WHAT DO SOUNDS WANT?

On august 4th 2020, at 18.08, two-thousand-seventy-five-hundred tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in the port of Beirut. The blast was so powerful that it shook the whole of Lebanon, it was felt throughout the entire Middle-East and it was even heard in Cyprus—more than 240 km away. It was detected as a seismic event with a magnitude of 3.3.

The Beirut explosion is considered one of the most powerful artificial non-nuclear explosions in history, powerful enough to affect Earth’s atmosphere. But obviously, the atmosphere wasn’t the only one affected. Thousands of people lost their homes, got injured, hundreds lost their lives, and for all those who experienced it there’s a before and an after. And much of it has to do with the sonic elements of the event.

Reem Shadid: the shared experience of listening to the Beirut explosion  has made a new community of people that might not talk about it, that might not, but are roaming and would maybe potentially even organise very quickly.

Here is Reem Shadid, who is the current director of the Beirut Art Center and one of the co-curators of the 2023 Taipei Biennial

Reem Shadid: I spoke to different people who all told me what they thought they heard when it was first happening. And most of the people, they hear… They heard actually like an air raid. They thought it was an air raid, not an explosion. They thought it was like F-16s that were driving low or something. And that’s not an empty feeling, actually. People felt that because they’ve heard that sound before. And in their memory, in their really sonic memory, this is the most atrocious sounds you can hear. And this is when you know that you really need to do something in order to, again, let’s say, survive.

So, the people who had grown up in the Civil War and who are very familiar with all of these sounds  and these are people that are now in their late 30s, they’re not old people, actually—when they heard this, they automatically knew what to do. A lot of them, I hear this a lot, they went and they hid under tables, they hid under before the explosion actually happened. So, from one element, this is how I also think of the politics of listening.
This shared listening experience that some people were able to use to disrupt what was happening and literally survive, actually.

With this powerful example of sonic memories capable of pushing certain responses and collective reactions, Reem Shadid reflects on the relationship we all have with our immediate surroundings. And without necessarily having to go to the extremes of such a dramatic event like the Beirut explosion, she asks how do we listen to the world we live in, if the way we listen could be used to understand it or to disrupt certain power structures. These questions brought her to the notion of sonorous territories as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in their publication from 1980, Milles Plateaux…

Reem Shadid: Sonorous territory is how you mark space through rhythm. There are certain things that you incorporate rhythm, whether vocally or not, or you start listening to specific things that give you a rhythm that maybe gives you some order within the chaos that you’re in. It’s a safety almost. It helps to take some control over a chaotic situation that you’re in. For me, rhythm is kind of a metaphorical pace at which things are happening. 

But that’s not only it: rhythm helps to make sense of things as sounds shape the world and our perception of it. Roland Barthes said that the first thing that power does is to establish a rhythm, and rhythm is political. But who or what establishes the rhythm? Who or what controls it?

Reem Shadid: how do we listen when the sounds or the soundscape that we constantly exist in, suddenly shifts. We’re talking about somewhere that is your home that you have a certain rhythm that you operate within, actually. And then suddenly it completely sounds different.

Those shifts in the soundscape happen whether we acknowledge them or not and they somehow reflect on how we inhabit the space we are in. They could be triggered by something shocking—like the explosion and its aftermath—or by something subtle, like the kicking-in of generators…

Juliette Volcler: This constant shift that our listening operates, is to me, really the core of critical listening and a way of experiencing and practising sound in a non-authoritarian way.

This is Juliette Volcler, a french independent researcher, producer and sound critic whose work and thinking is central to the whole evolution of Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U. Similarly to Reem Shadid, Juliette Volcler interrogates questions of politics of listening, positionality and attunement.

Juliette Volcler: I think probably we should start with the criticism of capitalism, really, as far as categorizations are concerned. What I mean by that is that the capitalist ideology that we live in is one that is heavily relying on categorizations and very faulty ones, actually, on binary categorizations. And as far as sound is concerned, that, for instance, takes the form of defining what a good sound and what a bad sound is, what’s repellent sound and what an attractive sound is.

Volcler challenges those binary categorisations by promoting listening as a tool for critical thinking and emancipation from pre-determined or assumed constructions. She criticises the assumptions regarding the use of sound in public spaces as a tool for social control.

