Welcome to this afternoon. What was the time? Sorry, the night was a bit late yesterday. So, yeah, I want to welcome to another day of our talk and discourse series. Shortly, the sequence of events today. We will have about two hours of talk, maximum two hours here, now with Steve Goodman, Toby Hayes, and Paul Paulun. Afterwards, a break, and then a kind of lecture intervention by Martin Clausen,
which I want you to invite as well to attend. And at 6 o'clock, Bradley L. Garrett will introduce into his research into the topic of urban exploration and the hauntings within the urban environment, the stones, the buildings, the ruins of the urban landscape. Yeah, Paul Paulun is active in sound research since the 80s, doing various activity from installation to radio pieces. He was also active in various Berlin underground, I would say, activity, various venues and spaces where there was
all kinds of experimentation with sound. Yeah, and he will introduce to you, our two other panelists. Maybe I shortly can add that we have this work from Audint in our exhibition program over at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, the Dead Records Office, and I'm sure they will be talking about that a bit as well. This is open every day from 12 to 7 till Sunday, so I can just encourage you to go there and experience this work as well. So, Paul, the microphone is yours. Yeah, we will talk about invisible attacks and hideouts. That's the title of this afternoon.
So it means attacks on the ear. and the ear is a very vital sense organ but at the same time very vulnerable one too. So even unborn children can listen to sounds from the second half of the pregnancy. The ear is developed and so later on in life it's also a very important thing. So I did an interview with a Sufi singer, Sheikh Mohammed El Helbawi from Cairo who was working with Suleiman Gamil. Some people might know he released on Touch Records. His music got released there. He passed away. So in this interview, Sheikh Mohammed El-Helbawi told me
that the most important thing in life is to be able to distinguish between what is wasteful and what is fruitful. And that this is the reason why the Lord created us ears. However, ears are under constant attack and so I'm happy to welcome some members of the ODINT project. It's Steve Goodman and Toby Hayes. They run ODINT together with John Kors and who cannot be here today. So we will talk about this project and we'll also investigate whether there are connections between military intelligence and the state of current electronic music. Steve Goodman, to my left, is author of the book
Sonic Warfare, Sound, Effect and the Ecology of Fear, published by the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. And in this book he describes several ways how the military uses sound and music to work on opponents. Apart from that, he's a music producer in the field of, one might say, dubstep. This happens using the alter ego of Code 9. He founded the label Hyperdub, on which releases his own music and also other music. To give you an idea about this, I'd like to play a short fragment of a track by Code 9, which is called Other Man.
Thank you. And then we have Toby Hayes at the far end. He's also a music producer as a member of the group Battery Operated and he runs the label Cocoa Solid City. Battery Operated came to my attention around 2000 with a CD called Chases Through Non-Plays
and it deals with so-called non-places, places like hotel lobbies, hotel rooms, airports, shopping malls, places that no one really feels in relation to you, like places you just visit briefly, highly functional places. And they were making recordings at locations like this and exploring the sonic nature of these places, the sonic constitution of these places. And later on the interest shifted, or seems to have shifted more to sonic weapons, and on their website today you find a very extensive archive
of all sorts of sonic weapons, sonic warfare, going back to the very roots even some centuries ago. one might be very surprised to see for how long sound and warfare built like a pair. So I'd also like to play an excerpt from one of the records from those chases through non-plays to give you an idea what his approach to music like that is like, to places like that is like.
and this is exactly how this field of sonic weapons, sonic warfare is like for me. It's like there's a lot of things going on, a lot of myth connected to this field. And so Audint is not as much as an online archive as the battery operated site. It's more of an art project. What is the idea behind Audint? Well, Audint has quite a long history before we got involved in it. Audint was initiated in the Second World War. Audint is short for Auditory Intelligence.
And it was initiated by three defecting members of a division of the US Army in the Second World War. They were nicknamed the Ghost Army. and I have a short video documentary we can watch of that. So they defected from the S-Army because they came across a certain powerful combination of frequencies that they felt was too dangerous to leave purely in the hands of the army and wanted it to be, in a sense, public domain. So they defected to, or they set up this research organization whose remit was to kind of make some of these sonic weaponry inventions open source and public domain.
So the first wave of Audent came out of the Second World War. the second wave of the organization corresponds to the Vietnam War and in particular I should say that one of the themes that brings together the history of Auden as a research organization what they're particularly interested in is the use of sound by the military to produce an effect of haunting or in other words to kind of simulate a ghostly experience in the enemy. With the Ghost Army, it was to do with sonic deception. In Vietnam, there was a campaign, a psyops campaign,
known as Wandering Soul, which attempted to tap into Buddhist belief system of the Viet Cong and try and persuade them to surrender. And then the third phase of the organization, which is when we were contacted by Odin, and recruited corresponds to the use of ultrasound devices of the US Army in Iraq. So we were kind of recruited in order to research these particular instances of deployment of sonic devices in a context of war. So we have short videos that correspond with each of these. I don't know if now is an appropriate time to show them,
or do you want to add anything to that? No, I think we should think it goes down. We start with the Ghost Army and then maybe talk a bit about the Ghost Army. The kindness sets the scene, I suppose. It sets the scene, so it's a good place to start. Sonic warfare, as developed here, is one of the Army's most closely guarded secrets. A single sonic company is capable of simulating under combat conditions the activities of a division. Every sound that is part of the bridge building operation is picked up by this microphone. carried through this cable and recorded inside this sound recording truck on this turntable, exactly the way a phonograph record is made. Every component part of the building operation is recorded on a separate disk.
