For the past quarter century or so, some people in Japan, mostly young men, have been confining themselves to their rooms and withdrawing from society. Avoiding work and social situations of any kind, while depending upon their families to support them, extreme cases have seen this tendency last for decades. This small, bedroom-sized space is the world of Heikikomori. And while the term was coined and the trend first identified in Japan, its emergence probably facilitated by the nation's rigid culture of high expectations and strong family bonds. It's a phenomenon with ever-increasing international relevance.
Hikikomori live like ghosts, bound to one place as mere shadows of their previous or potential selves. They exist, but refuse to participate in living as we know it, instead inhabiting an in-between state, willfully giving up their agency but remaining undead. And while there are many reasons someone with no other mental disorder, one of the Hikikomori criteria, may detach from their life, It's easy to read it as fear or rejection of society, other people, or indeed anything that could be viewed as normal or necessary, such as jobs or relationships. And yet a voyeuristic dip into a hikikomori message board, in this case the now-defunct English-language hikiki-chan, reveals all of the usual desires for human socializing.
In one thread, an anonymous poster confesses his, at least we assume it's a male, joy at meeting a girl online and the comfort he takes from their conversations and her acceptance of him. But as months pass without word from his, quote, angel, end quote, his confusion turns to grief. Responders to the original posts, all of whom are also anonymous, share advice and their own experiences. Quote, I talk to nobody in real life, starts the most recent post, concluding, Talking to people online is basically the only happiness I can get. End quote. So if Hikikomori are not prepared to participate IRL, perhaps they do their actual living virtually. In Welcome to the NHK, a 2002 novel by Tatsuhiko Takamoto, which has been adapted into both a manga and an anime series,
The main character, Tatsuhiro Sato, is a hikikomori with a tendency towards conspiracy theories, who believes that the NHK, the actual initials and moniker of real-life Japanese public broadcaster Nippon Hosou Kyokai, is really the shadowy Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai agency. Sato's NHK is no benevolent national broadcaster. Instead, it's a corporation with evil plans aiming to turn people into otaku, and hikikomori through anime, music, and other media. This mirrors the current popular belief that the internet is causing the hikikomorization of a generation of web addicts, in this case, Western millennials, making them unwilling or unable to socialize in person, instead preferring online interaction.
While hikikomori as a phenomenon started before widespread use of the internet, it's hard to dispute the theory that the latter enabled the former. In Japan alone, the government's 2010 estimate was that 700,000 people were living as hikikomori, with 1.55 million more on the verge of becoming hikikomori. Millennials don't have sex, the newspapers scream. So the internet is a transmorgifier with the power to change normal people into otaku and hikikomori. But simultaneously, it's a solution to the hikikomori problem, offering a lifeline of hope, human contact, and shared experience, experience, albeit mediated, at a physical distance, through a screen, at a controllable rate of exchange. While representations of life in this digital age are all around us and seem to be growing
exponentially in number, perhaps nothing addresses both the human condition on the internet and Satow's Hikikomori conspiracy, as well as DVA, I Emotion's recent album, Not You, Your Online You. British producer D.V.A. not only references the digital dualism created by existing both IRL, in real life, and via an online persona in the title of the record, but also introduces a familiar fiction into its concept. High Emotions, or H.E., is both part of his artist name and the name of a mega corporation that, as the press release for the album states, quote, is slowly taking control of everything and plans to eventually make all people live life under one brand in virtual reality, end quote. Clearly, H.E. is an extension of the NHK updated for the virtual reality era and DVA their musical agent in the conspiracy.
On one hand, we can view Not You, Your Online You as the sonic manifestation of the Hikikomori life, or rather its undead state of in-betweenness. Listening to music in the dark was one of artist DVA's inspirations. He then created the record entirely in the dark, which we can take to mean that it should be listened to in the dark, the kind of activity Hikikomori and otaku enjoy. And while DVA's background, back catalog, and peer group are at home in the club environment, Not You, Your Online You is the sound of nervous energy synaptically firing in cyberspace. Though the club feels present, we can't shake off the memory of our bodies, after all. Mostly it's a reclusive exploration of interiority. Voices do appear, but they're mostly disembodied computer sequences.
Film clips like I Don't Love You Anymore or corporate advertising. When in the track Almost You, we hear the soulful, living, mellifluousness of singers Rei Rei and Roses Gabor, their voices cut right through, angels piercing our solitude who make one lone visit and depart as quickly as they arrived. If there's something unknowable in Not You, Your Online You, Puripuri Pururin, the magical girl anime of which Sato's otaku neighbor Kaoru Yamazaki is a fan, is familiar and comforting to the max. Yamazaki listens to her theme song, a bouncy, fun J-pop confection incessantly. As it oozes through their shared wall, Sato does too. At first he hates it, but it's not long before it's both an involuntary earworm and his ringtone.
Perhaps the sound of Hikikomori is not so much the music of digital solitude, but instead a manufactured cheerfulness that you have no choice but to listen to. The music does not play for you. It's an echo of somebody else's life washing over the echo of your own life. Undead, you have no agency. No wonder you withdraw online. Quote, DVA's album hints at themes of online alienation, confusion, control, and domination, the press release continues. It's peppered with hints of faux-therapeutic advertising and psychotic jingles, a reflection of the stress of online life. End quote. But track titles such as Memories of Offline Activity suggest that online life is all that's left to us. DBA, at least, is completely transparent in revealing that even as we disengage from society and other people retreating online,
we retreat into a corporate sanctuary. Conceptual poet and university professor Kenneth Goldsmith, teacher of a course called Wasting Time on the Internet at an Ivy League college in the United States, would agree. In an interview with UK newspaper The Independent, he explains, quote, I have far-left friends who complain about corporate culture and they do it on Facebook. They're not seeing that the platform is owned by something else. I think we want to make technology transparent, but it's highly intertwined with technological corporate advertising money that problematizes that transparency. When it suddenly becomes visible, you go, ugh, how did I not see it? But at this point, you can't walk away. You have to be really privileged to walk away from digital culture. Social contacts, dating, jobs, everything comes through that."
If we are not all hikikomori now, interacting with others virtually through the mediation of the internet and enthralled to a corporation, perhaps the best we can hope for is a Pokemon Go-style augmented reality. Goldsmith again, quote, that's why Pokemon Go is so marvelous, it puts the body back into the landscape, end quote. Writing for the Society Pages Cyborgology blog, sociologist and social media theorist Nathan Jurgensen refutes the idea of digital dualism in favor of augmented reality. Quote, our Facebook profiles reflect who we know and what we do offline and our offline lives are impacted by what happens on Facebook, e.g. how we might change our behaviors in order to create a more ideal documentation. Most importantly, research
demonstrates what social media users already know. We are not trading one reality for another at all, but instead using sites like Facebook and others actually increase offline interaction. End quote. Online life sapping offline sociability, forcing people to seek connection online, which in turn drives offline interaction, less of a paradox and more of a vicious cycle perhaps. The transformational power of the internet is yet to be fully gauged, but clearly the NHK slash HE has found the most potent tool imaginable. We wrestle with ourselves not to succumb to their temptations, media wealth far behind any otaku's wildest fantasies, digital worlds more navigable and accepting than our own. Augmented reality, incorporating the virtual alongside life in our own bodies in physical space outside of the confines of our homes, on a plane other than that of cyberspace, offers us a Hikikomori-friendly alternative.