Juliette Volcler: Actually, we do have individually and collectively some control over our sound environments and I think we should never forget that the best way to fight against any industrialization of listening is precisely to make our listening more specific every time. The more specific I think the more you can share it with other people, because industrialization is not a way of sharing. And this is where you exercise your freedom and this is where also you build the knowledge that listening can offer you..

In Juliette’s words we, the listeners, have agency. We all experience shifts in the way we experience sound as much as the same sound will be perceived differently throughout time and space. In other words, context matters.

Juliette Volcler: the way we listen to things and how we listen to things and what things we listen to, that is absolutely not natural. That is not universal, and that is always culturally and socially constructed.

So, listening is not universal. We keep repeating this and somehow it implies that the understanding of the world that we get from listening  practices, cannot be universal either. We’re not pushing for an extreme relativism here, but for us this is a reminder of the importance of questioning some of the terminology frequently used when talking about sound and–to keep it with Juliette–about (or against) the industrialisation of sound. And this brings us to ideas of sound objects and effects…

The term sound object—or object sonore—first came about in 1948 with the french composer Pierre Schaeffer who in his research for a new form of music focused his attention on the “object” as the physical-material thing that would be the source of a specific sound. The term then evolved from the material thing to its recording, to then land on something “discrete and complete” that could be considered independently from its context. But Juliette Volcler isn’t fully on board…

Juliette Volcler: I think it’s an interesting tool, but we have to be able to criticise it and to get away from it. But in order to define how you perceive basically any sound, any sound that you listen to, be it on your headphones, from a podcast, or from the radio, or in the movies, or when you just walk in the street and you don’t have any headphones on you, any sound you listen to has some effect on it. You perceive it through effect. And what is effect? In fact, it’s the influence of the context of the environment on sound itself. And you cannot listen to a sound outside of an environment.

And to exercise listening as a tool for critical thinking also means to further step away from the idea that sound and listening are natural and a-historical elements that anyone in any given period of time, in any culture could experience exactly in the same way. Sound is not neutral. Nor can be neutral the perception of it. And on that note, citing Kodwo Eshun’s book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction sound studies researcher and curator Giada Dalla Bontà says:

Giada Dalla Bontà: Sonic effects and affects operate not only at the level of intellect or imagination; they also extend to how they engage the entire body. In Kodwo Eshun’s view, the physical aspect of experiencing sound is not in opposition to intellectual perception, and the brain alone doesn’t hold exclusive rights to comprehend and perceive sound. Instead, the body acts as a vast, distributed mind capable of holistic thinking and feeling. It harmonises with various textural, melodic, and rhythmic inputs to such an extent that it “drastically collapses and reorganises the sensorial hierarchy”

And that’s also what we talked about with artist and writer and theorist Brandon LaBelle whose research on sound culture, voice and questions of agency resonate with our investigation within the world of Dorothea Ïesj. In line with Juliette Volcler’s push to move beyond the classical definition of sound object Brandon LaBelle proposes possible different ways of thinking about it.

Brandon LaBelle: Sound for me is fundamentally a question of relationality or it sort of opens up this path or perspective onto relationalities. So for me, the object is always somehow in dialogue with something else, it’s actually not a singularity. Maybe it’s an interesting object because it is a carrier of multiplicity, for example.

Maybe one of the aspects that sound may invite us into is the sense of the subject. The sonic object is always a little bit alive. […] and maybe that’s part of its power and part of its poetic as well
I also really appreciate when we get into questions of public space and sound as something that really also activates these spatial relational experiences is the way that it traffics across worlds that are both human, non-human, that are public, but also very private, that are personal and impersonal, material and immaterial.

In the words of researcher and curator Giada Dalla Bontà:

Giada Dalla Bontà: Clearly, sound has to do with space, it expands in the air sound, travelling from the emittent (sender) to the receiver crosses the air, our bodies, and comes back, in a constant feedback loop that links bodies together, bodies to local communities and places, to social and even religious orders, to metaphysical loci, to memory and identity. Therefore, the aural space has a very profound  relational, expansive and “interstitial” nature that triggers psychological and emotional reactions, but also physical ones. And such reactions are not merely a byproduct of a passive action.