The next will be a bulldozer at work. Then, men unloading trucks and so on, recording each separate step. Of course, construction of a bridge is only one example. At the same time, another crew is at an armored camp recording the sound of an armored column, tanks crossing a small bridge, or any one of the many other basic sounds heard in combat areas which would indicate troop movements to a listening enemy. All these recordings go into the basic library at the Army Experimental Station.
For actual projection, the sound is re-recorded from the discs onto wire, a much more compact, easy-to-handle device than any heretofore employed. While the fidelity compares favorably with disc and film recording, these small spools hold enough wire to provide 30 minutes of sound. On turntable one goes a recording of trucks moving in, stopping. On turntable two goes a recording of pundins and other material being unloaded. On three goes a bulldozer working and a bridge being constructed. All these are sounds that would be heard by the enemy if a bridge were being built. And all these components, before they can be projected
from the loudspeakers, must be mixed onto one soundtrack, which is recorded on wire. With the progress of the war, changes in tactics and technique have called for changes and improvement in equipment. The best loudspeakers for the military requirements have been developed. under ideal conditions over water they were found capable of projecting sound for 15 miles so that's the the first historical phase of the project out of which Auden as an organization
emerged. Do you think we should show the other two clips? Just quickly as background. 15 miles is quite some distance. That's what you just said. So this next video is actually an excerpt from a Chris Marker film called A Grin Without a Cat. And it features It's very short. It features film footage of a helicopter flying over the jungle in Vietnam with mounted loudspeakers. And what they're playing is these kind of fabricated ghost communications.
They're Buddhist prayers, aren't they? They're like prayers for basically the wandering soul. the idea of the wandering soul is a Buddhist idea that if a body isn't laid to rest correctly, then the soul will wander. And it will always be calling back to people on Earth somehow, hence the idea of the haunting. So this is what the U.S. Army played from large speakers called curdlers, which were mounted on the side of helicopters. and they would fly sorties at night over the Viet Cong to try and fool them and deceive them that these voices were from their dead ancestors. So that's what we're going to hear now on this video. Vietnam, 1968.
A loudspeaker broadcasts the supposed cries of a Viet Cong who died in combat. His family call out to him, but he says, it's too late, I'm dead. And he urges his comrades to leave the forest before they die like him. And then the third phase of the project, which is referred to as phantom haler, is to do
with directional ultrasound, this kind of new wave of speaker technology that's emerged in the last 10 years based on directional ultrasound. So this clip is a short excerpt from a Discovery Channel documentary about future weapons. And it kind of explains some of the physics, some of the acoustics behind how these devices work. Try and ignore the craziness of the people involved in this. Try and ignore the craziness of the people who are actually developing these weapons because they're quite different from what we've seen before. Energy weapons are not limited to lasers and lightning. There is another form of invisible wave that can be used as a powerful and effective weapon.
I'm talking about sound. During the first Gulf War, the U.S. Army deployed psychological operations teams armed with vehicle-mounted loudspeakers. These were used to blast propaganda messages, invitations to surrender, and Western heavy metal music in order to deceive and disorient the enemy. They even played the sounds of armored vehicles and helicopters to create ghost battalions out of thin air. This proved that the military was using sound waves as a viable strategic option. To create these effects requires huge loudspeakers and lots of energy to drive the amplifiers. But conventional loudspeaker design hasn't changed in nearly 100 years. And to create an effective acoustic weapon, you need something a little more sophisticated.
Behind the mirrored windows of this ordinary-looking San Diego office block, one successful inventor has achieved what was previously thought to be impossible. He's designed the world's first truly directional combat loudspeaker. When I was a kid, I think I was in high school before I saw my first TV set. So what there was, was sound. Woody Norris has spent more than 30 years building and patenting hundreds of hugely successful ideas. I thought of my first invention kind of as a joke and then after coming up with the idea I thought well this maybe isn't a joke maybe this will work. Woody's breakthrough was to realize that if sound waves could be focused in the same way as rays of light it would open up a whole new world of possibilities
What if you turn on a light bulb and the light just went everywhere like the original Edison light bulb did? What good is that? Well it lights you up in the dark but you wouldn't have things like movies. You've got to project it, focus it, shine it in a direction. That's controlling and projecting light. I thought, jeez, we've got to be able to do that with sound. A conventional loudspeaker generates audio waves in every direction, which spread out as they travel like ripples on a pond. The volume heard by the listener drops off quickly the further away he is. Woody's design is different. It uses highly directional ultrasound at much higher frequencies to carry the regular audio. These travel in a focused beam so they don't spread out and they don't get quieter, even over long distances.
This thing happens to be on full blast right now. Can you hear it? I hear nothing. Oh, watch what happens. Is that bouncing right off the camera? Yeah, we're hearing a reflection. I can actually reflect it off of a person's clothing. Not nothing? I could swear that's coming from right over there. It is coming from right over there. The wall is the loudspeaker. Now what if I want to put a pair of headphones on you? Right. Now what's happened is... Not here, it's just really right here right now. Now it turns towards me. Now I hear both. Right here. Right. Right in the center. Nice colleagues you've got. What is it like to work with... They're not our colleagues. What?
