Chronic Sonics: An essay by Steve Goodman (Kode9)
How does the future seep in through the ears? Read an adapted excerpt from a forthcoming book by Steve Goodman (Kode9), founder of Hyperdub and author of the acclaimed Sonic Warfare.
Originally published in Ecoes #8 magazine, which serves as the Biennial Reader, this text is an adapted excerpt from Steve Goodman’s Notes on the Third Ear (forthcoming on Urbanomic). In the piece, Goodman considers the sonic violence of drones, with specific attention to their use by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. A moment of intense sound can collapse a person’s future – what happens if this sound extends into infinity? During the Biennial Symposium at the Stedelijk Museum, Goodman will expand on these ideas, addressing frequency as a physical and political force. His presentation will be followed by a conversation with writer and researcher Martina Raponi/noiserr, whose essay on Deaf music and sonic practices also appears on our Substack.
How does the future seep in through the ears? Environments sensed and scanned, threats estimated, predictions made, impacts averted, escape routes detected, conflicts pre-empted, and precipitated. Uncertain ambiences processed anxiously as danger – the highly strung temporality of threat, poised at breaking point, awaiting arrival, brimming with potential energy to be rechannelled, recycled. Sometimes, with a decoy, an after-effect becomes autonomous as an environment and virtualises, rendering its power continuous with minimal effort. An atmosphere which envelops cognitive and somatic states.
In the book Sonic Warfare, originally published in 2009, in order to apprehend the sonic colonisation of futurity, I borrowed the phrase ‘the ecology of fear’ from the late urban theorist Mike Davis, giving it a vibrational twist. Whether harnessed as a guerrilla technique, appropriated by the state’s military or police apparatuses, or as an artistic gesture, sound is sometimes deployed to weaponise an affective tone and, through lures and deception, entice action. The threshold of audibility – the boundary, both perceptual (pitch or volume) and temporal (memory or anticipation) – between sound and unsound plays a generative role in an ecology of fear.[1] It is on these borders that investigative aesthetics converges with sonic warfare. This synthesis of scientific and artistic methods assists in identifying the slow-motion, often intangible violence of reverberations beyond immediate impacts and so-called ‘collateral damage’. In this way, it can aid in the production of evidence re-deployable against malign actors engaged in the deflections and denials of information warfare. The following text gives an overview of recent research related to the sonic ecology of fear, its booms, blasts, drones, decoys, and their modulation of time.
