Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a dis continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
By insisting on the primacy of vibration in the nexus of sound, affect, and power, Sonic Warfare charts a transdisciplinary micropolitics of frequency that breaks with the orthodoxies of phenomenology and cultural studies and triumphantly succeeds in immersing us in the present of viral capitalism, pirate media, and asymmetric warfare.
This book is rigorous, affirmative, sober, and pitiless: in its ambition, its purpose and its passion, it is nothing short of a breakthrough for contemporary sonic thought.
Maurizio Lazzarato. Eleni Ikoniadou. Each chapter focuses on a particular event—sometimes in the historical past, sometimes in a fictional future—that fall within these thematic groupings to push the overall argument forward.
For example chapter 15, " Goodman brings a large number of individuals to bear on his argument—Jacques Attali, Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, Gaston Bachelard, and Henri Bergson, to name a few—but the core of his philosophic thesis reveals itself in the ideas of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Alfred North Whitehead, as well as that of "conceptual engineer" Kodwo Eshun. Through these authors' work, Goodman argues for an ontology of vibrational force that "delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities" Within this ontology, sound is only a particular vibratory mode of perception.
Upon this ontological foundation, Goodman posits a politics of frequency through which "the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality" can be thought. Noting a general "amnesia of vibration" in the literature regarding relations of sound and music to power physical and political, Goodman posits a politics of frequency in which the relation of of vibration—both the acoustic sense and the affective sense of the word—to power is of central concern.
Such a position, it is argued, goes beyond the usual oppositional dualism of "the jouissance of sonic physicality and the semiotic significance of [music's] symbolic composition or content" While this may seem abstract, Goodman's speculative methodology is always grounded in actual events.
By continually drawing the reader's attention to real-world applications of sound as modulating affect—such as Jamaican sound system culture or the military's psychological sonic warfare device, "The Curdler," to give but two examples—Goodman grounds his speculative methodology in practice. Indeed, the more obvious examples provided, such as the Long Range Acoustic Device LRAD used for crowd control, demonstrate a clear relation between vibration and physical discomfort.
While the more subtle examples, such as the corporate deployment of sonic branding or the idea of "earworms," present the opposite side of the vibrational dis continuum: the internal, psychological dimension of vibration. The nod to Afrofuturism is the clearest link between Goodman's philosophic work and his work under the name kode9 in UK's underground electronic dance music community.
For ethnomusicologists of Afro-diasporic music, these are particularly rewarding chapters; they provide a refreshing theoretical twist to the study of topics such as Jamaican sound system culture particularly dub , pirate radio, and the emergence of "global ghettotech.
This book is also worthy of attention for those interested in the study of music and politics. Though it maintains a thoroughly theoretical approach which Goodman wholly acknowledges , it nonetheless provides significant groundwork for real-world, ethnographic studies of music and politics.
For those unfamiliar with the philosophical thought of Deleuze, Guattari, and Whitehead, or the Afrofuturism of Kodwo Eshun, the theoretical passages will be difficult. An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe. Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm.
In Sonic Warfare , Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a dis continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
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