They're not our colleagues. They're not your colleagues? Not as far as I'm aware. Not as far as I'm aware. I invited them a couple of weeks ago. I forgot to tell you. I thought you were researching. We're researching all of these. Basically, Auden is interested in what we call military sonic hauntology. And these are all instances of it. So this is what we're researching, these kind of technological developments and implementations. We're not actually a technology company producing weapons. You're just making it public. Yeah. We're researching the effects of them. We're researching how they function, how they open up
this idea of the third year, how they function as this kind of military mandate of what it is to actually get inside somebody's head. And a very basic premise, what does it mean to try and get in somebody's head psychologically, what does it mean physically, physiologically, technologically. And with this speaker system, this is the first time that they've actually developed a speaker system which can actually focus sound in a way that it will focus on one person's cranium so that they are the only person that can hear a sound. So the other people around won't hear that same sound, which means that they can effectively it's kind of like the Philip K. Dick nightmare. Philip K. Dick imagined that people, the CIA, were
focusing sound and feeding messages into his head when he was writing. This is kind of like the early the nascent technology which is making that plausible, that idea plausible. So what all of these three examples illustrate is an attempt to create create phantom audio or create an ambiguity between voices that are coming from outside and voices that are coming from inside your head and kind of blur that distinction. So do you have any information what sort of people it are that come up with ideas like the Ghost Army? The Ghost Army was composed of
visual artists who were engaged in producing visual deception through the production of camouflage designs and inflatable tanks that you would blow up, carry place in the battlefield to create again, create a phantom army create an impression that your strength is bigger than it actually is and then the sonic deception was developed by radio engineers who had been drafted. It was kind of, what's interesting about the Ghost Army is they were staffed by creatives. One of the interesting things about all of this research is it's like a question of what happens to creatives
in a military context. So people like Bill Blass, the designer, I guess people maybe have heard of Bill Blass, Ellsworth Kelly, the painter, colour field painter, was part of the Ghost Army. All his work after the Second World War is based generally on his camouflage work that he did during the Ghost Army days. So it was a thousand people. It was about a thousand creative types that have been sequestered from various colleges, schools, agencies, galleries to work for the U.S. military. Do you have any idea why it's so interesting for artists to work for the military? I'm not sure they had any choice. in the middle of the Second World War. I mean, there's more of a choice now.
See, this is still going on. That's the interesting thing, is that this still happens. Yeah, but in Vietnam, there obviously was a choice. No, but in the Iraq War, for example, during the Iraq War, they used a lot of speaker systems behind dunes. So in the first desert storm, they took out all the air reconnaissance capacity of the Iraqi military. I don't know if anyone remembers that. It was the first thing the US military did so that they could actually direct the battlefield very simply because the Iraqis had no reconnaissance capacity. So they would place speaker systems behind dunes to deceive the Iraqi army that there was build-ups just as the Ghost Army were doing. So exactly the same strategy.
And they were employing composers, US composers, to make battlefield symphonies. I actually know one of the people who made one of the symphonies who's an electroacoustic composer from the west coast of America, and he did it for the money. I know for sure he did it for the money. So people, artists, aren't different from anybody else. He didn't get paid in the end of it all that they promised him, unfortunately, which really pissed him off. But I think he completely deserved it. So obviously, since the birth of the musical avant-garde and the beginning of the 20th century, Italian futurism, the idea, the manifesto of the art of noises, there's always been a fascination of musicians
into sounds of war, sirens, explosions, gunfire. And obviously Italian futurists were interested in bringing these kind of noises from the battlefield into the context of music, of making, of like expanding the jurisdiction of music to include the sounds of war. So it's an interesting symbiotic relationship between our war. The Russian futurists didn't really agree on that point of view, so they were rather, I mean, the Italian futurists were like... They described war as the hygiene of the nations whereas the Russians were more interested in the hygiene of their throat. And so coming up with a new language rather than...
Obviously Italian. I mean, I totally see the point in... like liberating the sense of hearing and so... perception in general and accepting sounds that surround you and bring them in a new context. Sure. I mean obviously the Italian futurists shared a certain celebration and glorification of war with the fascists of the same period in Italy. So what about this Wandering Soul project? Do you have any information? the Wandering Soul project. Do you have any information who's behind this? It's the American PSYOPs, the Psychological Operations Division of the US Army.
It's their work, which is also called Ghost Tape Number 10 as well. That's its other name that it's known by. The other music and the sign of music-related PSYOPs campaign of the same period, the US Army in Vietnam, was called the Urban Funk Campaign, which is what the famous scene with Wagner's Riding the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now is based on that particular psyops campaign. So it's an audio harassment campaign is how they term it. Yeah. And what sort of people are it, the Urban Funk Campaign? The Urban Funk campaign is the general umbrella term
that all these other small audio campaigns fit under. So the Wandering Soul, Ghost Tape No. 10, is just one of those operations that fits in this umbrella term. So they have all these different types of audio programs that they initiate during Vietnam, of which the Ghost Tape No. 10 is just one of them. I bought the recording myself actually, you can buy it from the department called Seavolves or so they call it and they send you a CD. How long is the recording that you got? I've just got like a, it's 30 seconds, a minute that you can download it online. It's like three minutes.
But the CD comes, there are four tracks on the CD, each track is 12 minutes long and they're all the same. And in the 12 minutes each piece gets repeated like four times. So you end up... Budgets must have been tight. Tight budgets. Yeah. So I mean, I think it was like used to... Well, it's playing with the belief system of the Vietnamese people. And so it's a conversation between a dead soldier with his daughter. And so his daughter wants him to come back. And so he says, well, I can't, I'm dead. So I took the wrong decision becoming a soldier.
And so my soul will be restless forever because, well, he fell in combat somewhere. and according to the belief system, you should be buried where you lived. So this cannot happen with him since he's somewhere in the jungle. But in the film clip you were presenting from Chris Marko, it's a little bit misleading because you see this flying helicopter and then the music. Actually, it's like a sound piece, a piece to listen to. It tells a story. So the information that I got is like the helicopter was there at a fixed point and broadcasting it into the jungle to work on the minds of the people being in there somewhere.
