Good afternoon. My name is Shirok Yadigari. I'm a faculty in the Department of Music and the Director of the Sonic Arts Research and Development here at QI. And I have the pleasure of welcoming you to today's presentation in the gallery by Toby Hayes and John Barnett. I'll give you a very short introduction, talk about Toby and John, then Toby Hayes will give us an introduction to the work. We'll sit here and we'll be joined by Sarah Hankins, who is also a faculty in the Department of Music, who focuses on sound studies.
We'll have a chance to go experience the installation, and we hope you join us for the reception afterward. I said I have the pleasure of being the host for this originally. Amy Alexander was going to be the host of it, and partially the work got started as Toby came to visit Amy here last year, and the discussion started. So thank you, Amy, for establishing the connection, and we're happy that you're here. Toby Hayes is a reader in digital media at the Manchester School of Art and head of the Future Technologies Research Group. He's currently the primary investigator of Enlight, a pan-European sound and light production residency and festival project funded by the European Cultural Fund.
He's also a co-investigator on a 3D printing graphine project funded by the EPSRC. He's a member of the sonic research group Audent, which is a collective unit. I believe that he will tell us about it. They're currently preparing an ontology called Unsound, Undead for publication through Univocal. 2007 popular culture has been marked by the phenomena of dead rap and rock stars being revived using holographic technology. From his biography you read that from Elvis to Tupac, these examples are emblematic of a newly emerging necromatic culture that problematizes the
the taken-for-granted idea that performers must be breathing, thereby troubling the relationship between sound, music, and life. He has been collaborating with John Barnett, who is a PhD candidate in the computer music program here at UCSD. John is a multimedia artist and a researcher based in San Diego, California. Drawing from a background in music composition, sound design, and technology, he creates technologically augmented reactive installations and concert works that derive their material from the present environment or synthesize new virtual hybrid spaces.
John is also a member of the Sonic Arts Research Group team based in the Qualcomm Institute working with me, where he researches audio spatialization, audio visual technology. Having the pleasure of knowing John John is one of those polymaths who has his hand in almost every area you can think of and he does really fantastic work both in the technology, in the arts and in aesthetics in general, you'll experience the work. Would you join me to welcome Toby Hayes on stage? Hi. Okay, you're going to have to put up with a very gravelly and messed up voice, I'm afraid.
It's a bit jet-lagged and exhausted in general. So thanks, Yaroque. I'm a part of Audint so Audint is a group of investigators and researchers into sonic culture more specifically we try and chart the evolution of sonic weaponry or have been charting the evolution of sonic weaponry and the notion of sound as a weapon from the Second World War onwards so from the ghost army in 1945 through to wandering soul program and urban funk campaign of the vietnam war and the psyops psyops campaigns that were run by the u.s military
through to the war on terror and through more recently to the sonic attacks in cuba which have happened and in china which are even more recent so the sonic attacks in cuba happened they started in the back well they actually started before august but when they actually came into national spotlight was in august um when the effects were being felt or being reported in the media so i don't does does anyone knows about this it's really interesting because it's been all over the news for months and months and months but a massive amount of people don't seem to know about it but it's on the front of the new york times recently like it's a fairly well. Do people know about this, what happened in Cuba? No? Yeah, no? Kind of? Okay.
So, okay, so for those of you who don't know, there was, in August, it was reported that staff members of the American, the American, what was it? Embassy, sorry, that's right, in Havana were experiencing sickness, dizziness, pain, and it was, nothing's been proven about what has actually happened there, but what eventuated supposedly caused brain trauma within a number of the people who were working there. They were pulled out, I'm actually going into my talk now, so I should probably not go too far with this, because I'm going to give you a
kind of timeline over about 10 or 12 minutes I'm just going to give you a very condensed timeline of what actually happened during this period as a result of this myself and Steve Goodman and Eleni Iconiadu who are also part of Audint were contacted on a pretty much on a daily basis by media or from all over like literally all over the world to comment on what was going on and of course nobody knew what was going on so this whole episode is mired in conspiracy theory nobody still to this day has really much idea what was going on some things have been discounted such as it being infrasonic or ultrasonic uh weapons and it's now with now more thinking
about microwave attacks were possibly the go but let me give you a quick rundown um or a condensed timeline. November 2016, Donald Trump wins the presidential election in the US. First reports from US embassy staff in Havana, Cuba, and at least one Canadian employee of Strange Sounds. The State Department concludes it was harassment. December 2016 to January 2017, employees first visit the State Department Medical Unit. February to April 2017, 80 employees are examined, 16 are determined to have suffered mild traumatic brain injury May 2017, the US expels two Cuban officials for failing to protect its diplomats
July 2017, the State Department's Bureau of Medical Services convenes a panel of academic experts to examine case histories and medical records They conclude that victims suffer from trauma from a non-natural source. August 2017. USA's 16 employees have been treated but attacks seem to have stopped. The Centre for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania re-evaluates the initial cases and later ones occurring until August 2017, bringing the total to 24 employees. September 2017 USA's attacks are continuing and 19 staff members are now suffering from a range of symptoms including mild traumatic brain injury and hearing loss related to mysterious sonic harassment attacks in Cuba.
