relational re-readings of disciplinary histories in the ‘80s and ‘90s (Donna Haraway [biology], Clara Greed [urban infrastructure], Elizabeth Grosz [philosophy] and more recently Mo Hume [violence] being some of the others) whom I quote in an essay on Brazilian favela funk (“Of Musics and Bodies: Embodying the Brazilian Favela Funk”) I wrote last term like this:

Spaces and places need to be traversed by bodies – which acquires a special frisson when these spaces and places are sonic because certain symbolic contestations of space acquire an audible ‘materiality’. McClary’s work in this area is of interest: she notes that denouncements of music involve a response for a twin imagined threat – the subversion of authority and (bodily) seduction – which has recurred as a constant throughout music history (1994: 30). In an important reflexive turn for ethnomusicology, she highlights how there is something of the suspicion of music also discernible in the attempt of many popular culture scholars to marginalise the music itself (i.e. to focus on lyrics, politics, reception or culture industry) (ibid.). To this extent there are at least two reasons why music itself and its imagery needs to be figured into the cultural studies project: there is a need to, first, find ways in which to understand socially grounded rhetorical devices by means of which music creates its intersubjective effects and second, to have a sense of the shifting musical strategies and priorities which is important for the consideration of power issues (1994: 32). She contends that it is more productive to focus on music’s correspondence with bodies, because these always arrive already marked with histories which are patterned by class, gender and ethnicity – in this sense music provides for a terrain where competing notions of the body as a symbolic package vie for attention and influence (1994: 33).

She is also known for a peculiar sentence -

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.

- that appeared in the January 1987 issue of Minnesota Composers’ Forum Newsletter but never in its original form again (Wikipedia is my great authority on this) which I must quote here…um, yes, mostly for kicks.

So how does “magicking up” a description of sounds with the medium of words work? One can evoke oceans, deserts, mountainous ruins or deploy adjectives such as expansive, aquatic, moist, sandpapery, awkward, animistic etc. in an exercise in which the abstract and the tactile compete…

No, no, no! It’s already not quite it although the algorithm for describing music must use (I think) tactile, physically anchored images that play on sound’s conceptual analogy with space, mass and architecture as well as gouge its workings on the human body. I need to read more of John Cage and Brian Eno (Paul D. Miller goes without saying) as well as get some women into this admittedly rather boyish mix but for the moment these are my avatars of not just good writing but sound made as potent as desire.

And yours?

• sound as arsenal, a history:

“Sonic Weapons”. Jack Sargeant  in Fortean Times. (December 2001)

“Possibly the earliest account in Western literature of sound itself being used as a weapon can be found in the Bible. As detailed in Joshua 6:5, Joshua leads an attack on the city of Jericho (c1400 BC) during which he commands his people, outside the walled city, to remain in total silence for seven days. On the seventh day, seven trumpets made from ram’s horns give a “long blast”, the people shout… and the walls of Jericho come crashing down. (It is significant that silence is used as well as noise and perhaps even ultrasound.)”

“Deadly Vibrations: A Brief History of Sonic Warfare”. BG Nichols in Spannered. (Originally published by Overload Media, 1 May 2000)

Make friends with “Squawk box” and “The Curdler”, veterans of the Vietnam war.

• diversion:

“The Sonic Weapon of Vladimir Gavreau.” Gerry Vassilatos at something calling itself the Borderland Sciences Research Foundation.

Spooky stories straight from the laboratory of the late Vladimir Gavreau! Will make your intestines liquefy – literally!

• gadgetry:

Sonic Devastator

For purposes of crowd control, whether it allows one to attain the “brown note” or not is purely speculative.

Sonic Cannon

• new acquaintances:

Vic Tandy discovered that ghosts are actually a sonic phenomenon. By making our eyes vibrate and causing dizziness and unexplained discomfort, sounds in the region of 19 Hz are a powerful aid to the imagination. (Further: “The fear frequency”. Mark Pilkington. October 16, 2003. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/oct/16/science.farout)

Feraliminal Lycanthropizer. A putatively dangerous sex aid, stimulating libidinous as well as strangulatory impulses. (Look here: “Confessions of the Feraliminal Kind”. David Woodard. Wild Waves #8. Spring 1999. http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/log/archive/8/feraliminal/)

For the moment, “sonic warfare” will give you a series of dubstep events but with the publication of Steve Goodman’s (Kode9) book  by MIT at the end of this year, the uses of acoustic force to affect fear might claim back territory from the frequencies of dance floor sub bass. I confess to be looking forward to this.

However, currently as the top most scoring object in response to the query “sonic warfare” is a personal archive where, below a massive warning, you can browse through a catalogue of curiosities and bizarrie where bubblegum-like, chewy pieces are set to a range of languages, from Arabic to Tuvan throat singing. Google’s prognostics for an outright sonic war are as yet mollifying.

Whilst searching for a name for this blog, I was playing about with the grammatically appropriate options such as

• sonic: utilizing, produced by, or relating to sound waves; broadly: of or involving sound [Merriam-Webster]
• sonorous: producing sound (as when struck) [M-W]
• sonar: acronym from sound navigation and ranging
• sono-/sonor-: prefix for something “relating to sound”

which quickly lead to the exploration of more fanciful options such as

• sonorium: the suffix -ium is used to form nouns, sometimes in the sense of more complicated or bigger (also a German Gothic Rock/Dark Wave label)
• sonotopia: place of sounds (though not so many web addresses)

Because I am not a linguist, this already causes sufficient stimulus to be giddy: because -ium and -topia make sounds (or sensations perceived by the ear caused by the vibration of air or some other medium) into nouns, sounds themselves would seem to lack that “thingness” or concreteness that would qualify them as nouns.

So this is the space for made up words that communicate (me) the elusive, unsayable quality of sound through the medium of linguistic confusion – for all types of sonosauri (saurus=lizard) and their sonorarium (think aquarium, terrarium).

Consider:

“If I put electrodes in your visual cortex (the part of the brain at the back of the head, concerned with seeing), and I then showed you a red tomato, there is no group of neurons that will cause my electrodes to turn red. But if I put electrodes in your auditory cortex and play a pure tone in your ears at 440 Hz, there are neurons in your auditory cortex that will fire at precisely that frequency, causing the electrode to emit electrical activity at 440 Hz – for pitch, what goes into the ear comes out of the brain!” (Levitin. This is Your Brain on Music. 2006.)

Sound’s ability to physically affect the (human) brain and induce mental states that are perceived as seductive or abrasive interests me as a space of synaesthetic disclosure and bodily communion. This journal is a step in the direction of understanding that.