Volume 228 min read
Sonic Warfare
Module IV · The Core Theories
Objective
By the end of this volume you know Steve Goodman's theory of sound and its starting point beneath meaning. You know what he calls unsound, why bass in his optic is no event of hearing, and how he brings the sound of the club and the sound of the interrogation into one frame. With that the module of core theories closes with the only case where the group's thinking can be measured against something you can check.
Exposition
Goodman came from Glasgow, took his doctorate at Warwick, and belonged to the CCRU's circle. Unlike the others he didn't stop at writing. He has produced since the late nineties under the name Kode9, founded the label Hyperdub in 2004, and released on it the records that shaped London bass in the following years, among them Burial's second album, heard far beyond the scene. His book Sonic Warfare appeared in 2010 with MIT Press, eleven years after the group's end, and carries the subtitle Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear.
The starting point is a charge against sound theory. It deals with hearing, with understanding, with the meaning a sound carries. In doing so it presupposes what would need investigating, namely that sound is something that goes to an ear and gets interpreted there. Goodman sets in deeper. What actually happens is a vibration reaching a body and setting it in motion, and the ear takes part in that process without exhausting it. He calls this approach an ontology of vibration and means by it that vibration is not a property of things but their ground state. What looks like a solid body is a rhythm running slowly enough to pass as a thing.
From that shift follows the second concept, and Goodman coined it himself. Unsound denotes what in a sound event doesn't get heard. That reaches from the frequencies below and above human perception, through the vibrations the body feels rather than hears, to the sonic forms that don't yet exist and are already taking shape in the ones that do. The word carries both meanings deliberately. It means the unhearable and the unbecome, and the joining of the two is the thesis. A sound not yet audible is already working on the present. You recognise the time figure from Volume 16, relocated into a field where it can be measured.
Bass is the place where the theory becomes tangible, and the physics bears it out. A tone below roughly eighty hertz doesn't reach the human through the ear alone. It hits the chest, the belly, the bones. Stand in front of a sound system and you don't merely hear the bass, you get moved by it, and that movement happens before any interpretation sets in. The culture in which this was developed knows no theory and needs none. Jamaica's sound systems, building rigs with oversized bass bins, have worked since the fifties at getting sound into bodies. Through emigration to London the procedure reached England, moved through dub, jungle, garage, and dubstep, and underlies the music Goodman produces himself. He writes about a practice he stands inside.
The philosophical scaffolding behind it comes from the concept of affect as Spinoza framed it and as Deleuze and Guattari passed it on. Affect is in this no feeling but the capacity of a body to affect and be affected. It sits before sensation and before consciousness. A body gets changed, and only afterwards does someone know how they feel about it. Goodman draws from this the inference that sound acts on a level preceding interpretation, and that any analysis setting in at meaning arrives too late.
The examples with which he opens his book are the reason for its title. Over Gaza, Israeli aircraft flew low and produced sonic booms without dropping a bomb. In British shopping precincts, devices were installed emitting a high tone only younger ears perceive, in order to disperse teenagers. In American detention camps, music was used on loop at great volume to wear down prisoners. During the siege of the nunciature in Panama in 1989, the American military blasted the building where Noriega had taken refuge with rock music for days. Alongside that come the acoustic cannons built since the 2000s for clearing crowds.
Goodman treats these cases and the dance floor in the same frame, and there lies the book's imposition. Both work on the body, both set in beneath meaning, both produce a state nobody resolved on. The difference lies in the purpose and the direction, not in the technique. Whoever stands in the club and whoever sits in the interrogation room gets seized by the same physics. Goodman refuses to resolve that finding morally, and the refusal is the same one you met in Volume 3 as the group's stance. He wants to describe the field on which both take place, before anybody takes sides.
From Burroughs he takes the notion that something propagates through contagion, and applies it to music. A hook that lodges and runs on in your head without your calling it is in this optic no accident but a structure built for it. Advertising has industrialised the procedure. Jingles, sonic logos, the composed sound design of retail space, all of it works with vibrations putting people into states in which they stay longer and buy more. Goodman puts that practice and the acoustic cannon in the same line, because both serve the same level.
The other side belongs to his picture too. The sound systems his music comes from use the same means and produce something none of the participants could produce alone. A room full of people moved by the same frequency is a body with many limbs, and that state has a history of its own, running from Jamaica through London into the warehouses of the rave years. For Goodman that's no counter-image to the weapon but the same apparatus with the sign reversed.
The title therefore means no programme and no indictment. Sonic Warfare denotes a field that has been worked for a long time, by militaries, by companies, by musicians, and Goodman's claim consists in describing it as a single one. Whoever commands the frequency intervenes on a level against which arguments achieve nothing, and that level gets served by everyone who has designs on bodies.
Core Claim
In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman sets in beneath meaning and describes sound as vibration that moves bodies before anyone understands. His concept of unsound covers the unhearable and the unbecome at once, and bass is the case where both show, because it works tactilely rather than aurally. He treats sound in the club and sound in the interrogation in the same frame, because they work on the same level and differ in purpose, not in technique.
The Critic
The refusal to resolve the ambivalence costs more here than in the earlier volumes. Comparing an avalanche with a bank run is without consequence. Treating torture and the dance floor in one frame turns a question of right and wrong into a question of frequencies, and the frame itself thereby already makes a decision. Goodman knows this and holds to it, because what interests him is the level on which both happen. Want to know what a person has to endure who gets blasted with sound for days and you find in this book the physics and not the person.
The second objection concerns the reach of the ontology. That everything is vibration is either a physical triviality or a metaphysical claim, and Goodman uses both meanings by turns. From the fact that matter can be described as vibration, nothing follows about music, affect, or politics. The word carries the connection, and the connection doesn't get shown.
What remains from this volume is the most solid yield of the whole module, and it needs neither the ontology nor the CCRU. Affect comes before meaning, and that sentence is testable. A bass under eighty hertz reaches the ribcage, that's physics. A tone only teenagers hear disperses teenagers, that's been measured. The consequence reaches far beyond music, because it holds wherever people get put into states before they can judge. Whoever builds rooms, designs surfaces, or runs brands is working on that level whether they want to or not, and the only question is whether they know what they're doing.
One reckoning remains remarkable at the last, one Goodman nowhere draws himself. Hyperdub has reached more people than all the CCRU's texts together, and the label managed without a single thesis. If this course's claim holds, that a thing is measured by its effect and not by its correctness, then Sonic Warfare is not Goodman's exhibit. The records are.
Bridge to the Next Volume
With that the module of core theories ends, and the course turns to the aftermath that set in once the group was over. Volume 23 belongs to Mark Fisher, who came from the same circle and took the opposite path. Where Land affirmed the inhuman, Fisher asked what it costs, and with Capitalist Realism he coined the term carrying the diagnosis of a present that can no longer imagine an alternative. There everything returns that this course has set aside so far.