October 12 2017 Associated Press receives a recording and the sound is distributed on the internet. December 2017 A report issued by a board of Cuban scientists suggests that crickets were the unlikely culprits of the brain-changing sounds According to Science Magazine, while US officials did not provide sound recordings to the scientists Carlos Barcelo Perez, an environmental physicist at the National Institute of Hygiene, Epidemiology and Microbiology recorded evening sounds around the residences the recordings revealed that the biggest noisemakers were insects in particular he found that the Jamaican field cricket chirps at a frequency matching the sound on the recordings reaching up to 74.6 decibels
February 15th 2018 specialists from the University of Pennsylvania's Pannellman School of Medicine published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association which provides the most detailed description to date of the injuries based on examination of 21 of the 24 diplomats. In most cases, the affected diplomats reported hearing a loud painful noise that they later associated with their symptoms. For 18 of the 21 individuals, the JAMA article said that there were reports of hearing a novel, localised sound at the onset of symptoms in their homes and hotel rooms in Havana. affected individuals described the sounds as directional intensely loud and with pure and sustained tonality
although some described it as highly pitched and others said it was low pitched while many of the symptoms were similar to those experienced with the concussion there was no evidence of physical trauma and MRI examinations showed no significant brain abnormalities reported symptoms included persistent cognitive vestibular and oculomotor dysfunction as well as sleep impairment and headaches these were observed in u.s government personnel in havana these individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma conclusion found no definitive case or cause for their ailments
march 2018 an ultrasonic account intermodulation distortion distortion as accidental side effect of eavesdropping professor kevin foo and members of the security and privacy research group at the university of michigan speculate on the havana health incident being due to malfunctioning devices that are placed too close together and not staged attacks. Reverse engineering the recorded sound by combining two ultrasonic signals of 25 kilohertz and 32 kilohertz, they discovered that the resulting distortion produced an audible sound around 7 kilohertz, similar to the metallic chirping heard by the victims.
May 2018. Employees of the state-of-the-art American consulate in Guangzhou, South China, complained of subtle but vague abnormal sensations of sound and pressure between late 2017 and April 2018 and almost identical symptoms to the Cuba affair. June 2018, the US evacuates its employees and their families from the American consulate in Guangzhou. The State Department issues a health alert to American citizens travelling through or living in the country warning victims not to try to locate the source of any unidentified auditory sensation. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sets up
a task force. September 2018 microwave attack. Head of the JAMA study Douglas Smith speculates and or suspects microwaves as being the main suspect in these immaculate concussion attacks. several analysts looked to the fray effect the microwave auditory effect more recently known as radio frequency hearing whereby short radio waves passing through the temporal lobe which contains the auditory cortex were perceived were perceived as sounds inside the head the new york times traces a long history of russian interest in internal sound perception in their classified psychotronic research programs.