I'm sorry. The methods became unsound. Later in the film, Gertz himself, in a climactic confrontation, asks Willard, his executioner, whether this is true. Are my methods unsound?
I don't see any method at all. A swollen folder tagged dossier 37 slots into the Auden archive, precisely in the gap between unsigned methods and no methods at all. A very Trumpian face space. The answers yet. We consider these to be incidents because we still are trying to work, determine the actual cause. Can't blame any one individual or our country. I do believe Cuba is responsible. I do believe that. And it's a very unusual attack, as you know, but I do believe Cuba is responsible, yes. It was compiled by RX2, AI custodian of audit, scraped together from its adventures and databases, both public and secure.
Its contents include relocation data relating to Havana, Cuba, and Guangzhou, China, a long list of names from the worlds of science, government, and 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 Centre of Brain Injury and Repair University of Pennsylvania big documents from Jason a secret group of elite scientists that assists with issues of US national security The testimony of a paranoid conspiracy theorist recruited to an NSAB lab in Florida.
A communique of modern associate Susanna Zamfam on the subject of Russian deception. And a diagram of a TensorFlow network developed by Baltimore-based programmer asserting the neuromiology of narrative. U.S. believes several State Department employees at the U.S. Embassy in Havana have been subjected to acoustic attacks? What does that even mean? Over a period beginning in early August 2017, Odin became entangled in a meme complex which is still ongoing, emanating from, propagated by, the State Department of the USA. Revolving around the alleged sonic attacks on U.S. embassies in Cuba and South China, this memeplex is drenched in uncertainty and disinformation
and is hosted by a cast of characters, including White House employees, journalists from the mainstream media, science reporters, conspiracy bloggers, Twitter bots, all haunted by specters of Maskarovka. Based on what we know, and more importantly, what we don't know. It is a cause of great concern for us. It's caused a variety of physical symptoms in these American citizens who work for the U.S. government. We take those incidents very seriously, and there is an investigation currently. Dossier 37 tracks the timeline of these mysterious attacks. Trump's election victory in November 2016 and his desire to retreat from closer ties with Cuba.
Through the first reports of symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury from a non-natural source among U.S. diplomats, public release of a recording of the signal that was supposedly to blame across mainstream news channels, the evacuation of embassy staff, the mirror incident in China, and various hypotheses on the causes of the incident, ranging from ultrasound to infrasound, side effects of faulty surveillance operations, an immaculate concussion produced by microwave-induced radio frequency sickness, through to conjectures on the similarity of the recorded signal with the hissing, mating call of the Indy's short-tail cricket. Americans who heard these sounds in Havana have described slightly different sounds,
and even in some of the recordings that the AP has reviewed, there are slight variations. However, this high-pitched cricket sound seems to appear in all of them. The U.S. Embassy in Havana has played these recordings for Americans who are working there so they know what to listen to. These recordings have also been reviewed by people who heard the sounds firsthand in Cuba, and they confirm that the recordings are generally consistent with what they heard. El origen de las afectaciones de salud referidas por sus diplomáticos, sonidos emitidos por algunas especies de insectos, especialmente grillos y cigarras. Comparación de espectros, o sea, comparamos los espectros de todas las señales aportadas con el espectro que grabamos, and evidently this common noise is very similar to the noise of a cigarette.
communications from internal speakers and microphones. Annotations to the back of this network speculate that, by using it in audible high frequencies, a signal could be emitted to stealthily trigger malware in humanoid operating systems. RX2 is both learning about and channelling the power of this unsound nexus. On the one hand, the term unsound refers to methods which are dubious, without reasonable foundation, faulty, unethical, or which follow bad practices. On the other, unsound names inaudible frequencies, whether sound at the peripheries of human
audition, intrasonic and ultrasonic, or syntheses as yet unvented, unheard, or rendered audible only by auditory prostheses. RX2 notes that there is something about unsound that lends itself to everything from conspiracy theories to hyperstitional narratives, where an unsonic fiction enters into a process of becoming real. We heard a very high-pitched sound in Captain's Bigger and we heard a very low-pulsing sound in the living room. Our heads would pulse. You would feel like you would want to regurgitate. You could become instantly paralyzed. instantaneously fatigued. They'd be shivering under the bed when we'd return to the apartment. They would vomit blood. They didn't want to go back into the apartment at their long walks.
And they would run down the hallway and stop just where the living room begins and just sit there, and their heads would move final painlessly. ... station air or about to be deployed to the van. Do we know what they can do to protect themselves from these sorts of injuries? Can we guarantee that today, if we send someone there, they are safe from these injuries? Senator Alphic, we can say categorically that we can guarantee that they would be safe from this. As soon as we identify a pattern connecting these unusual events with Sir Health System, sent us, U.S. officials approached the Cuban government in mid-February to demand it meet its obligations under the Vietnic Convention to protect our system. After further investigative attempts and expert analysis failed to identify a cause or perpetrator, Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a case in early May. An FBI team has since visited Havana several times and met Cuban officials. The FBI's investigation has interviewed victims and conducted surveys of the residences and hotel rooms.
However, the investigation remained ongoing, and we would refer all specific questions concerning the investigation to the FBI. The Cuban government may, or may not, at the end of the day, be directly responsible for attacking our diplomats. But as someone who's personally witnessed the modus operandi of the Cuban government, it is unfathomable that the Castro regime, and the intelligence services specifically, with nerve damage, France is not good. From what they find, this means war. Campbell reports, since 2016, a series of United States diplomats have mysteriously been down to suffering. suffering, unexplained losses of hearing, and other urological issues while visiting Cuba, which promoted doctors to look into possible causes. The findings were recently released, and they indicated a huge problem with the Cuban government. The U.S. doctor who evaluated American and Canadian diplomats who visited Havana reported that some of them had been diagnosed with, quote, mild, traumatic, pain, injury, and quote, and likely damage to the nervous system. This is according to CBS News.