And like if you're just flying around, you only get like five seconds. I think it's more the effect of the voices that was more important maybe than the whole story. And the idea that somehow, also what's important here is that So this was probably obvious to the Viet Cong that it wasn't actually their ancestral voices. But there's a certain anxiety which is produced, I think, by just that the American military have these recordings. It's a strange concept, I think, for the Viet Cong to think that somehow the American military have the power to record and then reproject and amplify these voices and re-utilize them as weapons, as psychological weaponry.
That still has a power of its own, which is different from the deception, but it's still a power. And I think that's what's kind of maybe interesting as well about that campaign. I mean, I thought that I got the CD. We could listen. I brought it also so we could listen in a broadcast quality, actually. So if we could please listen to track record 3. Thank you.
I am here. I am here. I am here. So that's part of the communication before. I mean it's like really eerie sounds and it's hard to imagine you're living, living, being somewhere in the jungle at night, they have to listen to it on end. It really can, it's like the torture, like things happening at Guantanamo probably where people get tortured. It also sounds like a kind of really schlocky 1950s B-Horror movie. Yeah. It's got that side to it as well, which kind of is interesting. But for us in the chairs here, like in the jungle at night, it's probably something that's really might have a strong psychological effect I think.
I think it's that capacity again, just reiterating what I said before it kind of works on the dynamics of a church in a way. Having the capacity to be able to broadcast sound from above head height and fill that kind of space between head height and the sky with sound. There's a certain there's a dynamic there, a psychological dynamic which is about to do which is about power, which is about having the power to be able to amplify and broadcast information, anxiety, different types of oral information in that space. Being able to control that space denotes a certain type of power. So again, I think knowing for Viet Cong soldiers to know that that space between themselves
and what the sky or the heavens is controlled by the US military, whether it's real or not real is not maybe what's important. Maybe that they have control of that space, that audio space is what's more important. Yeah, I totally agree. So however, I was researching this topic as well for a radio documentary on sonic weapons and I did an interview with Joe Banks, you might know him, aka Disinformation. And so he told me a very interesting story about the urban funk campaign. so I'd like to let him tell it in person if you could please play it. I wrote an article about this, including stuff about the Wandering Soul, black propaganda tapes and things like that for this magazine.
Then I recycled that material for sort of publicity material for a rock group. I founded this couple of mates of mine, Simon Faulkner and Mike Kuhn, and we called ourselves the Low-Level Urban Funk Campaign, sometimes shortened to Urban Funk Campaign, and Urban Dereliction Squad was another one that we used. So we put out all these kind of spoof leaflets attributing various stories about non-lethal weapons technology to ourselves, as though our group was the organisation responsible for all these experiments. And that material was recycled for a whole bunch of different fantasy articles and has now subsequently seems to have been quite well lodged in certain areas of counterculture. to the extent that, as I was describing to you the other day, if you now look up Urban Funk Campaign on Google,
there are actually these stories that we put about as deliberate disinformation that are actually being quoted online as being reliable historical sources. And one of the paradoxes of this is that, as presented in the original spoof leaflet, the Urban Funk Campaign was involved on the British side during the Second World War, but then happened to fight on the American side during the Vietnam War. So there's this one military unit that changed nationality down in generations. So that's really disinformation. I mean, truth is the first victim in war. We all know about that. So it's really misleading sometimes. And there's a huge field of myth involved. and
so yeah it's really strange how you cannot say what's actually the truth because you have different information so it's funny how those stories evolve sometimes about sonic weapons because there's so much myth connected to it but however I mean with that as well you have people like Jürgen Altman who I guess you probably come across excuse me? the researcher Jürgen Altman German researcher who kind of goes about debunking a lot of these myths about sonic weapons and their capacity and what they can do but this is the guy who's supposed to kind of negate the conspiracy theory and yet when you actually kind of burrow down there's people
who have, or it's been relayed to us that he actually has his own agenda for why he's trying to debunk these myths and that maybe the experiments he's carrying out are themselves maybe not completely neutral as he would like to. It seems like he's actually trying to debunk military scientific research company press releases more than conspiracy theories. It's myth and conspiracy theory about what a certain type of sonic weapon can do and what it can't do. What was the guy's name? Jürgen Altman. Oh, Jürgen Altman, yeah, of course. I think he's got bored of sonic weapons and he's moved on to debunking nanoweapons. Yeah, I mean, he's also quite critical,
actually about most of them, because there's so much myth. Like on the Discovery Channel, there was something about sonic bullets, bullets of sound you could fire that even could be directed. I mean, so there's a lot of myth, you know, a lot of things are just, it's like there are so many little companies, especially in the United States, that come up with some really intriguing sounding concepts and so they just want to get some funding. And so they get the funding, they can survive for another three years or so. Such as the sonic devastator. The sonic devastator.
The sonic devastator, yeah. It's a very small device which I don't think probably is that devastating. Yeah, but anyway, I think it's like, I mean, infrasound is another thing. Like, Jürgen Altmann is totally convinced that it has no effect. What's your opinion on infrasound? Infra. Infrasound? Yeah, I mean, there's a long history of... Well, low frequency, let's explain it. grey science and kind of conspiracy theory about the effects of low frequency sound and the character who always comes up in the literature is I think either Russian or a French scientist. Gavreau. Vladimir Gavreau.
who accidentally in this particular story accidentally stumbles upon the powerful effects of infrasound because he wonders why everybody in his laboratory is getting ill and he sourced the infrasonic vibrations from the ventilator fans in the laboratory and then once he realises that the low frequency sound has this power he tries to implement it as a weapon. Obviously, the problem with low-frequency sound as a weapon is it's the hardest kind of sound to focus, to target, to direct. So there is a few instances.