Professor Beatrice Golomb of University of Calhoun University, UCSD, argues that the symptoms are very close to what is known as radiofrequency sickness. Dossier 37. Charting the increasing moral derailment of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, General Corman describe how his ideas and his methods become or became unsound. Later in the film, Kurtz himself in the climatic confrontation asks Willard, his executioner, whether this is true or not. Are my methods unsound? Willard replies, I don't see any method at all. A swollen folder tagged dossier 37 slots into the Ordnance Archive in the gap between having
unsound methods and having no methods at all it was compiled by irix2 the ai custodian of audint scraped together from its adventures in both public and secure databases its contents include geolocation data relating to havana cuba and guangzhou south china a long list of names from the worlds of science government and the media some of which appear to be computer generated. A report from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Transcripts of Senate subcommittee hearings and White House press conferences. An interview with the Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair, University of Pennsylvania. Leaked documents
from Jason, a secret group of elite scientists that assist with issues of US national security. testimony of a paranoid conspiracy theorist recruited to an NSA meme lab in Florida and a communique from Audient associate Susanna Zamfay on the subject of Russian deception preparing the ground for the 2019 publication of Audient's edited collection Unsound Undead Irix2 orchestrated numerous presentations of the concept of Unsound by Audient associates at the Unsound Festival 2018, tricking festival director Matt Schultz into thinking it was a mere coincidence. The book and presentations revolve around the fusing of two meanings of the word unsound in
English. On the one hand, the term refers to dubious methods, ones which are without reasonable foundation, faulty, unethical, or following bad practices. On the other, the word names in audible frequencies whether it be sound at peripheries of human audition, infrasonic and ultrasonic, or syntheses as yet not invented or heard or only made audible by auditory prosthesis. IREX2 is teaching itself about the power of unsound strategies in humanoid populations. When a vacuum of knowledge accompanies the vacuum of imperceptible vibration, such methods play on the fact that if you can't hear something its absence forces us to speculate on its presence irx2 notes how unsound methods converge with self-concealing auto-occulting information
strategies operating through a neurobiology of narrative in an ongoing period that began in early august 2017 ordent became entangled in a mean complex emanating from and propagated by the state department of the usa this meme plex was drenched in uncertainty and disinformation and was hosted by a cast of characters white house employees journalists of the mainstream media science reporters conspiracy bloggers and twitter bots all haunted by spectres of maskarovka from post truth to the plane of unbelief where effects operate regardless of belief or disbelief in the threat's causal existence. Causal existence, sorry, not casual existence.
IREX2 watches closely as carefully orchestrated incrementally seductive. This perfect storm of un-sonic fiction triggered a wave of the speculative research into a forensic acoustic architecture at the threshold of detectability. IREX2 trains its deep learning algorithms on this memeplex, noting the somewhat random array of symptoms. It notes the power of always withholding enough information to ensure that grounding in fact was always one step out of reach. Rather than evidence of what Willard refers to as no method at all, IREX2 observes how unsound strategies make themselves real, metabolizing their own actuality. however it still remains unclear whether irx2 has taken a more active role in this sequence of
events suspiciously several audience members have been tracked down as talking heads and interviewed by amongst others the new scientists cnn reuters and the bbc by even engaging with their requests we became carriers relays on the vector of its transmission By even talking about it today, we're extending its duration of propagation. And as our audience, you are now also complicit. So that's a digested timeline. And I think we're going to probably sit down, hopefully now, and maybe talk around some of these subjects with Shirok and John and Susan.
Sarah, sorry. My bad. Are you going to come up? So, this is working to you, that's good. So I'm not sure how we're running this. Are you running this, Shirok? Do you want to run it? I'm not sure if it needs to be run. We'll talk. But I was wondering if John wanted to say a few words as you have been collaborating
just to get us started. Yeah. Hi, I'm John. So with this piece coming off of the ideas that Toby was discussing of this sound attack being something that's propagated and led into these diplomatic spaces, these embassies, the Cuban embassy, and then the embassy in China where this also happened, we're trying to frame this weapon as this sort of intelligent AI that manifests in these diplomatic spaces
for the purpose of disorientation and disruption of the diplomatic process, ultimately yielding, whether this is the intent or not towards mass hysteria. And so the reports of these attacks lay out the results and the symptoms and the means of infection of these sounds in various ways. So microwave attacks, radio frequency sicknesses, and there are reports of people who have experienced
this starting to experience strange sounds around them, sounds that don't exist even after being subjected to the attacks. And then the attacks themselves consisting of what people thought were cicadas, these intense, spatially oscillating sounds that disorient the diplomat in their sleep. So with the installation that you're about to hear, we've constructed various scenarios of both the weaponized sound, these intense frequencies and sums of ultrasonic frequencies
that lead to these strange spectra that are blamed for creating these symptoms as well as depicting the results of these symptoms of hearing these strange sounds around you that have infected you even after you've left the space that's being attacked. Yeah. Sarah, would you like to say a few words? Maybe I can continue as well. Sure. Hi, I'm Sarah. And thanks for thinking of me to join this panel. I love this project for a lot of reasons.
And I have complicated feelings about it, which I think sort of relate to some of the networks and sort of the past assemblages of information and communication, miscommunication that you were mentioning in your timeline. I did actually work for the State Department for about eight years before this, and I still identify sort of in a way with that world of like the embassy, the consulate, the diplomats. And when I learned about this from social media and non-social media, my initial thought, which is still the thought I have, was a certainty that this is just a straightforward, this
was a straightforward counter espionage attack. Like I feel very inclined to think that in fact it was an attack by the Cubans or the Russians or an agent of one of these countries because it's the most mundane, like that kind of sort of this sort of bizarre counter espionage that seeps into the personal worlds that sort of revolve around the embassies and consulates and expat communities in outside of the United States, happens all the time. And so it's the possibility of it being an actual attack by a third country or whatever is not surprising.