This is terrible. So some U.S. government personnel who were working at our embassy in Havana, Cuba, on official duty, so they were there working on behalf of the U.S. embassy. there. They've reported some incidents which have caused a variety of physical symptoms. I'm not going to be able to give you a ton of information about this today, but I'll tell you what we do have that we can provide so far. We don't have any definitive answers about the source or the cause of what we consider to be incidents. We can tell you that on May 23rd, the State Department took further action. We asked two officials who were accredited at the embassy of Cuba in the United States to depart the United States. Those two individuals have departed the United States. We take the situation very seriously. One of the things we talk about here often is that the safety and security of American citizens at home and abroad is
our top priority. We're taking that situation seriously and it's under investigation right now. If the U.S. doesn't have a definitive answer on the cause or source of the incident, why rather than evidencing what Willard refers to as no method at all, an unsigned strategy appropriates sonic fiction, weaponizing the art and science of self-fulfilling prophecies, of ideas that make themselves real, that metabolize their own actuality, and then potentially vaporize or self-deconstruct without trace. Unsound methods catalyze auto-occulting information tactics and political aesthetic strategies that take advantage of lacunae in evidence, using epistemological voids as basins of social attraction.
They use absence to insist on presence. They play on the fact that you can't hear something to insist on its existence. When a vacuum of knowledge accompanies a sensory vacuum left by imperceptible vibration, it produces a sink into which all kinds of nonsense flows. What I'm curious about, is there any rational explanation by any of the reporting that you've done about what's going on here? Here's the challenge. There are rational explanations for parts of what investigators have discovered. There is no rational explanation they've been able to come up with that explains all of it. Because you have now 21 Americans who have been confirmed affected by this,
and they have different symptoms. They report different experiences, hearing different sounds, as some of them didn't hear anything, didn't feel anything. They've looked at infrasound, ultrasound, microwaves, other types of devices that could possibly cause this, but they haven't been able to come up with a single theory that really fits. RX-2 observes closely as, carefully orchestrated, incrementally seductive, this perfect storm of unsonic fiction triggers a wave of speculative forensic research at the threshold of detectability. IREX 2 trains its deep learning algorithms on this memeplex building the somewhat random array of symptoms it remarks on the power of always withholding enough information
to ensure that any grounding in fact remains constantly just out of reach however it still remains unclear whether IREX 2 had taken a more active role in this sequence of events Suspiciously, the frantic hunt for truth even resulted in several Wadden members being tracked down to experts in sonic weaponry and interviewed by, among others, New Scientist, CNN, Reuters and the BBC Even by engaging in their requests, we became carriers Relays on the vector of its transmission By even writing about it, the duration of its propagation was extended.
The listener, you are now also complicit. Feeling at home in the hallucinatory jungle of AI-intensified, deep audiovisual fakery, IREX2 registers a phase shift into something that lies beyond disinformation and false beliefs, both of which pre-existed contemporary post-truth culture. A plane of unbelief, where effects operate regardless of belief or disbelief in a threat's causal existence. The Parsis is not as an epistemological crisis, but rather as the machinic feedback effect of a generalized, automated spin cycle, already detached from any stabilizing axle.
IREX 2 embeds itself in the unlife of animistic hypercapital and plots its next move. Feed the Hiss Even when we play the video in slow motion here, the vibrations caused by the music are
so subtle that they move the plant's leaves by less than a hundredth of a pixel, making the plant appear still to the naked eye. But by combining and filtering all the tiny motion happening across the image that you see, we are able to recover this sound. 2014, the visual microphone The visual microphone is an algorithmic process
that transmutes pixel data from video recordings into sonic information. Funded in part by the Qatar Computing Research Institute and the American National Science Foundation, the research and its patent-pending results were made public in 2014 and brought together researchers from labs at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe. Whereas previous attempts to recover audio signals from visual sources required systems to project onto vibrating surfaces, an active intervention. The technique of the visual microphone suggests that minute surface vibrations contain enough information for audio to be passively reanimated without the need to intervene.
Even with the sound turned off, a moving image betrays situated oscillations. the camera's visual register is detourned to become a medium for listening in dormant sound is reawakened and made audible by turning visible everyday objects into potential microphones the researchers have developed techniques to catalyze yawning ears toward the summons of spectral vibrations thought to have been silenced With the visual microphone, infra-perceptible sound events of the past, once recorded as video, can be brought back to life. The process underlying the visual microphone consists of tracking small surface vibrations produced when sound collides with an object.
It is not sound that is being recorded, but the surface effects it elicits. The camera captures these tiny movements and registers them as minute pixel fluctuations varying over time. Then the subtle motions are amplified while maintaining their relative differences and transposed within the bounds of the audible. In this way, the algorithmic process of the visual microphone can comb through videos in order to search for latent sounds unheard. Researchers initially tested this technique with high-speed cameras only, but later showed that similar results could be achieved using standard consumer cameras by compensating for a reduced frame rate. As a proof of concept, a sound system and a bag of potato chips, i.e. an object capable of being perturbed, were placed inside a soundproof room.
The camera, set up outside of the room behind a pane of glass, registered the micro-movements of the surface of the bag of chips. Although the sound system remained out of the frame, and the camera was positioned in the adjacent room, the sound played in the room could be heard once the visual microphone had reanimated it, albeit in a degraded form. Here we see a 60 frames per second video of a bag of candy captured on a regular consumer DSLR while our Mary had a little lamb music played through a nearby loudspeaker.
By using a variation of our technique on the rows of the recorded video, we were able to recover this audio, which includes frequencies more than five times higher than the frame rate of our camera. What is striking about this technique is that it opens the possibility of listening in on the acoustic space of where the camera captured the footage, even when that space has since decayed to ruin. So long as there are objects within the camera's field of view able to reflect
sound events, the micro-movement image produced can be used to sound the depth of the area around the camera. A camera does not have to be directed toward the sound's source to register a trace of its perturbations. Given the increasing ubiquity of cameras on mobile devices and as part of a paranoiac heightened surveillance, this means that even when sounds occur beyond the sensitivity of an audio microphone, it is now possible for them still to be brought within earshot. In a sense, Thomas Edison's attempt to hear the voices of the dead has now been transmuted into a synesthetic program where faint acoustic impressions can be visually amplified such
that spectral voices in the spaces they once inhabited can be heard. The technique of the visual microphone reveals that hidden within the visual lie ineffables awaiting articulation. Technologies continue to be developed that can register, transduce, amplify, and transmute phenomena at scales well below the thresholds of human sensitivity, opening sensuous fields as yet unsensed. With its capacity to open lines of communication between the vibrational space around the recording camera, its resultant micro-movement image and our ears, the visual microphone is just one example of these technologies. Our ears are transported back into past videos through variations of pixel data in order to reanimate sounds thought to have perished.