In this “constant feedback loop”—as Giada Dalla Bontà calls it, whenever a sonic occurrence happens, whenever a sound object comes to be it  creates soundwaves that propagate through the environment. So, we go back to Brandon LaBelle’s words:

Brandon LaBelle: There’s also a really wonderful way in which, as we know, sound is always, in a sense, leaving objects behind. So if we think that a sound happens, and it starts from some moment of material friction or a certain material event that is very concrete or object-based, mostly we could say, that is vibratory, frictional, and then sound is produced from that, and it leaves those objects or materialities behind to propagate through an environment.

Because of that, I think it does really invite this imagination that we have to follow sound wherever it may take us. So it leads us into a lot of imaginary, imaginative dimensions. And that really, for me, becomes the basis for also how we may enter into relationships and enter into spaces through sound.
So even when that sound leaves those objects behind to become a milieu in which reverberation is very pronounced. 

Reverberations then become maybe opportunities for, again, how we participate, how we find each other through these reverberations that have become also carriers of voices and bodies and situations. So, maybe reverberations become also slightly political in that sense, which is that where or in what sense do I do things to allow certain sounds to travel?

To think that sound reverberations and their echoes may never stop moving through time and ether could also be an exercise in imagination.

Brandon LaBelle: I was also thinking about how, I mean, sometimes there’s that idea as well, that fantasy maybe about, do sounds ever really stop? Are they just continuing to move through the ether? And so there is that sense maybe with recordings that they may come to us at certain moments that can also carry us when we need it or give further support in moments, particularly of conflict or crisis. We can think maybe reverberation is also a support structure or support of energy that can help lift or give inspiration even to others at later moments in time.

In a similar way, Juliette Volcler reminds us of the political dimension of sound in public space. What is acceptable, who or what controls it—or wants to control it—and how do we listen to it.

Juliette Volcler: I think the question of sound and public space is a very political question, because it’s the well, my idea is that listening and sound, as far as public space is concerned, should be considered as part of the commons, like the air that we breathe, like some spaces that are not being fenced, for instance.
Behind this is also the question of analysing the public space as a battlefield for different industries, but also the public space as a space where different actors will shape the use of the public space through the sounds that they say are legitimate into that space and which sounds are not legitimate. 

So, sound in public space is essentially a matter of power, recognition, imagination and organisation. But what about the listener’s agency, our agency, that Juliette was talking about before? In her words our agency lies in being aware that the sonic world around us is a construction, is fiction.

Juliette Volcler: fiction, it has a double meaning. It’s fiction as far as it’s being organised and edited like this podcast will be. This podcast actually is a fiction too. Everything is edited and organised. And even if you don’t edit it, the basic choices that you make, what microphone you will use, where you will put it, how long you will record and what you will choose to focus on when you record. This moment when you will record sound, it will make it specific and it will immediately put sound into this set of symbolic significances that you cannot listen to pure sound. It’s always in that kind of set. But also fiction is not only in the producer’s hands, it’s also in the listener’s ears. And that’s also where we have a lot of freedom. I mean, freedom and also a very strong ethical imperative. 

Listening to Giada Dalla Bontà, Brandon LaBelle, Reem Shadid and Juliette Volcler, we walked through some of the many questions that may rise thinking of sound in public space; of how listening practices may be used as tools for critical thinking and for the tuning and re-tuning of power dynamics. On how sound may shape the perception of the world we live in and how, through its complexities, questions of ethics and power do emerge.

In the next episode of WHAT DO SOUNDS WANT we’ll dive head first into the role of technology in supporting and experimenting with the production of pervasive sounds.

This podcast serves as a pair to Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., a project by ALMARE curated by Radio Papesse, promoted in collaboration with Timespan and produced thanks to the support of the Italian Council—a program to promote Italian art by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

We know this podcast is an intense journey and unfortunately we don’t have the time or length to unpack all the perspectives mentioned in each episode, but you will be able to find all the references we found to be useful and interesting together with an extensive bibliography on neroderitions.com

We hope we’ve been able to catch your attention and if you’d like to know more about  Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., please visit almareproject.it and radiopapesse.org

You can find the Italian translation of the first episode here.