But nor, and I have some attachment to that idea that I don't quite understand why, which is maybe something you know, we can talk about. But I also think that one of the more interesting, what's more interesting about this is not who did it or why, but as you both suggested, what happens to mass sort of collective consciousness when it's possible that there has been an attack that is, and yet is invisible. I mean, this is, of course, what we all go to when we think about sound and the sort of unique power of sound
is that it's force that's not. It's tangible material force and yet can't be seen and is ephemeral. But it's true. I mean, this is the feeling of being attacked without, particularly in a context where one might have reason to believe they might be attacked, you know, in an embassy overseas. The feeling of being attacked or under threat with no way to, You know, all embassies and consulates have marine guards all over the place and bristling with guns. But nothing can, that makes no difference if the sort of object of threat is nothing, you know, is a sound.
And I imagine that whatever amount of sort of factuality is involved in this, I also imagine that there's an enormous amount of somatoform or sometimes called psychosomatic actual physical symptoms that are what Freud and the whole tradition of Western psychoanalysis have defined as hysteria. And the fact that this sort of archaic idea of mass hysteria or hysteria of the individual can be legible and can kind of like register as world news in 2017, 2018, this is, I think, a very interesting thing that sound can do.
A couple, two years ago when we, I was running a seminar in the music department called Sound and Violence and one of the essays that we read was dealing with infrasound and phenomena like the Windsor Hum. Have you heard of the Windsor Hum? Where there's like sort of spots in the US and I can't remember the second spot that was actually the focus of this article. hundreds, dozens, tens, dozens, hundreds of people around these areas are sick and are certain and do all they can to get some kind of evidence that can be registered as evidence that there is something there, but they can't.
So this invisible agent of attack becomes, as you mentioned, a sort of locus for all kinds of other collective anxieties, not necessarily hysteria, but complaints, fears. There are sort of problems in collectivities that people can't speak about, and so they speak about their physical complaints that are being produced by this individual agent, or sorry, invisible agent. And so I think that the, and I feel, I don't feel fascinated by the individuals who are ill because of this, but I feel fascinated by what this invisibility has been able to,
what kind of news it's been able to make. Thank you. Excuse me, I have a question. From how and from where are the sounds emitted? Nobody knows. There's no proof about any of this whatsoever. So nobody knows. I mean, I think what's interesting to start with is the fact, you know, I mean, nothing is known about this. This could even be, I mean, it's already been pointed to that it could have been, at some point in this evolution was the suggestion that none of this had actually happened at all. So it was mass hysteria. So that there was no attacks, there was no frequencies of any type at play here. It was just purely mass hysteria.
So somebody would have suggested the idea in the office, and that mass hysteria would have propagated kind of virally throughout the office, and then other people would have psychosomatically thought that they were under the same kind of attack or witness to or perceiving the same kind of trauma, if that's the word. One of the, another interesting thing is not just why people insist that it is there, but who is it that would insist that it was not there? You know what I mean? And there are, you know, why, how does the experience of this become, slip over into conspiracy theory? And what, at what point do some people say, this can't be real, you know?
like this has to not exist and that's part of that's what they then contribute to this discourse is that it doesn't exist yeah that's why um the the fact that this is um because of sound is so potent because it's so immaterial that you can question its very existence in the first place like the the only like publicly available evidence of this being sound based in the first place is like a recording the AP News found off of someone's phone of of just like just like a collection of like really resonant frequencies. That's all we have to say that it did exist.
So now that you've said I heard the sound, there weren't groups of people who have claimed that they heard these sounds? There are people who claim they heard it, and I think they experience it sometimes as just like, is it out my window? Is it coming from in my room? It was sort of an unlocalizable sound, but they did hear it or claim to have. On the topic of the spread of hysteria, can you comment on kind of the timing of it? if this would have happened 10 years ago, would have had the same propagated effect as it did happen now, where we all have smart speakers and I don't think that we're more aware of the whole audience. I mean, the whole thing,
I mean, what's interesting also is that the whole episode came at a time where Trump is obviously very heavily invested in rolling back any gains that Obama, the Obama administration made, I think, across the board, pretty much. I think he's pretty blended-minded in just like, I think, any gains made anywhere, he's happy to roll back, as you obviously know. The gains, there was obviously huge gains made under the Obama administration with Cuba in terms of relations, economic relations, civil relations, political relations. it's interesting that this has come at a time the cuban economy has suffered really badly from this
so i think i actually was strangely i ended up consulting the cuban government because they put together a team of people from across around from sciences from people who investigate ultrasound and infrasound which is one of my is my background for my phd and we and we formed a subcommittee for the Cuban government because they were really desperate, and they are still desperate, to understand what's going on because of the ramifications for their economy, which are huge. They have suffered economically really badly from this. So, yeah, there's something really interesting. I know that's not exactly your question, but I diverted it a little bit to that. I don't know if somebody else wanted to say something. Yeah, I actually find it very fascinating that this subject has come up in the sense that we say this hysteria has come up.