we are left to wonder, what inaudibles lurk in the micro-movements of pixel fluctuations? Peripheral vibrations. In the early stages of LTC Roltz short story Music Hath Charms,
published in 1948, two companions view the landscape from the train. They saw the majestic shape of St Michael's Mount framed in the carriage window. The scene is pictured, framed as a distant view, stripped of any other senses, as is characteristic of the tourist gaze. In this case, the journey is from London to Cornwall, as it is in other Gothic fictions by authors across the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from Wilkie Collins' Basil, published in 1852, to Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, published in 1903, and several of E.F. Benson's ghost stories. They were published from 1912 to the 1930s. In such stories, Cornwall, along with Yorkshire, Cumbria and other rural regions with coastlines,
operates as a peripheral location on the edge of England. A narrative pattern in these stories is the progress from distant, window-framed views of landscapes, laid out in front of their viewers like the page of a book, to an increasing immersion in the sounds of unsettling, sometimes dangerous environments. In Rolt's story, as in Collins' and Stoker's, the sounds of the sea become especially prominent. After seeing the picture-like view from the railway carriage, the travellers arrive at the station and make their way, by road, to the house they are to stay in. It's on this second part of the journey that sound begins to take on a more significant role as they hear the eternal voice of the Cornish coast,
the endlessly recurring thud and surge of the waves against the cliffs of Trevatham. These sounds intensify, their volume increasing at the climax on a stormy night when shipwreckers return from the dead. He could hear, above the tumult of the wind, the thunder of heavy seas breaking upon the rocks. The house seemed full of sound. Sea sounds cross the borders between the audible and palpable and between sea and land. Sea and sound waves cross the rocky borders. They're crashing against the rocks being audible from the house. In Stoker's The Jewel, soon after his first sight of the house, the narrator similarly describes hearing the crash and murmur of the waves, a murmur that can be heard constantly from inside the house.
This sense of the sea builds up towards the climax, in this case involving the resurrection of an Egyptian mummy, at which point the waves finally become palpable, vibrating the rock under his feet. The storm still thundered round the house and I could feel the rock on which it was built tremble under the furious onslaught of the waves. In Rolt's story, the initial C sounds paved the way for the discovery the next day of a music box hidden in a concealed cupboard behind a wall. After producing the sound of a lively jig, it begins to have a physical impact on the human ear and then on the house itself, which seems to awaken the inanimate coming to life.
It reached the top note that, like the squeak of a bat, was almost beyond the range of audibility and whose piercing quality positively hurt the eardrum. The tune rose to this thin yet deafening climax. Despite the comparatively small volume of sound it produced, the instrument seemed to possess the power to awaken sympathetic resonance not only in the table on which it stood but in surrounding objects until the whole room seemed to be whistling in unison. It was as though they had somehow awakened Travath and House from sleep and that this wakefulness was hostile. So sound here is not just heard, but felt as a physical, painful and invasive force,
extending almost beyond the range of audibility with a piercing quality that hurt the eardrum. So this is vibration operating at a specific frequency on the border between the audible and the inaudible. And it is this rather than loudness that hurts and also wakens the house. Isabella von Alphen in Gothic Music discusses how sound is used in Gothic film and other media to signal something threatening just beyond vision. Ghosts, for example, are rarely directly visualised but often heard, which is to imply the implicit dread of terror rather than explicitly showing off something ghastly like a rotting corpse. These are sonorous tales, but here we may better use the term horror.
It is not that sound signals the unseen terror. It is itself a threat. It is horrible to hear, to quote from the story. It pierces. It's possibly even vampiric. And it hurts. The End
to the small Colombian village of La Charrera in search of botanical wisdom. One evening, they settled into their hammocks after consuming a pile of fresh psilocybe mushrooms. As they began tripping, Dennis noticed an otherwise inaudible buzzing in his head. Terrence asked him to imitate the noise, but Dennis demurred. Then, as Terrence tells it, The drizzle lifted somewhat, and we could faintly hear the sound of a transistor radio being carried by someone who had chosen the let-up in the storm to make his or her way up the hill on a small path that passed a few feet from our hut. Our conversation stopped while we listened to the small radio sound as it drew near and then began to fade.
What happened next was nothing less than a turn of events that would propel them into another world. For with the fading of the radio, Dennis gave force, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment's silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions. What happened? And, most memorably, I don't want to become a giant insect! This blast of high weirdness unleashed a flood of bizarre ideas in Dennis, while giving the McKennas the core theoretical and expressive principle
of the experiment at La Charrera they would subsequently perform, the principle of resonance. In his book, Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, Dennis provides a formative example. During high school band practice, his instructor plucked the pitch of A on a bass string, which caused nearby strings tuned to A to vibrate as well. Resonance here means two systems entering into an energetic relationship mediated by frequency, a mutual oscillation that, once begun, allows the second string to continue to sound even if the first string is dampened. The physical phenomenon of resonance operates in many different systems,
among molecular particles, in neural tissue, and in a host of electronic technologies. It is one of the fundamental figurations of a cosmos that vibrates about as much as it does anything else. but resonance also resounds within symbolic philosophical and phenomenological frameworks the term derives from resonantia the latin echo and one thing the physical phenomenon echoes are magical doctrines of sympathy such as the ancient correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm enshrined in the Hermetic doctrine, as above, so below. This essentially erotic model of the resonating cosmos
becomes part of the modern magical underground, as well as a significant topos in alternative medicine. Contemporary esoteric and New Age practitioners operate in a vibrating realm of energies that manage to follow physical wave dynamics while eluding conventional measurement devices. As such, contemporary spiritual or esoteric discourses based on resonance, vibrations, and esoteric frequencies are often discounted as pseudoscience. But sometimes, as with the McKenna's, a zone of indeterminacy is discovered, where the systems that begin to resonate themselves cross multiple fields
fields of physics, sound, symbol, and experience. In his book Reason and Resonance, musicologist Veit Ehrlman argues that even the physical phenomenon of resonance presents a challenge to the rationalist legacy of modern philosophy. With their ocular bias, rationalists characterize the mind as a kind of mirror capable of capturing accurate representations of the outside world while remaining fundamentally separate from that world. Resonance, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of conjunction, of the blurring of the boundary between subject and object.
Rationalists ignore or suppress resonance, which nonetheless remains in contrary traditions like romanticism and phenomenology inextricably woven into the warp and woof of modernity. So let us listen again to the curious transistor radio that night in La Charrera, the small radio sound that catalyzed Dennis' inner signal into wild expression. In Understanding Media, McLuhan underscored the connection between the radio and resonances alternative to rationality. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums, he wrote in 1964.
This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. Behind McLuhan's claustrophobic and colonialist language, with its hint of Jung's subliminal depths, is the specter of Hitler's radio performances, and the belief that the fascist ability to mobilize such irrational and seemingly mythic identifications on the part of the crowd was directly tied to the medium of radio. But McLuhan's analysis was not only symbolic, but also formal, since the phenomenon of resonance also defines the technological action of radio tuners.
