Steve Goodman
Steve Goodman—also the electronic musician and Hyperdub founder Kode9—turns the Ccru's interest in jungle, affect, and nonrepresentational process into a systematic account of vibration as power. Sonic Warfare is not simply a history of acoustic weapons. It constructs a “politics of frequency” across crowd control, military research, commercial branding, sound art, and dance music (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. xiii–xviii). These are connected captures of vibrational potential, not isolated applications of sound (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. xviii–xx).
From sound to vibrational force
Goodman's basic move is to decenter both the audible object and the human listener. The Ontology of Vibrational Force places sound inside a wider vibrational continuum, only part of which is available to human audition (Steve Goodman/Texts/Essays/The Ontology of Vibrational Force.pdf, pp. 1–2). Vibration names the rhythmic oscillation through which entities affect and are affected by other entities before perception is organized into a recognizable sound (Steve Goodman/Texts/Essays/The Ontology of Vibrational Force.pdf, pp. 2–3). The essay therefore refuses a linguistic model in which sound matters chiefly as signification and a phenomenology centered on an already constituted listener (Steve Goodman/Texts/Essays/The Ontology of Vibrational Force.pdf, pp. 3–5).
In Sonic Warfare, that ontology becomes tactical. Goodman calls for an account of a “vibrational anarchitecture” in which bodies, buildings, media, and atmospheres are temporarily composed by rhythmic force (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 75–79). Affect here is not private feeling: it is a body's variable capacity to enter relations, modulated by frequency, amplitude, repetition, and resonance (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 82–84).
Fear, preemption, and control
sonic warfare names a continuum running from spectacular acoustic weapons to ordinary environmental modulation. Goodman treats the siren as a compact model: it does not need to communicate a proposition, because it directly recruits attention, movement, and alarm (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 6–8). Military and police devices intensify this capacity, but the book also follows it into the diffuse “war continuum” of urban security and media environments (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 10–12).
The key temporal mechanism is preemption. Threat operates effectively before its object has been verified: a possible future is made causally active in the present (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 62–67). Fear can thus be engineered as an atmosphere rather than delivered as a message to individual subjects (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 68–73). This is Goodman's precise addition to the Ccru vocabulary of nonlinear time: futurity acts through an ecology of bodies and media without requiring belief.
Bass materialism and sonic fiction
Goodman's counter-line comes from Black Atlantic sound-system practice. The book treats the sound system as an experimental apparatus that composes a crowd through bass pressure, architecture, selector technique, and collective movement (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 27–30). “Bass materialism” is literal rather than metaphorical: low frequencies expose the material efficacy of vibration by passing through bodies and structures (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 28–30).
Here Goodman's project meets kodwo eshun's sonic fiction. He treats Black Atlantic music as a conceptual event that produces techniques and temporalities, not as an illustration of an identity already given (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 1–3). Dub's studio practices become an “audio virology”: versions, remixes, and effects propagate by mutation through technical and social networks (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 155–163). This is adjacent to hyperstition, but it is grounded in reproducible musical procedures rather than a generalized theory of self-realizing fiction.
The same viral model explains commercial capture: mutable sonic techniques can be extracted from subcultures, formatted, and redeployed by media industries without preserving their original social composition (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 128–132).
Goodman also distinguishes sound from “unsound”: the not-yet-audible or no-longer-audible virtual field from which actual sonic events are selected (Steve Goodman/Texts/Books/Author/Steve Goodman-Sonic Warfare_ Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2009).pdf, pp. 195–198). The concept prevents sonic materialism from shrinking back to empirically present sound.
Blade Runner, jungle, and the technological present
speaker unattributed The Kode9 excerpt recalls encountering Blade Runner alongside 1990s jungle, where fragments of its dialogue and soundtrack circulated through tracks. Its question of “what it means to be human” resonated as computers entered music studios and digital technology, artificial life and genetic engineering became everyday concerns (Kode9 on Blade Runner, 00:23–00:54). The film's continuing force is consequently “as a way of talking about the present.” It is not simply a futuristic scenario (same recording, 00:56–00:59). The clip supplies a concrete instance of sampling as sonic fiction, binding cinema's artificial humans to electronic music's technical conditions.