I tried to find some facts about it, and it seems like it's out of nothing. But I'm really fascinated that we have a really beautiful installation that has been born out of this nothing. And so we propagate to this but we propagate it in a way that we try to respond to it. And I want to just say a few words about what I felt actually today when I went. I don't know how many people actually have experienced installation. Not many. You'll really enjoy it. You'll see this as I was expecting to go there and be assaulted. And as I went in there. No, you were. Yeah. I mean, the concept of being assaulted is an interesting one because I think it connects a lot to intention of what this assault means.
In a sense that we're talking about sound affecting our bodies if there is a weapon to be made. I always have felt, I can't for certainty say, that low frequencies may make you feel nausea. It's very hard actually for us to hear low frequencies because there are not perhaps enough equipments that can produce them. But if you have a subwoofer that can produce low frequencies around 4 or 5 hertz and you have them strong enough, they do actually make you move because if it's strong enough and that can give you nausea and as I went to I was expecting something physical happen and I was listening to it
and I thought oh modern music that's what I was hearing I actually heard music and then what I was thinking is that it's the intention that matters it's like a lot of times We currently are doing crossing boundaries class, and the discussion of torture has come up a couple of times. If you put a needle in somebody, if you're a doctor, that's okay. It's not a problem. But if you're doing it out of bad intention and the person knows you're doing it out of bad intention, that's really harmful. And the person will feed it. And I feel like in general, when we turn sound into music, we affect other people because this is like we're pouring something, some sense of we're filling the sense of the other person.
And the intention of why we do it becomes really important. And as you asked the question, when you said these days that we have smart speakers, my thought suddenly went to where you said, to the idea of how much torture I feel when I read news these days. and the fact that the concept of facts has really disappeared. It's like we have been divided so much that belief has taken over our understanding of the world, and any subject that has come up, depending on who you talk to, can have different meaning. So I felt like this is one of those subjects that it shouldn't really be that difficult to prove
if it happened or if it didn't happen, both medically on the people that this had been, they were subjected to it, and also physically if they were able to record this. You know, we have so many recording devices on so many levels, it is quite unlikely that something like this would go unnoticed. On the other hand, I also apologize for going a little longer here, but I remember 1994 earthquakes. earthquakes and you know they say animals can tell when earthquakes come i was in the part of 1994 earthquake in santa monica and when the earthquake came and power went then the tv came
a few hours later and we would watch we had uh aftershocks every five minutes and these are like five and a half, six Richter aftershocks. So they were major. And we had the seismograph on TV. We could see it about 10 seconds before the earthquake would arrive. The Caltech seismograph would show it. I suddenly noticed the cat, the dog next door would start barking 10 seconds before the seismograph would start. And I could tell that the dog knows. and you know they said a lot of people said they start scratching they know that they've seen a lot of but they have a sense that perhaps we don't and I a lot of times I wonder if there are things
that affect us that we don't experience so I see the both sides of it but the major one that I have felt as I was studying this for today trying to find something which was very hard to I mean there's tons of material, but there was really nothing that you could concretely pull and try to say, yeah, this thing happened, is the absence of accepting facts, is the absence of that now anything can go as we can take and spin anything in any direction. And that's kind of troubling, actually. I mean, that's essentially Mascaravka. It's like the Russian deception techniques from the Second World War, which is what they what they do to watch the right this technique is basically just feeding enough disinformation
into a system where it just questions the veracity of any anything that we would might want to call factual or a narrative that might be supported as having or might be conceived of as having the support of a main an institution or a main body of power whereas now today as we know like all narrative is is is malleable isn't it it's like all whether it's scientific conspiracy theory whether they're memes whether they're tweets emails whatever the type of narrative it's all malleable and and and they all they all collide at some point and converge and that's that's ultimately like what the kind of the the technique of maskarovka is tries to tries to
get to grips with or tries to forward and propagate that notion. Thank you for this because it's been something I've been concerned for many decades but I'm EMF sensitive. I found that out about 20-30 years ago and I tried to notice how it affects me when I'm in a certain phase that has a lot of EMF. Now I also have heard of this in Vietnam that happened this past year. It was actually used to control any protests. So I heard reports that a ton of people have had this targeted at them. And I've also heard that this is a weapon that was developed probably for like a Coast Guard use.