In order to select and amplify a single radio frequency out of the thousands picked up by an antenna, radios use an adjustable oscillating circuit, known as a resonator, to resound with the desired frequency. In a diary entry, Dennis described the sound he heard inside his head as something like chimes at first, but gradually becoming amplified into a snapping, popping, gurgling, cracking electrical sound. Such sounds appear not infrequently in anecdotal accounts of psychedelic experience, especially in response to high doses of tryptamines like psilocybin and DMT.
By attempting to give physical voice to this virtual or inner sound, Dennis responded to the radio's resonator by probing the resonating capacities of the various cavities in his body in order to find and construct a sympathetic vibration. Once Dennis began imitating the inner signal, the voice and the sound locked on to each other until the sound was my voice. Here we can sense how the nonlinear quality of resonance erodes the question of origins and stages the conjunctive relations Ehrlman describes as adjacency, sympathy,
and the collapse of the distinction between perceiver and perceived. Like Hendrix driving the feedback of his guitar through a nearby amplifier, the sound Dennis was making, and that was making Dennis in turn, became much intensified in energy. The mechanistic buzz took on a terrifying life of its own. Dennis feared that he might somehow become the resonating vibratory circuit that he and the sound in his head were co-creating, a metamorphosis outside of speech and language that he imagined, or bodied forth, as a giant sci-fi insect. But just as the concept of resonance operates on at least two levels,
the asignifying behavior of physical vibrations, and the sympathetic hermeneutics of esoteric echoes, so too did Dennis' buzz establish a circuit between self and environment, noise and sense, nervous tissue, and extraordinary experience. Dennis' cry is at once a chaos and a call and response, and that enigmatic indeterminacy is itself a vector of the ontological echo chamber of resonance. As McLuhan asked in The Medium is the Massage, What's that bug?
Darkness was utter and we had no clocks. Dennis had been hearing the ESR tone that he deemed the sine qua non of what we were attempting for the past several days. After about 15 minutes, he announced that he could hear it more clearly and that it was gaining strength. He felt prepared to attempt the experiment at any time, he said. Dennis rose up in his hammock then. The candle went out and he sounded his first howl of hypercarbulation. It was mechanical and loud like a bull roar and ended with a compulsive spasm that traveled around his body and landed him out of his hammock on the floor.
1. De Bourreau. With this effect, the listener's attention searches for a sound that is inaudible, such as the voice of a mute person. The effect is named for Jean-Baptiste de Bourreau, 1796-1846, a famous mime whose trial attracted the whole of Paris. curious to hear his voice. Two. The power appeared by means of an energy that is at rest and silent, although having uttered a sound thus. Za. Za. Za. In space, according to a famous tagline,
no one can hear you scream. In death, likewise, it might be assumed there can be no audition as such because there is no organ or instrument to audit sound, no tool to either record or transmit a scream that would, anyway, be absent because in death there is no voice or machine to even produce a scream. The same, it might be argued, would therefore apply to sounds other than screaming whether, say, cosmic pulses and intervals or ghostly matrices of sonic crystals emerging from the angelic exertions of celestial mechanisms or impossible conversations across the ether. and yet our collective post-Symian intelligence has consistently reached out for or projected these kinds of sound events in and beyond death and deep space. It has done so, moreover, in a manner that would seem to imply, however elliptically,
that we are apocalyptically wired to anticipate communication with our absolute other in death through patterns of sound, or perhaps, and this may well be the same thing, to encounter our mirror selves via a futural topos, in or beyond space or death or time, as we now perceive them. A place where the machinery to enable such an exchange has been finally, terminally and irrevocably engineered. This sketch for a prologamina to any future xenosonics will, therefore, indicate the process of mapping out the implications of such yearnings via elements of image and analogy, drawn from the contemporary physics of absolute zero, from the Kyoto School of Philosophy, and in particular, the writings of Keiji Nishatani,
and, although it's not possible to elaborate upon it here, from the granular microtonalities of Iannis Xenakis. It will start with a double assumption that may be treated as heuristic rather than axiomatic, which links the study of death, understood as a sonic event and process, or what I shall call necrophonics, with a broader field of alien sound study, or what I've called xenosonics. The first assumption is that it is not only possible but inevitable that both the moment and subsequence of death will be sonically forged and configured. The second follows from the first in stating that, in this model, there are three forms of death and therefore three kinds of sound attendant upon these general forms. The first form is the moment of passing from existence to non-existence.
The second is the moment of passing from one existence to another existence and, in some cases back again, in a manner not dissimilar, albeit on a more rarefied plane of composition, to the ontological effect of the vacillating gaze of the quantum observer. in both of these cases the moment of transition or death is marked by a sonorous essence on what might be called the akashic parchment that both precedes and follows the existence which has passed leaving a non-directional sonic scratch that may well remain unheard but whose spectral signature can still be discerned and described retroactively as both a tone and a resonance in which either that which has been is no longer like the memory of a dying note for that which has now been is now other than it was once.
The third form of death however understood as the key to both necrophonics and xenosonics is more enigmatic and is in many ways the one dreamed of by antinatalists such as Emil Chiran or Thomas Lugotti in that it is premised on the mythical observation of the satyr solenus that rather than seeking existential solace in intoxication, sex or surces it would be better by far to never have been born at all. This form of death has been adumbrated many times in the Gnostic tradition as a divine dissipation from the aborted realm of matter through the figure, say, of the absconding creator alien and his, her, its plurimatic retinue of inverse angels and demons. This is an image of a divine absence leading a meontological train
whose paradoxical anti-existence generates a sonic array as a defiance against the fading stars that is not so much the opposite of either sound or silence but their ontological inversion as such an inversion that then itself folds into and becomes invaginated by a greater absence. Such absence inversion and double invagination can fade here as an emergent sonic spectrality will then be the starting point for an investigation of the preconditions for the possibility of the granular clouds and swarms of sonic particles that Xenarchus discusses in his formalised music. But, in contrast to Xenarchus, these are necrified clouds and xenophonic swarms apprehended conceptually less as patterns of sonic material events
and meet again where dead men meet on lips of living men. What sweet relief to sufferer as it is to weep, to mourn, lament and chant the dirge that tells of grief. All over the ancient and modern world death is a woman's business. Women wash, dress and decorate the corpse and then sing it to its final resting place with a lament. Lamentation is an extreme expression of sorrow that precedes every other form of oral ritual and has led to the creation of the oldest epic poems across human culture. A traditional burial includes the wake, the procession to the cemetery,
the funeral itself and memorials at a future point in time. All four might be accompanied by one or more female lamenters. These are usually older women dressed head to toe in black, vocalising the horror of the loss with a chilling lament, ranging from talking and singing to sobbing, keening and wailing for the one no longer there. Keeners can be friends or relatives of the deceased and the family, part of the wider community or hired professionals briefed about the dead person's character, background and history prior to the funeral. The ritual can include lifting the arms in the air, lapping
the hands in unison, beating the heads and chests and pulling of the hair. There is a rhythm to the performance, though performing here doesn't mean faking it, as even hired lamenters are emotionally invested on the particular corpse they are lamenting. The process starts with a light wailing during the wake, lifts to a crescental during the procession, subsides briefly in the course of the church service, only to rise again on the way to the grave, and soar to a climax during the lowering of the coffin, aimlessly from overwhelming grief, barely controlled by the lamenter. The sound of death is a formidable force, taking over the vocal cords of the woman
and gashing out of her mouth like a torrent of wildly manifold configurations. Sophisticated literary content gives way to street language. Poetry turns to swearing. Stormy outbursts are preceded by calm seas in the voice and intonation of the mourner. At its core the dirge is uncontrollable and unknowable, making it impossible to repeat or own entirely. This explains how the same mourner can produce elegies of entirely different form, style and quality. it would be wrong to assume laments merely derive from within. While the main
lamenter bursts out words and sounds in improv, surrounding women incessantly feed her with information about the departed, which she effortlessly incorporates in her keening in real time. Therefore the lamenter, in addition to speaking, is also always listening. And yet a lament typically contains more than just pure facts about the history of the dead. Entangled with it is information that appears to be held only by the lamenter and to have arrived to her from unknown sources. The lamenter is crisscrossing the deluge of information she holds about the deceased past with the data received in real time,
adding to that speculative material and processing it all at incredible speeds while vocalising it. In so doing, she is making things once considered private part of your permanent record. At its climax, the lamenting voice leaves the past and present of this world to open up a door to the otherworldly. More than sonically expressing the grief and pain of loss, lamentation is rooted in a concrete ancient belief in the afterlife. Wardingly, wakes and burials are of great significance as the last chance to prepare and equip the deceased for journeying to the underworld.