Unsound and the third ear
At the CTM 2012 AUDINT event, the term unsound marks the weaponization of vibration beyond the conventionally audible: “it's not just about listening and hearing.” Infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies act at perception's boundaries (CTM 2012 – Invisible Attacks and Hideouts, 45:09–45:13). The event defines its remit as the effort to “investigate phenomena that exist at the edges of perception” (same recording, 45:34–45:39). It calls “the third ear” “the auditory equivalent of the third eye” (same recording, 01:06:25–01:06:31), a research figure for “the relationship between hearing and audible and non-audible sound” as well as the unstable boundary between inner and external voices (same recording, 01:07:15–01:07:26). This links AUDINT's perceptual research to Goodman's sonic-warfare context without reducing a collaborative event to a single speaker.
Relation to Ccru
The contemporary account Renegade Academia identifies Goodman among the Warwick Ccru participants and records his description of the unit as a productive “gang” rather than a conventional research group (Secondary Sources/Texts/Renegade Academia; The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.pdf, pp. 8–9). It also places his work on jungle and rhythmic futurism inside the collective's events and collaborative production (Secondary Sources/Texts/Renegade Academia; The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.pdf, pp. 6–8). Goodman's later book preserves Ccru themes—distributed agency, positive feedback, fiction as intervention, and time arriving from the future—but subjects them to a more explicit philosophy of affect and a documented archive of military, commercial, and musical techniques.
Audio virology after the platform turn
The Audio Virology recording returns to the viral model after both platform capitalism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Its examples move from earworms through cut-up, dub, and remix, describing “sonic fictions of virality as an aesthetic method” (Steve Goodman/Audio/Seminars/Steve Goodman Kode9 · Audio Virology (On-Line Lecture).mp3, 38:43–38:47) speaker unattributed. The recording places sound and the virus in a shared chain of incubation, transmission, infection, mutation, and threat (Steve Goodman/Audio/Seminars/Steve Goodman Kode9 · Audio Virology (On-Line Lecture).mp3, 38:56–39:10) speaker unattributed. But it also marks a change in the term's political economy: “Going viral has become a synonym for success” (Steve Goodman/Audio/Seminars/Steve Goodman Kode9 · Audio Virology (On-Line Lecture).mp3, 40:40–40:43) speaker unattributed. audio virology thus names both a speculative method of mutation and the metric by which platforms capture circulation.
The abeng as sonic warfare
speaker unattributed The Original Sonic Warfare clip uses the Jamaican Maroons' abeng as a compact example of sound acting before semantic interpretation. The recording says: “And they used these horns, kind of ram's horns, called the abeng.” The horns communicated across the jungle and coordinated with ambushes (Steve Goodman/Videos/Kode 9 on Original Sonic Warfare.mp4, 00:12–00:38). For English colonial forces who could not identify the source, the signal produced fear; the book's problem is correspondingly “the way sounds used to create a bad vibe” (same recording, 01:34–01:39). The case grounds sonic warfare in asymmetrical perception and territorial knowledge: one group's communication is another group's ambient threat.
Hyperdub as media infrastructure
speaker unattributed The Red Bull Music Academy interview describes Hyperdub first as a web magazine that gathered producers across jungle, hip-hop, dub, UK garage, and early dubstep before becoming a label. Its in-depth interviews supplied “background that didn't exist in other media platforms at that point” (Steve Goodman/Audio/Kode9 talks Burial, Hyperdub and the roots of dubstep Red Bull Music Academy.mp3, 12:43–12:48). The interview places this editorial work inside a hybrid local/network infrastructure: pirate station Rinse FM and an online archive of grime and dubstep shows acted as “an amazing fuel injection” for the music's spread (same recording, 18:08–18:20). Hyperdub's label practice retained this openness: Burial “doesn't really fit in anywhere it's definitely a tangent from what dubstep is”; it mixes UK garage syncopation with darker and more melancholic material (same recording, 24:38–24:59). Hyperdub therefore appears as a machine for documenting, circulating, and deliberately exceeding a scene rather than merely branding it.