But it was targeted at the protesters in Vietnam this past year. And people went deaf and they went crazy and people even died from it. So this is not new to me. I've heard about the two incidents we reported in Cuba and China, but when I heard about it in Vietnam, there were direct reports that count by the censorship we then back from reported. So some people report it personally and then it was reported later on online by people who are outside the country. So to me it's like science means know a lot but we don't know anything if you look at, flip it over. So I feel like not knowing doesn't mean it didn't happen or couldn't shift. And I'm glad that someone is looking at this and maybe we can have detectors or something to install so that it could be.
Because I think it's also very directional, so you can do it something directional, we can also capture it and at least locate it. So I don't know if you've heard of anything about that being used in Vietnam in the past year. It was reported in some circle, it was used against protestors. The usual one for that is active. There's LRADS, but it wouldn't be LRADS because long-range acoustic devices are very... They are directional to a degree, but they just emit massive sound, like decibel levels. There's active denial systems, and there's also hypersonic sound, HSS. HSS are like hypersonic sound systems, so they're very directional. But it can't be heard.
If it's something that can't be heard, it's probably something like an HSS, but on a much larger scale than the ones that are actually the ones that were originally made were produced here were from here were from american technology atc which were based in san diego and actually they made them for the coast guard for the u.s coast guard they were for ship to ship comms if the uh communications went down they were for ship to ship comms um i've actually loads i've got loads of them i think we use them a lot for installations um but they they're asked there are that type of it's uh ultrasound it's ultrasound it's woven in sound it's woven so sound is carried by ultrasound in a technique called heterodyning so the it's woven into it but it doesn't it doesn't uh it only becomes perceivable when it hits something so if it hits a wall it
will reflect but you can't hear it in the air so it's not like a traditional loudspeaker it's very different than allowed than sound than the way we comprehend sound and sound in space so it could be something of that nature but i don't i i don't know but these things can't kill people it's very unlikely that they would kill people you could damage people's hearing for sure you could cause tinnitus very easily and bleeding and but it would be quite difficult to kill somebody because you'd need something with a huge amount of power to do that. I mean, yeah. Do you know what the cause of death was? What did they declare the cause of death for those who are dying? People also were arrested and beat up too, but there were a massive report of brain damage and also bleeding.
And also other, you know, like I think the physiology is something you can look at and test for, but other things you cannot employ. Someone is already brain damaged. You cannot ask them to respond to knowledge that they're affected by. You know, I think you probably can find more information than I can if you look into it. I'm just an ordinary citizen, but I think that's something that, you know, people are not, you know, if you have some kind of drug infection, you can test for it. Yeah, of course. that's why non-lethal weapons utilize a lot of a lot of non-lethal weapons are sound are frequency based for exactly for that purpose because strategically they're really useful because they don't leave marks if you if you see somebody on the news beating somebody with a baton
that's obviously going to have repercussions you know it doesn't look good for police to be beaten but if they're using a something with sound it's also the fact that if they are using sound it's not it's still not taken seriously i mean you know so i think about guantanamo bay and abu grave and all the talk the torture we all know happened and has been documented fully in a number of books and journals etc etc it's still very difficult for people to take this idea seriously now it's like this idea that playing a song repetitively over 28 24 48 hours could really be that serious but you know it's like the a lot of the interviews done with people like the tipton three who were in Guantanamo, the reports are pretty consistent from people who were beaten, sexually abused,
had dogs set on them, had harassment of many different types, that the sonic harassment was generally the worst of all of them. And that's concluded by a number of people who were in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. And if you're interested in exploring that, there's Suzanne Cusick, who's a musicologist a few years ago, did a couple of really good pieces. She interviewed some folks who had been at Guantanamo, prisoners at Guantanamo, only about the sound, the sonic torture. And she actually did some sort of like physical experiments where she put herself physically in positions in relation to sounds to try and get into
a place of empathy, I suppose. And it's really provocative, like the similarities between the experience of, you were mentioning earlier in tension, the experience of, for example, a nightclub where you're kind of being destroyed by sound. I mean, I destroyed my ears DJing. I have tinnitus. And, you know, I don't, I just sort of, it's hard to take it seriously. but then if you place that same kind of if you put that same kind of decibel and that same kind of spatial environment in Guantanamo it becomes very clearly sort of immediately registers as violence
I think there's I think it's true that it's very difficult for people in general to take sonic violence seriously as violence no matter what kind but I do think there is some kind of shift that's going on around LRADS because they've been turning to this almost like it's a very phallic weapon. It's a very directional, loud, it is a gun, and people can kind of register that. And then there's another maybe level of immersive loudness that people can kind of, if they can sort of imagine themselves in that situation, can get there. And then there's this sort of infrasound or unsound space
that we've been talking about, which I think is the most aporic, in a way, for people. It's somewhere between a thing and a non-thing. It's material and a non-material. It's invisible. It's like a haunting instead of a gun or a violence. So sound can do these vis-a-vis violence. I think it has these different registers of invisibility, which is why I think people use it so much for what you've, you know, against protesters, et cetera. Yeah? Did you say NSA's name last earlier? Did I? Yes. I did say that.