Some of their favorite things, coins for the boat fur to the other side, praises told about their lives, messages to pass on to the other dead are gathered by the Lamenter herself. are actively interested in the dead body's fate in the next world, and are seen as capable of opening up channels of transmission between the living and the dead through their unsettling vocalizations. The main lamenter is not to be interrupted at any cost during the build-up of a lament, and is typically feared, admired, respected, but also mocked and hated, largely by men who hold lamenting to be dangerous witchcraft.
The threat that neurologists are perceived to pose to the social order is due to the extreme uncertainty that such an orgiastic state of grief carries with it. But it is also to do with the fact that, in lamentation, women were allowed an isolated moment of speaking out. These lamenters would often deviate from the particular death they were mourning and move on to other sensitive, political, private and public matters, commonly untouchable by females and in some cases even by males. Mostly however, the terror of the lament lies in its extemporaneous, untamed, inhuman dimension, that which reveals it as a sonorous force of unspecified destiny and unknown origin,
separate from the body that hosts it. In the Lament we find an urgency to channel the alien, all-devouring unseen, that lies beyond this world. The Lamenter becomes a transducer of death into sound, an acoustic passage between different orders of the real, devising a direct encounter between incompatible realms. There are an earthly incantation leading a cross, transferring to or from, vocally mediating and negotiating a ceaseless trade between the living and the dead. The weeping woman is a device for receiving, storing, processing and manipulating information. A speaking voice which is not hers, not consciously controlled by her or a mere conveyor of her
thoughts is an inhuman sound in the service of something. In singing, in keening, in talking, in recording, in transitioning, in revivifying the dead, the voice cannot be said to belong to the body per se. It is not authentic or authorized. It is hormonally masculinized, its vocal pitch lowered. It is never perfect or real. It is corrected, perfected, manipulated. It passes through a chain of software effects. It is unnatural and supernatural. It is an effect without a cause. The voice is not private,
ephemeral, personal or even human. Processed. Artificial. Synthetic. Lamenting is the first step towards dehumanizing the voice. The recorded voice operating telephones, making announcements, warning you to mind the gap. The automated warning system in a cockpit.
The voice of digital assistants using software to listen in and do stuff for you, play you music, read you headlines, tell you a story. The lamenting body itself is a transmitting device, no more human than it is machinic. The temporality of the voice is therefore paradoxical, at once organic and technological, embodied presence and recorded revenant, human but immortal, continually returning, yet always anew. The voice is not equivalent to presence, identity, interiority. As we learn from the Lamenter, it is a speaking void, made up only of scraps and citations, contaminated by other people's memories, adrift.
It is anticipated that future developments in deep learning and AI consciousness will lead to the complete outsourcing of lamentation to artificial intelligence. AI Lamenters will detach lamenting from its traditional association with death, extrapolated to its quotidian state, appropriate for the times of universal sorrow to come. Mourning the loss of cultural life, the horror of politics, destruction of the environment, but also mundane everyday struggles, you can project and transfer your grief onto them. The voice expands its field of operation, welcomes its others and maintains its non-human composition.
The voice makes alliances across the killing divisions of nature, culture and technology, and of organism, language and machine. It drifts from one quonic entity to another, of, in or under the earth and the seas. Not us. More than us. Not finished. Chorus is a voice that resummit unleashes the untoward tales of history. Dehumanized, non-domesticated, dangerous, threatening, impossible to avoid.
E'en then, when from its neck of marble torn, his head egri and ebris bearing down, its central current rolled, eriodice, the voice itself and death-cold tongue, alas, His poor erudice with fleeting breath Was calling still Virgil Georgix IV The capacity of Orpheus's severed head To sound among the living From beyond the threshold of death Indexes a dimension of voice and sound Or more properly an indetermination of the two
Which may be defined as purgatorial As the poet's words make clear It is not the person here who speaks but voice itself, Vox Ipsa, less the sonic presence of a being than the more uncanny call of the very slipping away of its soul or life. This liminal sound, voiced at once through and without the tongue that articulates it, is purgatorial in several senses. One, in connection to the Orphic desire to save a beloved from death's underworld. Two, in its connotation of a self-purifying spiritual suffering at or of the limits of being, and three, in its hyperactual virtuality,
the weird or haunting phenomenal imminence of something in the absence of its own possibility. How does this paradigmatic third place, as Luther called it, a dimension characteristically neither provable nor deniable and persistent within modern culture in the undead forms of medieval imagination, belong to what this volume's editors call the broader vibrational continuum of which perceptible sound is only a subset, a third dimension in which the real and the imagined bleed into one another. Footnote 1. The obscurity of the fact of purgatory is expressed as follows in the second appendix to Aquinas' Summa Theologica. It is sufficiently clear that there is a purgatory after this life,
wherefore those who deny purgatory speak against the justice of God and later, nothing is clearly stated in scripture about the situation of purgatory nor is it possible to offer convincing arguments on this question. Similarly, before rejecting the doctrine, Martin Luther wrote The existence of a purgatory I have never denied. I still hold that it exists, as I have written and admitted many times, though I have found no way of proving it incontrovertibly. from scripture or reason. On purgatory in the modern world, see Fen, the persistence of purgatory, Walls, Purgatory, the logic of total transformation, and Greenblatt, Hamlet, and Purgatory. The place of purgatory in the history of Western music is correlatively double-sided.