The British Army in Northern Ireland in the 70s is supposed to have used infrasonic weapons, deployed them on rioting crowds as a kind of way of controlling the crowd. But I think what's interesting is the kind of frequencies that are tending to get more real implementation are higher frequencies because of their targetability, such as the LRAD device that was on there. although since the Occupy protests in the US, I've seen a couple of websites about an infrasound device that is supposed to be deployable on the first few rows of a rioting crowd
and is supposed to have an effect on their internal organs and have this effect of suffocation on the front row of crowds. Only on the front row? particularly the front door. It's like an invisible punch. It's a little bit like an older device called the Vortex Ring Generator, which kind of emitted a very, at least the patent suggested that what would be emitted from this device is a very short, sharp pulse of energy, pulse of vibrational energy that would be the equivalent to being hit in the chest.
It's a different observation than the people were observing in the 60s or 70s where it was more like things would supposedly your organs would turn into jelly or so, not like a punch. It was more like something like a softer thing. I mean, bass waves are like rather soft and quick punching. And anyway, it's like in the open field you probably need like really big speakers to produce the long is it sub base so so much about sub bass is is just awkward to be used as a weapon controlled in a focused way i mean fan driven fan driven infrasound like fan driven speakers
i think are probably the future of more directional if there is a notion of infra infrasound that is directional, it's going to probably be fan-driven rather than cone, regular kind of traditional cone-driven speaker systems that do that. Directed infrasound? Well, if it is going to be directed, fan-driven speakers seem to have more capacity to maybe send infrasound in a bit more of a directional way than a traditional cone does. But this is still, I think it's still a long, long way off. if it is plausible to direct. I just don't know. I don't know if it is physically plausible to direct it. It's not the nature of a long rolling wave isn't to be directed. I suppose,
irrelevant of the technical details, one of the things that we're interested in with these kind of deployments of weapons is that, which is why we use the word unsound, is that it's not just about listening and hearing. It's a way of vibrations are used. Frequencies lower than what we can hear and higher than what we can hear. Yeah, it's not audible. It's all stuff that's on the edge of perception. So I guess that's kind of a remit for our research, current research anyway, is to investigate phenomena that exist at the edges of perception. Non-audible sounds, that brings us to another topic that's a software we find on your website
called the Ghost Coder, which is about, well, maybe subliminal messages, but you can't hear them. Maybe first I demonstrate what it's about and then we talk about it. It's about, I prepared something, I prepared, it's like what it does, you can, you have one carrier sound which is audible and in this audible sound there is something hidden which is not audible. So you might get bombarded or exposed to music like this one that I'm going to play you now, make it visible too for you. It's a piece of music.
What's this track? Oh, it's French. So there seems to be like some innocent piece of Euro techno from France called Sextronique. It was like a very number one hit some time ago, maybe some years ago. And so in this innocent music something is hidden, which I can decrypt now with the software.
So I import the encoded track, which is like this sextonic. And then we save it, extract it to the desktop and call it whatever. And hit the decrypt button and now the thing is working. And we'll come up with the hidden message behind this. So, I think it might be hidden.
the reality of either. So, and so on and so on. It would be probably very interesting to listen to the rest of the DJ officer, officer, which many people of you might know from the Reboot FM. He can't can't be here today, unfortunately. So yes, the GhostCode is a fantastic piece of coding, coded by John Corse, who could not be here. What's the idea behind it? The idea of it is that it's a way of creating a spectral archive online. We have a, through the research that has been done from 1945 onwards, there's been a huge amount of research that's been accumulated.
A number of the cards on which that research is done on is actually in the gallery, the Bithynian, Kreuzberg Bithynian Gallery, am I saying that correctly? Wherever there's installations. There's the installation there, and it has a lot of the information that's been accrued since 1946 on the interior of record covers. This was an attempt to transpose that information onto the internet. So what the software does is it takes spoken word content, it secretes it, camouflages it, hides it within pop music, and it puts it very high in the frequency range so that it's not audible when you listen to the original song.
When we decrypt it, we just bring everything down five octaves. So it comes down five octaves. The original pop song that it's hidden within just becomes a drone, becomes a background drone, and then the original voice that we've secreted becomes audible as a regular spoken word voice. So it doesn't work with MP3 because MP3 uses perceptual coding. In other words, it takes an average of the frequencies that we hear, so it cuts off all the high frequencies and it cuts off all the low frequencies. So the thing about FLAC and WAV files or lossless files is they actually have a very wide spectral range frequencies that we are way too high to hear. So the software uses that fact of lossless files, lossless formats,
in order to pitch up the spoken word message into the ultrasonic range. And then to decrypt it, it pitches it back down into the audible spectrum. Okay, so basically his voice was more rich in the original, but it was an MP3 copy of a radio show he did. So maybe that's why he sounds so ghost-like. Everything has that very kind of ultra- I'm not sure why. Compressed sound to it, which is fine. Exactly. It's fine. Aesthetically, I think it's perfect. Yeah, that's what I thought. Yeah, so the ghost coda.
Do you think this, the music has some sort of effect if you hear it? Do you get the, is it like a subliminal way of influencing people or is it... No, not at all. Sextronic. That piece of music. No, no, no. Just the idea of... Generally. Generally. Generally, yes. No, the music that we secrete the... There's no idea that we're trying to plant subliminal messages within the music. That's not what we're interested in at all. The music appears as the music. you can hear nothing of the original content that we secrete and camouflage within it. You can't hear anything of it. It's too high. You can't hear it.