Bibliography
Brandon Labelle (2018), Sonic Agency. Sound and emergent form of resistance, Goldsmith Press.
Brandon Labelle (2021), Acoustic Justice. Listening, performativity and the work of rerorientation, Bloomsbury.
Salomé Voegelin (2014), Sonic possible worlds, Bloomsbury,
Juliette Volcler (2011), Le son comme arme. Les usager militaires et policiers du son, Édition La Découverte.
Juliette Volcler (2017), Contrôle. Comment s’inventa l’art de la manipulation sonore, Édition La Découverte.
Juliette Volcler (2022), L’orchestration du quotidien. Design sonore et écoute au 21^e siècle, Édition La Découverte.
Deleuze G., Guattari F. (1980), Mille Plateaux, Minuit Paris.
Elmer Rice (1954), A Voyage to Purilia, Penguin Books.
Roland Barthes (2013 ed.), How to live together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, Columbia University Press.
Jean François Augoyard, Hery Torgue, ed. (1995), À l’écoute de l’environnement. Répertoire des effets sonores. Edition Parenthèses.
Barry Blesse and Linda-Ruth Salter (2007), Spaces speak, are you listening? Experiencing aural architecture. The MIT Press.
Helen Thorington (2017), Il est si difficile de trouver le commencement. Van Dieren, Collection Rip’on/off.

Useful links
https://dmy.co/new-music/a-love-letter-to-collective-listening
https://beirutartcenter.org/
https://www.soundpocket.org.hk/v2/uncategorized/day-after-release/?__cf_chl_tk=5VRpSUijBL3J2rCrX7kQ0hj7NDUevFKRXvS.P8VxrMo-1698856227-0-gaNycGzNCxA

Curiosity
https://www.thehum.info/
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/nov/15/the-omagh-hum-what-is-the-source-of-the-towns-mystery-moan

Hello, listener. This is What Do Sounds Want?, a podcast by Radio Papesse and ALMARE. It is podcast about sound, or better to say, about listening, through a series of questions and intuitions we’ve shared while working together on Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., a sci-fi audio novel that follows the adventures of the researcher Dorothea as she extracts and resells sounds from the past.

Have you listened to the first episode? If you’re interested in the relationship between sound, listening practices and public space, go back to it. If you’re into how sound, recording and listening technology, data extractivism and economic value are tied together, wait for the next one. Here, we’ll be investigating how technologies have been supporting and experimenting with the production of pervasive sounds.

If a sound hurts, causes discomfort or physiological imbalance, well, that sound is to be considered a weapon. Those implementing such sound devices describe them as “non-lethal weapons.”

On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. Yet another crime of systemic racism by law enforcement and American society as a whole. Black Lives Matter resounds throughout the country while, in many cities, the sky is lit by fireworks. The Atlantic states that, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston, residents have reported an unusual uptick in fireworks. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Hartford, Connecticut: fireworks. In Greenville, South Carolina, and Columbus, Ohio: fireworks!

On June 21st, the rapper Whale tweets: “too many ppl from major cities sayin this. Something is afoot.” Online, rumours circulate: all these fireworks—illegal in many states, including NYC—are secretly set up by the police to disrupt the sleep of those living in the neighbourhoods most involved in organising and participating in protests against police brutality.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it must be said that the US secret services have done this before: using sound as a weapon is a widely established practice both in the army and by the police themselves. In fact, some fireworks do make a lot of noise, so it’s not surprising that a mind prone to believing it is “under attack” might imagine fireworks are being used for disruptive purposes—and no wonder they’re also known as bombs, mortars or batteries.

Non-lethal sound weapons, such as flash-bangs, debilitators and long-range acoustic devices (LRADs), are increasingly used in civil contexts, such as the protests of the Black Lives Matter movement. These devices can cause dizziness, loss of balance and nausea, and it is not uncommon for victims to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. And yet, many people are surprised by the very existence of acoustic weapons.

The French theorist Juliette Volcler, whom we met in Episode 1,  has written a lot about sonic weapons. In her work Extremely Loud: Sound as Weapon, she writes:  «In a world dominated by images, people need to be reminded of the existence of sound, this background noise, sidekick of the visible».