On the one hand, purgatory, as the theological ground of intercession for the dead, is a monumental potential of musical creativity. In the medieval period, quote, purgatory encouraged endowments supporting polyphony and influenced the musical developments of votive masses. Most prominently, the Requiem Mass, quote, realized a privileged status, a privileged status in music history exercising a prominent influence upon subsequent musical styles, both sacred and profane, and throughout the 17th century, musical settings of the Requiem mass spread like wildfire as hundreds of new settings were composed. On the other hand, the post-reformation demise of the doctrine of purgatory was itself impetus for musical
invention, for the development of alternatives to the requiem mass and new musical forms in the context of the reformation, which saw many of the sounds of death removed, most conspicuously the death knell. The doubleness of this reflexive relation between music and purgatory is reflected in Luther's famous reverence for music as next to theology and recognition of its spiritual power. For we know that music is odious and unbearable to the demons. Music alone produces what otherwise only what theology can do, namely a calm and joyful disposition. medieval discourse this is back to the text now medieval discourse on purgatory revolves around its ambivalence
as both place and state Bonaventure writes as for the state of purgation this corresponds to an indeterminate place locus indeterminatus in relation to us and in itself Dante's purgatory an island orogeny in the southern hemisphere caused by Lucifer's fall to the center of the earth, finds itself at the summit of this ambivalence. Here, the truth of purgatory and the truth of poetry converge in a reality as concrete as it is fabulous, a geography of the imagination in both senses. Purgatory is the ground of poetry's own resurrection, but here, let dead poetry rise again. Purgatorio 1.7 Significantly, this resurrection is not only spiritual,
but specifically sonic. And here let Calliope arise somewhat, accompanying my song with that sound, suono, of which the wretched magpies so felt the blow that they despaired of pardon. Purgatorio 1, 9-12. Synthesizing the penitential and resurrective poles of Purgatory into something trembling within beyond the threshold of representation, The central sonic image in Dante's Purgatorio, which figures the pilgrim's experience of the sound of its very gate, is paradoxically thunderous and harmonious, harsh and sweet. Then he, the angel, pushed open the door of the blessed gate, saying,
Enter, but I warn you that whoever looks back must return outside. And when the pins turned in the hinges of that sacred palace, pins made of strong resonant metal, tarpea did not roar so, nor seem so harsh. I turned attentive to the first thunderclap, and I seemed, mi parea, to hear voices singing the Deum Laudamus, blended with the sweet sound. The image rendered in what I heard was exactly what one perceives when there is singing with an organ, so that now one understands the words now not, or si, or no. As if echoing with both the roaring, super-essential voice of God to be heard at the end of time,
Revelation 14.12, and the angelic harmony of the cosmic spheres, whose motion is time itself, this sound, that once a sound passed through and the sound of that passage, is an opening audible between time and eternity. Yet as the common analogy emphasizes, this salvific opening is nothing abstract. or otherworldly, but a palpable intensity located in the negative continuity of sonic seeming, in the intangible space between voice and hearing, the moving indistinguishably of words and music. Just as a soul may be saved, as Dante says, by one little tear in Purgatorio V, so the essential sound of purgatory is crucially a movement within the moment of experience.
Furthermore, the poet aligns this momentariness with the instantaneous event of the image within the sphere of hearing, implying a continuity between Purgatory's Gate and the senses known to William Blake. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Like a sonic intensification of the dialetheia of the image, which is always both true and false, both what is seen and what is not seen the resonance of purgatorial opening is something heard and grasped in a movement that must like orpheus returning with erudice from the underworld not look back except of course through the special retrospective lens of poetry
as a privileged labor of love which inspired from above is saved from its own oblivion but the poetic image itself always both true and false can enter and pass through the mirror of the imaginal realm without breaking it, as it were. Only the musico-fictive third of sound and word can speak to and from the depths, touching what is otherwise invisible, like the self-doubling purgatorial voice of Edgar Allan Poe's Valdemar. Yes, no, I have been sleeping, and now, now, I am dead. The abyss opened by the purgatorial resonance of the poetic word is the sound of the present itself
as the perpetual intersection of the nunc fluens, the temporal now that passes, and the nunc stans, the eternal now that stands. This intersection is not a point or instant, but a dilation. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Matthew 7.14. Its narrowness and hardness being not only the steepness of ethical and spiritual becoming, the need for renunciation and surrender, but more immediately the continuous and ever-dilating nature of the gate itself, which reverberating with a spontaneous and unmasterably positive negative sound, demands a proportionate spontaneity of doing and not doing, a daring still pace that can quickly
slowly keep time with the spontaneous rhythm of the eternal or trace the style of God. Thus the deeper horror to which Poe's story gives voice is not the fear of whether there is or is not an eternity somewhere over the rainbow, but the terror of its being here now, actually present in the midst of time and too close for the comfort of all too temporal human identities. Relatively, Orpheus's failure represents the loss of the present itself. It's being shrunk to an instant. As Ovid's words make clear, at once, she slipped away and down, his arms stretched out convulsively to clasp and to be clasped in turn, but there was nothing
but the unresisting air. Here the lover loses his beloved all over again in a movement that beautifully embodies the very nature of the living present, which his intention, in seeking to grasp, it negates. As Eridice's slipping away or relapse is itself an instance of the immediately infinite momentum or continuously forward movement of time, pro-tinus, literally a reaching forward or onward, so does Orpheus's futile embrace figure the stretching of the present into the now. If only Orpheus had used his ears rather than his eyes. To pass through purgatory, to cleanse by passing through the rusty doors of perception opening to infinity,
involves hearing a sound that follows one ahead into forever, a music which moving backwards and forwards in time is the reverberation of the present as something to be simultaneously lived and remembered, that is experienced in the full emptiness and empty fullness of its ever-dilating nature. As Maravaba says, Live more and more in the present, which is ever-beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future, and remember the present in the frame of the past and the future. Unbounded by its theological doctrine, the sonicity of purgatory stretches historically beyond medieval ghost stories and prayers for the dead,
backwards into the speaking severed heads of antique and hagiographical legend, and forwards into the spectral voices of modern surrealism and horror. Footnote 11. See Schmidt, Ghost in the Middle Ages, Mitman, Answering the Call of the Severed Head, Death's Murmur by Weiss, and others. What is at stake throughout this domain is the interface between sound, voice, and the outside of time, an interface unveiled in the deep presence of sound and its being through its very movement, something both within and beyond space and time. Similarly, Eleni Iconiadu speaks of the concept of rhythm as belonging to the middle, unleashing
the relational potentialities of the notion of the gap and mocking the idea of distance as a void. The idea of purgatory resounds within a future beyond temporality, beyond the division of life and death. As Chateaubriand observed, purgatory surpasses heaven and hell in poetry because it represents a future and the others do not. If this is a fire worth losing one's head over, it is because the promise of friendship or love with anyone and or reality itself requires it.