It's completely unhearable. We're not interested in that subliminal message as such. We're much more interested in it, in the information existing in the public domain and that the public transport this information in torrent form so that this archive becomes a public library, in a sense, It's a public archive that can be accessed and is passed around by people who share music. So this is kind of like the other side of the entertainment, music as entertainment. This is kind of like the other side of that entertainment musical phenomena. So the previous instantiation of this installation, which was in New York last summer, had in the center of the space a computer which was networked and it was connected to BitTorrent networks.
since it was constantly online trading in these encoded files, uploading them, and also we received some messages coming through to us as well. And in the meta information of the FLAC, you can always find in the meta information that it does actually have secreted files in. So you can tell before you download them that they actually do hold Audient information. All right. Yes, some things, it's a range of mystery, myths also. There's also a history of counterculture and this want to believe into the myth or the power of sound
and that certain sounds have a certain power. We were briefly talking about infrasound. sound. Another thing that the counterculture of the 70s and 80s was interested in is music. So there's this film called Decoder, you might know it. It's about music in fast food restaurants, non-places, sort of non-places, how to fight it or that it allegedly this music was really powerful. So to work on people's minds in the film, it's a musician who wants to fight it with pure noise, by bringing noise into fast food restaurants because he thinks people's
minds get worked on by Muzak. And the interesting thing is for another radio documentary, I talking to the CEO of Muzak, around 2005 it was, Erwin Collis is the guy's name. And he told me and my colleague Hartwig, who I did it, that it actually never worked. So Muzak never had any power whatsoever. They all made it up. So they came up with photographs of alleged scientists, which were just people working there, putting on white coats for photo shooting. So he was quite frank and I was surprised why he was so frank about it.
But still, music still has a power. Music is used as a means of getting, so music and sound are used as means to get people away from certain areas. Like in front of the Hamburg Central Station you find loudspeakers and they don't blast but they emit something resembling classical music. I mean, I say resembling because the sound quality is very poor and then it's also not the original, it's like an interpretation, a variation of classical music.
And this place used to be a meeting point for homeless people, for junkies, which is probably not the sort of people that Deutsche Bahn wanted to have in their courtyard. And since they started playing the music, the people went away. So they can't stand the music. and it's some sort of torture. But there are also other things. That's more to do with the cultural association, isn't it? It's the cultural association that is the power, is the kind of nexus of the power there rather than the sonic content, rather than what the actual sonic content is. It's more the cultural association of being associated with being in a place where that type of music is being played.
I mean, that's part of the power of music as well, surely. I mean, we're really guarded about people don't like to hear, you know, they don't want to be associated with music they don't like. It's something that people really fear, you know, of humiliating themselves or making a fool of themselves by being seen to have certain types of music that they might think is embarrassing around their peers. Like, no other form of cultural production does that. Books don't do that, films don't do that, dance doesn't do that, design doesn't do that. Music's the only form of cultural production that really has that power to shape people's lives in that way, I think. And people are very guarded about what they listen to. And they're very guarded about making the mistake of having a certain type of music associated with them,
which might have nothing to do with them. Yeah, it looks also the other way around, like coming back to MUSEK. So first of all, MUSEK is the provider in Hamburg of this non-stop classical music stream. And MUSEK still exists, but these days they don't do background music any longer. They provide foreground music, like in-store music. They call it audio architecture, don't they, I think? That's their kind of brand name for it is audio architecture. Yeah, there's a couple of other companies who also do it, but if you go to H&M or Starbucks, all over the planet, you find the same, maybe not exactly the same music, but the same mood. And so they are creating moods, so music gets deployed as an instrument to not just exclude people,
but to create something like a feeling of home or where you feel relaxed. So still very functional but in a different way than before. So one thing, do you have any information about healing qualities of music? Sorry about what? Healing? it's not kind of a remit we're always asked that because it's like you're just talking about the negative aspect but the point of doing that is that usually we take
usually we're so used to the positive side of music culture listening to music gives you pleasure makes you high, makes you relaxed all of these generally in a general sense healing properties or opiating properties. Which can be kind of summed up with the idea like that old adage, music is the medicine of the mind, is that kind of like 16th century adage, which... So I think in a general sense, I think we just take for granted that music does have general healing properties. who want to try and save you from brain damage
by playing you a piece of music it's not specific like that but we assume that culturally music has healing properties which is why we're not looking at that because there's this kind of underside to sonic culture which gets overlooked which is more about the manipulation and how it's used to manipulate the somatic form yeah but I think if you know about so you have to exclude the healing no it's not excluded it's just not the focus of our it's on the periphery of our research but it's not what we're focusing on and the interesting thing is if you think of things like
the during the Vietnam War after the Vietnam War there is the what was it called? The Institute which then starts using healing and Buddhist the First Earth Battalion the First Earth Battalion is a US department of the military a department of the US military which is bound to using New Age stroke Eastern religious ideals, ideologies, technologies to affect them as weapons, to make them into weapons. So this kind of idea of this healing, these healing principles
and these healing mandates that we come to understand as being medicinal are very vault-faced. They can also be used very easily or they can be turned around and made into manipulative tools as well. So I think that's also the point at which that interests us when that kind of medicine becomes manipulative and that manipulation becomes medicine. Because in many of these cases, there's nothing specifically insidious about any of the sound or music that's used in many of these contexts. It's often the specific context in which they're deployed. and it's that so a lot, one of the interesting things
about silent music generally is its ambiguity or its neutrality to be turned one way or another even even sextronic can be weaponized sure most intellectual people despise this music absolutely personally I felt you were attacking me when you played that music but the recent history of music torture, none of the music necessarily in itself that's been used in these circumstances was sonically offensive, but it could have been culturally offensive or because of volume and repetition becomes an irritant.