I can't imagine that that could ever be true. What does it do? Produces. Analyzing and producing. Propagating. Who could have thought? Well, a common thread between all of this weaponry, including memes, is, as Sarah said, this degree to which they're invisible. Like with LRADS, it looks like a satellite dish, but yet you can physically assault someone without an officer laying a hand on someone,
thus making them very useful for breaking up Black Lives Matter protests, which has been documented. Or even in a more extreme and direct case, what we talked about with the torture in Guantanamo, where they're just blasting these sounds. It's still not physical violence, thus it's not assault. Or with ultrasonic frequencies, there's something we can't hear, but then there's part of the spectrum that we can hear, but its ultimate source is hidden. And same with the subsonic frequencies, where the dog can perceive this because they can perceive lower frequencies than we can,
but what's being experienced at that moment is hidden from us. Even though it exists, it's invisible from what we're able to perceive. Thus, the means of transmission is hidden from us. I think I associate unsound and the danger that it or the threat that it represents more with sickness, infection and the virus you were mentioning earlier, is there something about viral culture that is related to this which to me, I mean there's a virus that can come in, there's a sickness that can come in there's an infection that can come in and destroy and then there's violence, which is like the El Rad, the gun,
a thing that is condensed in a way as opposed to diffuse. Yeah, and obviously asymmetric as well. I mean, a lot of the kind of ambient, ambiated or ambient and asymmetric warfare techniques that are utilized today are predicated around things that are at the edge of the sensorium. so things that are difficult to perceive obviously it makes it if something's easy to perceive it's easy to easy much easier to oppose if something's difficult to perceive and it deals with the sensorium in a different way than we're used to then and it also extends the notion of the sensorium then it becomes a abstracted it becomes asymmetric and it becomes very difficult to
actually start opposing that and analyzing that and rationalizing it and that's the it's the irrational that's exactly where the power of this lies is it's in it lies in the in the kind of irrational in the just beyond just beyond being able to perceive it which is you know infrasound as mentioned before that infrasound produces nausea it also produces anxiety and like it's been medically proven to cause anxiety because you cut your ear can't it doesn't come through the ear the sound because it's sub 20 it's a hearing cuts with humans at 20 hertz so anything below 20 hertz we don't perceive with our ears we can like via bone conduction so the sound travels along jaw lines for examples and delivers sound into the organ of corti where we this is going
too far into the nuts and bolts of it but we we get infrasound also through our through our jaw bones which deliver delivers the sound into here and we also receive it throughout through our bodies as well and we feel it so infrasound has this capacity to to trouble trouble the brain because the brain's used to understanding and comprehending frequencies via the ear and when it doesn't do that it it does it kind of goes into a fight or flight mode to a degree daniel leverton writes a lot about this from mcgill university wrote the this is your brain on music book which is a very famous kind of neurobiology book around sound and there's a number of people like sarah anglis in the uk have done big experiments are in churches and cathedrals
looking at the way that the religion certain religions have used infrasound to control the people in within the buildings in churches and cathedrals and that was one of the main constituents of the strategies of the Catholic Church was to use that notion of the space above the head to produce infrasound out the organs. Obviously, that comes down because infrasound, low frequencies, want to be around the base of the building or the floor. But it makes people feel that fear and anxiety and that kind of awe that people feel, that you feel in that kind of building with that kind of sound is because of the anxiety that it produces in the body. Sorry, that kind of went and wove all over the place, didn't it? There's no real point to it at the end of that.
Sorry. And what that anxiety, what is sort of affectively experienced as anxiety, sometimes nausea, sometimes a combination. I think what's really troubled by this, I'm just using unsound because I think it's a great way to, since I'm not sure enough what I'm talking about in terms of the actual phenomenon, I'm just going to say unsound or the different phenomena, What is troubling is subjectivity. Is the constitution the integrity of one as a sort of coherent being, right? As a being who engages with the world through the five senses, who has a bounded body, who is defined as I in distinction to all that is not I.
