Unsound

A listening category, not a synonym for silence

Unsound is Steve Goodman's name for sonic virtuality: vibration that acts at the fuzzy edge of audition, and musical potential that is not yet audible within an established field of listening. Its narrow range includes infrasound below ordinary hearing and ultrasound above it. Its wider range includes rhythms, resonances, textures, and syntheses masked by physiology or by audiosocial filters such as taste, expertise, class, race, gender, and age (Sonic Warfare, p. 191).

The term does not mean defective sound, silence, or everything inaudible. Silence can indicate an unactualized reserve; noise can indicate interference with an existing musical or social order. Goodman values both concepts but argues that their familiar politics overemphasize the amplitude axis between quiet and loud. Unsound shifts attention across the frequency spectrum and asks how imperceptible or excluded vibration becomes effective (Sonic Warfare, pp. 191–194).

This makes unsound a junction rather than a genre. It connects the politics of frequency, the tactile low end of bass materialism, the constructed futures of the futurhythmachine, and the mutating carriers of audio virology. Those links organize a reading route; Goodman does not claim that the four concepts are interchangeable.

From audible objects to vibrational relations

Goodman's ontology of vibrational force supplies the concept's deeper methodological boundary. Sound is only the thin slice of vibration audible to humans or other animals. Beginning from sound but refusing to make human audition the measure of existence allows analysis to include bodies, architectures, media, and nonhuman participants in one vibrational encounter (“The Ontology of Vibrational Force”, pp. 1–2).

That move is not a reduction of experience to measurable acoustics. Goodman rejects both a naive physicalism that treats vibration only as quantifiable matter and a phenomenology centered on private human feeling. His object is the relation: oscillation, potential vibration, and the capacity of one entity's movement to affect another. An entity can therefore be effective without becoming an ordinary audible object for a listener (“The Ontology of Vibrational Force”, pp. 2–3). Unsound names one practical frontier of that relational ontology.

A contested frequency reserve

Unsound has no guaranteed political sign. Directional ultrasound, infrasonic weapons, crowd-dispersal devices, and subliminal or branded messages can colonize the periphery of hearing. Goodman calls this expanding investment in inaudible frequency a front line of twenty-first-century sonic warfare (Sonic Warfare, pp. 185–189). Control seeks a precisely targeted signal that bypasses ordinary attention; the inaudible becomes an infrastructure of preemption rather than an outside to power.

Yet the audible is also socially policed. Music made inaudible by prevailing standards can emerge as a new collective object, while bass cultures make the physicality of frequencies near the auditory threshold tangible through shared architectural and bodily vibration (Sonic Warfare, pp. 188–193). Unsound is therefore a contested reserve of capacity. It describes what control may capture and what an existing sensible order has not yet learned to recognize; it does not promise that novelty will be emancipatory.

Ballard's material fictions

Goodman identifies J. G. Ballard's “The Sound-Sweep” as a direct influence. In the story, sounds persist as material refuse rather than dissipating, while an ultrasound concert gives an audience aesthetic pleasure without audible stimulus. Goodman uses these devices to think both the persistence of vibration and the neural action of frequencies that do not present themselves as ordinary sound (“On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction”, pp. 1–2).

The same interview links Ballard's purified concert to selective acoustic control. Phase cancellation suggests the large-scale masking of urban sounds, while the commercially available “Mosquito” device directs a high pitch at younger listeners in order to move them away from property (“On Ballard, Alienation and Abstraction”, p. 2). The fiction is not offered as documentary proof of a technology. It is a conceptual probe that makes selective audibility and sonic cleansing thinkable together.

AUDINT's research-fiction expansion

AUDINT later expands unsound to the imperceptible, not-yet audible, and no-longer audible, as well as to anomalous audition, haptic feedback, auditory hallucination, and explicitly fictional phenomena. The introduction to Unsound:Undead describes these augmentations as a re-engineering of the sonic and presents Ballard's persistent sounds as one speculative probe among military, medical, technological, and occult-seeming cases (Unsound:Undead, pp. 1–2).

The anthology's “undead” is a cipher for agencies that disturb simple divisions between presence and absence, life and death, audibility and non-audibility. Recording, communications technology, hallucination, artificial intelligence, and holographic performance become ways to test how something can act without a stable physical presence (Unsound:Undead, pp. 2–4; gothic materialism). This is a documented artistic and theoretical extension of unsound, not evidence that the anthology's fictional operatives or future dates are real.

CONTRADICTION In Sonic Warfare, unsound remains a material and political category even when its contents are virtual: imperceptible vibration and unrealized musical potential (Sonic Warfare, pp. 190–194). Unsound:Undead deliberately admits fictional and occult-seeming phenomena into its bandwidth (Unsound:Undead, pp. 1–4). The later research-fiction broadens the method; it does not retroactively make every entity in the anthology a factual claim.