So yeah, it's really the point at which whatever the content that set of vibrations becomes weaponized that we the audience becomes interested Did you explore the field of binaural beats? Yeah, briefly that's something we're kind of more researching currently there's a lot of the adverts online for teenagers who were listening to binaural beats and having out-of-body hallucinogenic experiences, or supposed hallucinogenic experiences. One of the themes that Auden is interested in
is this process called heterodyning. What is it called? Heterodyning, where more than one frequency is combined, so several frequencies are combined and they produce a third frequency that isn't there. That's the difference between the two. So it's two frequencies that are very close, and then the third frequency that is produced is the difference between the two. This is how directional speakers are operating, isn't it? This is heterodyne, yeah. Some of the speakers are based on this principle. The HSS that we showed before is based on this principle to a degree. One last question before I'd like to open the rooms to the audience here.
You speak about the opening of the third ear. What's the third ear? Well, most basically the third ear is the auditory equivalent of the third eye. And what audit has been interested in, I mean, it's really the primary focus of Audent's research program. And the third year is the way in which the body relates to audible and inaudible sound. It's also, in a number of the cases that we've come across, which have been ritualized cases,
is a way in which the participants of a certain ritual claim to be hearing the voices of the dead. There's a way of communicating with spirits and communicating with ghosts. So for us, the third year really corresponds to the relationship between hearing and audible and non-audible sound, but also that blurred distinction between voices inside your head and voices, external voices. So it's communication channels again that are kind of on, of presences that are on the edges of perception. Again going back to this idea of things that we can, we don't know yet how to perceive or how to give language to,
how to use language to actually explain this phenomena and opening up this conduit between the somatic presence and these presences that exist on this peripheral, liminal kind of boundary is what we're specifically interested in. Thank you very much. So I'm curious whether there are any questions in the audience. Yeah, maybe you can explain a little bit more about the thing I was interested in here, in all this field of myths and truths and non-truths.
If there is an antagonism between the military scientific complex on the one side and artists on the other side, what gives the kick for the artist to move over to the other side and what gives the kick for the scientific people, feel maybe like artists. To give an example, Michael Aquino in San Francisco, the leader of the Temple of Set, this satanic religion, used to claim that he not only was working as a psy-op officer, he was also, he knew by himself that the whole Stargate thing, you know, the TV series, were actually the truth. So the TV series showed what he did as a psy-op officer.
And of course the people who made Stargate liked this information somehow and also brought it into the field and said, yes, maybe it is that way. So what is the kick between art and this military scientific complex for you? What is the kick? What do you say? What gives you the key to working in this field of dealing with art and military, scientific? I mean, I think there's an interesting, I mean, maybe if we invert that, I think, for example, what the military, I mean, the military, I think, are at the moment very involved in the assimilation of culture. They're very involved in the assimilation of architectural ideas,
of semiotics, of music. This all can be seen in things like the use of torture of music in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. You can see it in things like the IDF think tanks, the Israeli Defense Forces think tanks, where Shimon Nava has an institute which teaches semiotics and rhizomatic theory to IDF soldiers so they learn how to circumnavigate cities and towns in rhizomatic ways. So rather than taking a street to chase a guerrilla soldier, they'll just burrow right through a house. They'll knock a hole through the walls, and they'll go through, and they'll use kind of like Guy Debordian ideas of detournement to navigate the city in an urban complex.
So I think I'll just speak from that perspective, and maybe Steve can do the other side. But for the military, there are new ways of thinking about how to engage in conflict, abstract, asymmetric styles or strategies that deal with conflict in a completely different way. And the IDF think tank are, I mean, I know Shimon Nava comes and lectures to the US military regularly. So they read Paul Virilio, they read Deleuze and Guattari, they read Foucault. These are soldiers who are deploying semiotics as a weapon and there's very specific strategic reasons why they do that. Don't you think this is just propaganda?
Because if I take an Israeli army defense force, it's more the stick thing. I don't know what music they play in Guat-Halabu. I'm afraid it will be more pop music. What we listen to in the radio here, but louder. No, it's not propaganda. And Shimon Navas, one of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life, he's frighteningly smart. And, I mean, this is all, you can see this. I mean, Eyal Weisman writes a lot about this from the University of Goldsmiths in London. And, I mean, these strategies are deployed. It's nothing, it's not propaganda. They're deployed. You can see them. They're in photographs. I've only seen them through photographs because I haven't been to Israel or Palestine.
but no it's not propaganda and the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is not propaganda this is well well documented and we have books by people like Jonathan Pieslak called Sound Targets which is based on it's more from a US military perspective of why they use music as a torture tool as a tool of torture so I don't think there's no I don't think it's propaganda also just take another angle on that question. It's a kind of hard truth, a hard reminder that artists don't have a monopoly on art, artists don't have a monopoly on creativity, or philosophers don't have a monopoly on
intelligence or radical thinking. And that in the particular period that we live in, ideas are very much out of control. and there's a certain neutrality to ideas in the way that they're appropriated and can be turned in any direction. So from an artistic point of view, it's a kind of wake-up call to realise how close the most schizophrenic parts of the military are to the most supposedly radical aspects of the art world. And also, maybe slightly more positively or constructively,
it's the idea that, obviously, to develop these technologies it takes a lot of capital, it takes a lot of financial investment, and that's something that the military has in many cases. And so the key from an aesthetic point of view is really to get hold of these devices and experiment with them and use them in more interesting ways, no doubt, than the military will use them. I like to go to the concept of the wandering souls, you know, the connection of spirituality
and mysticism in cultural and acoustic warfare. I think Mr. Goodman wrote about this in his book, calling it hyperstition. But I'm more interested in the division between the cultural aspect and acoustic, you know, and aural aspect of sonic warfare. So basically, if certain spiritual or religious experiences are connected to a cultural upbringing, what about the acoustic aspects? For example, you spoke about sounds on the periphery of infra- and ultrasonics having a strong, profound, you know, spiritual, mystical experience, or barely audible, like talking or chanting having a similar effect.