This is sort of the foundation of the human. And when sound is acting, while an LRAD, I would be more afraid to encounter an LRAD, I think, or more like protective of my body than to encounter some more diffuse, like, what's in there. I'm less scared of the one, of the weapon, because it doesn't trouble my being. It doesn't trouble my subject. It is a danger that I can, as you said, identify, whereas the other is something that troubles boundaries, and I can't protect myself against when it might come.
And that's the danger that, as you know from class two years ago, Chris David talks about as objection, abjection, something that's neither me nor not me it's kind of this liminal in between that is the most dangerous from sort of like an ontological point of view i mean you're in a vibrational field aren't you i mean with especially with that with infrasound it really destabilizes the notion of that centered subjectivity because we we as rational notions of rationalization often come from this notion that we're centered we're centered and then relate to the rest of the will by being able to name what's around us and take distance from it when we feel we need to infrasound doesn't let you do that it puts you in it puts you in a field of relations of
constant and complete oscillating relations you're always in this discourse and you can never be outside of it if you're in this field of of frequencies so something i mean julian enriquez writes uh really interesting about like subs sound systems jamaican sound systems and the whole idea that you know like especially with low frequencies is that they're not interested in expressing themselves or manifesting themselves on the surface of the body or the skin that they move in they go into the body and they and they relocate our notions of what what a body is what it can be how it can express itself in its agency so it yeah that is really interesting i think what you said and that is very destabilizing in that manner one hour is a
very short amount of time, at 6 o'clock. But I'm wondering if there is one more question from the audience that we can take. Amy, please. Well, since this story has been going on, I've been wondering about it in the context of Cold War invisible weapon lore. It feels very Cold War and reminds me of these programs. I think NSX was one based on the idea that the Soviets were able to spy on computers by, you know, like reading the radiation between the computer and the monitor, for example. And so defense facilities had to be built
with a certain amount of, you know, a giant tinfoil hat around the defense facility to keep the spine from going on. And then of course we had these conspiracy theories going back to the Cold War about somebody spying on Brother Green's, I have to do that, I think we all had. And all of those were based on spying on you, right? That someone could do during some of these major thoughts. And this feels like the next generation where they can actually do something to you with the invisible weapon, not just steal things from you. And I've been trying in my head to imagine why that is. And is it because of all these smart systems and all of the loss of privacy that we are familiar with now?
Is it because you can't scare people enough just by pretending? I mean, it's not even the spine, right? It's just the thought that spying might be possible. We just have to get that out there and people become hysterical. Is it because you can't generate enough hystericals and now you have to make people hysterical? You have to make people hysterical at the possibility that you can have an invisible weapon that is attacking them at any time. I'm just curious what all of your thoughts are on this sort of transition between invisible weaponry.
If I was going to like put it place a bet that I would say that would that's the reason why this was done to whoever it was done to by whatever agent or government did it not to nobody cared about the individuals I suspect it was it was just so that everyone would know it was possible we can we can get anyone anywhere you know that's like that's a you know to to. To show, I mean, a lot of this, what I think of as counter espionage stuff, these like hijinks at embassies, has no purpose, has no like instrumental purpose, only just to show the world, to show that they can, you know, to keep people on their, yeah, like weird stuff.
Like I came home, I'm just going to say this real quick. I was working at the embassy, the American embassy in Tel Aviv, and I came back to my apartment one day, and it was filled with insects. And I learned like it was just paper. It was just like wall-to-wall bugs. And I found out later that bugging people's apartments in that way was the joke. It was like playing a practical joke. Like we bugged you. See, we can bug you. And I sort of feel like this sort of just sickifying sound, which has no effect other than to make people feel frightened and ill, is similar. But that's just a speculation. Did you want to say the last words, either of you? Okay. You're in the middle.
Yes. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I'll just continue on with your question. But I mean, I think it's more than just showing that it can be done, but it's this like abject fear that you're talking about of this is irresolvable. and to research and search for a source, you're only opening up just rabbit holes. And you look at all the news reports and New York Times, they're just getting longer and longer and longer of just possibilities of, is it microwaves? Is it ultrasound? Is it all of these things? And by investigating it, we're just like spreading both it itself with an installation and the paranoia it induces.
Thanks, guys. I think we're all actually anxious to go and experience the installation. So I want to take the moment. Yes. I want to take a moment to also thank the Qualcomm Institute staff, specifically Trish Stone who's done a lot of management work for this installation to happen and thank you to Toby and John for making this and thank you Sarah for accepting to be in this panel thank you very much for you being here I hope you join us