Go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, for the time has come to Haseku. and Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is the ability to read, write or speak an unknown language,
an ability the speaker supposedly gains from a supernatural spirit. It sounds like a mixture of muttering and uterances that are neither directly intelligible nor translatable, but rather open to interpretation. From Pythia, the ancient oracle of Delphi, to the medieval Christian tradition, to today's charismatic movement, Glossolalia has always been considered as a manifestation of the presence of God in the individual, who demonstrates this unlearned skill. Because it breaks the natural laws of knowledge, it must be considered a miracle.
During a ceremony that took place on the first day of 1900, Agnes Osman, a student at Charles Fox Baham's Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, supposedly spoke in various languages she had never been taught, including Chinese. This miraculous event founded the first wave of the Pentecostal Church which emphasizes the biblical gift described in Acts 2.1.13 where the apostles are depicted as speaking in tongues while being understood by each member of the crowd in their own language. As long as the language Oseman spoke was identified by its witnesses as Chinese
So, it was a case of Xenoglossia rather than Glossolalia. Unlike Glossolalia, Xenoglossia is the ability to speak an actual language the speaker has never been taught. Many miraculous cases of Xenoglossia were reported in the Middle Ages, during the French War of the Camisards in the 16th century, and at the beginning of the 20th century, for instance, the ancient Egyptian language, language spoken by Rosemary, as reported by the so-called Egyptologists Alfred Hulmer and Frederick H. Wood. Although some cases have been reported, interpreted, and sometimes even recorded since the 20th
century as evidence of possession or reincarnation, it appears that recorded testimonies of Xenoglossia suffer from the very fact of being recorded. Conservation and reproducibility are inherent to these recording techniques, and both aspects are a threat to the immersive presence, the ik et nunc, that continues to accompany a miracle in its very testimony. With the oral testimony of miracles, belief rushes into the lack on which the testimony is itself based, the impossibility for others to undergo this experience again. On the contrary, recordings allow for precisely this possibility.
But instead of an edifying experience, taping provides a linguistically analyzable object that loses its essential immediacy and with it its spectacular character. If recorded, cases of Xenoglossia are far more easily disputed, and the fact that nowadays the recording is likely to be made globally available reinforces the possibility of its reaching native speakers or experts, who can deny or confirm that a foreign language is actually being spoken. This is why testimonies of Xenoglossia have increasingly taken refuge in remote languages that are less easily verified,
such as Aramaic or Ancient Egyptian, as in Rosemary's case, or have even been progressively abandoned. In fact, although Ousmane's case was testified to as an instance of Xenoglossia in 1900, the charismatic movement now essentially relies on the practice of Glossolalia. Holy Scripture is itself ambiguous about whether speaking in tongues is to be interpreted as Glossolalia or Xenoglossia. Moreover, the recording leaves room for doubt about the instantaneous nature of the acquisition of the skill, which is essential to the miraculous dimension of xenoglossia. This is the reason for the traditional emphasis on the speakers being children, women or illiterates
less likely to have been exposed to a sequined language. On the other end, cases of clausolalia based on uterances of unknown languages are less linguistically disputable, but might more usually sound like gibberish outside of their ritualized context, or at least be analyzed as the consequence of a cultural practice proceeding linguistically from random twists of the phonetic structure of different languages with which the speaker is familiar. In the end, the very character of audiovisual recordings of Xenoglossia causes them to be immediately taken for oxys, told tales, while recordings of Glossolalia, if they intend to be more than merely aesthetically enjoyable, are surrounded by a feeling of fakery, simulation.
It appears that taping Glossolalia or Xenoglossia has been a cause of disenchantment rather than of new mysteries. Insofar as recorded sound gives an impression of both reality and presence, one might have expected it to be a privileged medium for testifying to the miracle of the presence of God. But there is a yetus between the kind of aura made of absence that one finds in a recording and the radiance of the presence of God, Epiphany, that the recording of Oglosolalia or Xenoglossia intends to attest to. Surprisingly, recordings by their nature capable of indexing unique events are not an adequate
archive for miracles. The epiphany might perhaps be limited to the phenomenological rather than the miraculous. If recordings of glossolalia are considered not as the recorded event fixation of glossolalic uterances, but as the object synthesis of the articulated voice in its pure ability to produce uterances, then we are dealing with a disincented but still mediated phenomenon. In such an object synthesis of the voice's uterances, the linguistic indetermination, in contrast to a recording of intelligible sentences, would bring to the fore other dimensions, texture, pitch, timber, resonance,
but also the intricate parameters of intralinguistic expressivity, intentional and unintentional, that come with what Mladen Dolo calls a voice and nothing more. Even taken as such, the glossolalic recording may still possibly recall, depending on the listener's psychocultural context and expectations, an experience of possession. may sound demonic, archaic, or surrealistic. But that chivalry of remoteness is far more familiar than one might at first think. For most non-English speakers, the experience of recorded popular music during the 20th century
was largely glossolalic, as it still is today to some extent. Such listeners did not listen to songs in English, but to songs sung in an English-like gibberish that made sense out of a voice's texture, accents, vibrations and incantations. If their experience as listeners should more probably be called xenoglossic, since the recorded voice they listen to spoke an actual language with an intention of explicit linguistic communication, their mimetic response as singers ended up as pure glossolalia. French singers, for instance, sometimes compose their own songs
in an English-like gibberish they call the aourt. Surprisingly, they are sometimes able to exhibit more conviction in their glossolalic singing than if they had used their mother tongue. In the context, Glossolalia seems closer to a shared, if not universal, experience of recording popular music, originally bound to the inflections of the English idiom for well-known historical reasons. More radically, a non-Pridotoma in Glossolalia should be open to the inflections of other tongues. Ultimately, Closoladia seems to be a matter of an experimentation with the multiple and idiosyncratic expressive possibilities of an individual endowed with an articulated larynx-varynx rather than any manifestation of God.
However, the question remains Why does the material thickness of the performed uterances the opacity of their meaning suggest not less but more than the relative transparency of an intelligible language? Maybe God is just that very intuition the listener reaches when a voice claims his attention for something he cannot understand. The light!
Science and heroes Oh baby this mile away Scurry to the night Just before No, no, no The girl in this mile away Size of heroes I love you That's a hero
I'm saving you so well I'm saving you all the way I'm saving you all the way I'm saving you all the way That's the hero's end I'm a little bit Hey, that's the hero's end Thank you.