So what other acoustic mediums and effects have that certain sense of universal connection without the cultural part? I like to create a sort of mystical or spiritual atmosphere without having necessarily roots in a certain specific cultural upbringing. I mean, it's hard to think of an idea of neutral frequencies, given that we always try and place language upon frequencies to a degree to explain them. And that's what's interesting about frequencies as well, is that we can't often find the language to deal with what we don't know how to perceive, or what's, again, what's at the edges of perception.
We can't often deploy language to actually deal with what we feel because it's not adequate. but I'm not quite sure the specific focus of your question, but obviously one of the common aspects in many religions is a feeling of awe in front of the divine or in the presence of the divine, which is mosques and cathedrals and synagogues. the acoustics of the architecture is there as a resonance chamber to amplify this kind of feeling. One of the responses to infrasound in many creatures,
particularly humans, is a feeling of awe. So many people have made an argument that the role of church organs and the infrasonic waves that come from church organs, in fact the effect of awe that is produced in these acoustic environments are actually a lot to do with the feeling of being in the presence of the divine that many believers have I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing you're asking about when we're talking about certain acoustic methods like resonance or low frequencies and like every sort of cultural system has its own awe-inspiring methods
like either a Buddhist chant or a Christian church organ or a Muslim singing style. But what do you think are the most universal methods to achieve this sense of spiritual awe? I don't think there's something universal. I think you can look at ideas of what the resonating frequencies of certain parts of the body are. for example, to explain certain cultural feelings that you might find spread across different cultures. So you might think about what frequency theta waves or beta waves are produced at, and that kind of neurological effect that they have. These are kind of effects that might be then transposed
to certain ritualistic practices that you find in different cultures, and that might be something that you can tie together is just resonating frequencies of the brain, resonating frequencies of the eyeball, for example. You know, if you're talking about something that's spectral, the idea that we hallucinate, or the eye hallucinates at 19 hertz because you get visual smearing, because that's the resonating frequency of the eyeball. That's where the eyeball starts, seeing things that aren't necessarily there. These are kind of phenomena that are frequency-based, which could then show up in different representations in different cultures, I think. Actually, I had a question also related to hyperstition, because the CCRU, which Steve
was a part of, he also mentions it in his book, defines hyperstition as fictions that make themselves real. so I was kind of wondering how this relates to the practice of audint and maybe also to the third ear to the third ear and yeah because I guess the third ear in relation to the third eyes kind of relates to the definition of unsound as the sounds which we can't physically hear and also sounds that are not yet heard so I think the thing the quality about hyperstitions that I find particularly interesting is they kind of can exist
outside of the language realm the linguistic realm and they can kind of have this advantage that they function outside this linguistic realm basically so how does this relate to the, I haven't visited the installation yet but it sounds like it kind of deals a lot with fiction it deals a lot with half troops or this kind of fake pseudo scientific or yeah misinformation, disinformation thing so I think this cultural field, whether it be what you were talking about earlier you know the CEO of
Muzak saying that it never worked in the first place. Right from the, across the 20th century at least, if we just focus on that, this field is one in which the difference, the line that divides science and mythology is kind of non-existent. Whether it be because of hype, marketing press releases, conspiracy theory, grey science. So one could take an approach which is based on
clarifying what is true and what is false. To do that would be to ignore the the specific dynamics of this particular cultural field. And so from audience, in audience research, remit, it just understands this whole history as real. So is there no kind of specific strategy which plays with this kind of dispersal of information and this kind of
idea of the truth and true and false in the spread of information? I think there's something about this idea like everything's real, that everything has the truth have the resonant frequency and that resonant frequency is controlled by different people at different times, different organizations, different governments, different militaries, different individuals, different artists, different scientists, etc., etc. Our research is interested in why and who is providing that resonant frequency that attaches itself to this notion of truth. So the research we're doing is kind of tracing back where these kind of resonating frequencies lead back to, where the idea of truth comes from, where this idea of myth comes from, and who's generating each and why. So it's kind of like a tracing, always trying to trace back
and who is deploying these kind of resonant frequencies of truth. There was a question up there. Can we get the mic up? Way above. Hi. I understand your cultural, philosophical and scientific research from the military side but I wonder what's the further research for you after the book you released on sound what's your idea, where do you want to go
because I see artistic I can understand and I find it very good I find this philosophical idea I see cultural but where do you want to go after that? What's your... Sextonic I think that's the next stop we need to make Very interesting Sorry, have you got a serious answer? What's your personal interest after that? Where do you want to go? What's your vision? Hardest question in the world Well, part of what we're doing is trying to construct concepts from audience research, from my book, from Toby's own research,
into environments, so experiential test sites. We're also working on a project which will be kind of like a sequel to the book, which would be a series of interviews with artists, musicians, scientists, military people, police people, to concretize some of the concepts in the book. Then there's my sextonic album. She uses ultrasound to beam... To wax the body. Those are actually my legs on that album cover.
So I'm getting signs that we have to sort of come to an end and since there seems to be such a strong desire to listen to the Sextronic again. It's in your own mind. Maybe that's the appropriate soundtrack to end this discussion. Thank you very much. You