Sonic Warfare

Sonic warfare is Steve Goodman's name for the tactical capture and deployment of vibration across military, police, commercial, architectural, artistic, and musical fields. It is not merely a catalogue of acoustic weapons or a metaphor in which music “attacks” a listener. Its object is the modulation of bodies, populations, and environments through frequency, rhythm, resonance, anticipation, and fear (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. xiii–xx).

Beyond audible sound

The concept rests on an ontology of vibration. Sound is only the audible portion of a wider field; infrasonic, ultrasonic, tactile, and not-yet-actual forces exceed what a human listener recognizes as sound (Steve Goodman/Texts/Essays/The Ontology of Vibrational Force.pdf, pp. 1–2). Analysis therefore begins with relations of affecting and being affected rather than with a sovereign auditory subject (Steve Goodman/Texts/Essays/The Ontology of Vibrational Force.pdf, pp. 2–4).

Goodman's “vibrational anarchitecture” names transient compositions of bodies, buildings, technologies, and atmospheres (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 75–79). Such a composition can be coercive, pleasurable, or indeterminate; the ontology itself does not assign a political value to intensity (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 79–84).

Sirens and the war continuum

The siren is an elementary sonic weapon because it recruits attention and movement before it communicates a determinate proposition (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 6–8). Acoustic devices can disperse crowds, mark territory, interrupt sleep, or make an environment physically intolerable (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 8–12).

Yet Goodman refuses a clean peacetime/war distinction. The “war continuum” connects exceptional military devices to everyday security, branding, media, and urban design (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 10–12). A retail environment, alert system, or branded sonic logo can modulate conduct without resembling a weapon in the ordinary sense (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 17–20).

This is why the analysis follows commercial sound design alongside security technology: both organize zones of attraction, aversion, recognition, and compliance through repeated sonic cues (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 128–132).

Fear and preemption

Sonic warfare often acts before conscious interpretation. Sudden onset, repetition, low frequency, and spatial uncertainty produce bodily readiness that may precede identification of a source (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 62–65). Preemption gives a possible future causal power in the present: action is taken against a threat before the threat is verified (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 65–69). Fear can therefore be engineered as an atmosphere distributed through a population rather than sent as a message to isolated individuals (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 69–73).

This nonlinear temporality is adjacent to Ccru hyperstition: an anticipated event helps organize the conditions of its present efficacy. But Goodman's account does not require a fiction to become true. It describes the operational force of threat whether or not the predicted event occurs.

Sound systems and bass materialism

The concept is not only a theory of domination. Black Atlantic sound-system practice offers a counter-laboratory in which speakers, bass, architecture, selector technique, and a moving crowd compose a collective body (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 27–30). “Bass materialism” names the literal efficacy of low frequency as it passes through bodies and structures, making vibration tactile and architectural (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 28–30).

Dub treats a recording as mutable material. Versioning, echo, subtraction, and recombination propagate tracks through mutation rather than fidelity to an original (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 155–159). Goodman calls this an “audio virology,” a formulation close to Eshun's account of records as conceptual and subjective machines (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 159–163; Kodwo Eshun/Texts/Books/Author/Kodwo Eshun - More Brilliant Than the Sun_ Adventures in Sonic Fiction - libgen.li.pdf, pp. 123–141).

Unsound

“Unsound” is the concept's limit: the virtual field of sonic potential that has not yet become audible or has passed beyond audibility (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 195–198). It prevents materialism from being restricted to currently measurable auditory objects while also preventing “sound” from swallowing every kind of force.

!CONTRADICTION] The same vibrational capacities support crowd control, commercial capture, collective pleasure, and musical invention. Intensity is not politically innocent, but neither does its technical form dictate one politics ([Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 128–132). Sonic warfare names this contested ecology rather than a guarantee that sonic force is emancipatory.