WAR GAMES

Better known as Kode9, Steve Goodman has concentrated most of his studies on the liminal areas of sound perception (infrasounds and ultrasounds), developing a theory of the relationship between vibration and power, based on what he calls “politics of frequency.” His pivotal book, Sonic Warfare, was published in 2009. Goodman explores the many ways sound can affect the body—and rather literally addresses what we call “bad vibes.” Spanning philosophy, science, narrative, aesthetics and popular culture, this book considers police and military research on the acoustic means of crowd control, sound branding, and music cultures, as many artists and musicians have ventured into these powerful frequencies in search of new aesthetic experiences. Goodman also speculates on the not-yet-heard, or the concept of “unsound,” which relates to the peripheries of auditory perception.

While reading this book, we understand that the term “sonic warfare” basically refers to all the practices and devices that exploit the power of sound to trigger a given effect in individuals and populations. We’re talking about the tools and actions of “psychoacoustic correction,” such as those used in Panama by the US army against Manuel Noriega, the sound bombs dropped on the Gaza Strip, or the acoustic rat repellents used to dissuade teenagers in shopping malls. Kodwo Eshun, writer, theorist and artist best known for his 1998 book More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, wrote that “by insisting on the primacy of vibration… Sonic Warfare charts a transdisciplinary micropolitics of frequency”.

In an interview in 2011, Steve Goodman said he was interested in  “dread-full” urban environments, and in how they “affect” people by producing anxiety and uncertainty. At the same time, much of the music and related musical cultures born in these environments (jungle, footwork, dubstep and many others) have managed to take this feeling, this unpleasant “affect,” and translate it into cultural codes that make this feeling “aesthetically productive” rather than existentially immobilising. To make a long story short: take anxiety and anger and vent them through music.

Steve Goodman: During the 90s in particular, and especially during a period in which I was listening to and deejaying jungle, a lot of jungle music, I became interested in the way sounds of alarm -sounds of gunshots, sirens and so on, in other words, sounds that really trigger a fight or flight response, sounds that tap into a very basic autonomic response to sound and a very elementary dimension of the auditory system, which is primarily to scan the environment for signs of threat. So, when that becomes aestheticized, when these kind of samples, for example, become part of rave culture, then obviously we don’t run away.

This is Steve Goodman. We recently had a long conversation, during which we spoke about his book Sonic Warfare, the desire or urgency to carry out research on sonic weapons, and the ability of sound to affect the body.

Steve Goodman: For me, there’s an interesting transposition that takes place when you stay and enjoy sounds which trigger alarm; so that could be called transvaluation or re-polarisation from bad to good sound or alert to enjoyment, intense fear to intense enjoyment. This kind of transformative valuation, I think, is interesting. But I would also say that the impetus, some of the impetus to write this book, also came from an interest in what I would call the fluid dynamics of crowds. From a visual point of view, when you’re watching a crowd, it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate between dance and violence. I had this experience in the 1990s at Nottingham Carnival, watching a jungle sound system from above, and a track would drop and the crowd would go crazy for that particular bassline. But also, I remember seeing, occasionally, small fights breaking out in the crowd for various reasons people pushing into each other, you know, a very tightly packed street, full of full of people. And I’ve always been interested in this idea of a fluid dynamics of crowd. And so that’s one example of this kind of flip flop, this… ambiguity between dance and violence. And it’s something that I’ve thought about a little bit in relation to also martial arts and dance.

Varèse, Avraamov, Shostakovich. The Sweet, The Clash, Black Sabbath. Quincy Jones, Dr. Dre, Travis Scott. The Speed Freak, Atari Teenage Riot, The Panacea, The Bug. We could go on for hours, listing all the musicians who have sampled the sound of a siren in their songs over the decades. How do we hear and understand emergency signals at a time of intersecting environmental and sociopolitical crisis? How can we address alarm fatigue, as both a lived reality and a metaphor for our current state?

We asked these questions to the artist Aura Satz, whose ongoing project Preemptive Listening sees her working collaboratively with a roster of musicians, including Steve Goodman, to speculatively reimagine what a siren is.

Aura Satz: I’ve been working on this roughly for seven years now. It’s a reimagining of the siren, both as a kind of sonic experience, but also as a cypher for a wider way of understanding emergency. What is worthy of attention, how we understand the siren as a call to attention and instructions are telling us to do something, and also pointing to some sense of future or the possibility of survival. And maybe I should add that I’ve invited around 20 different musicians to reimagine a siren composition.

What I’m trying to do is to think what would happen if we were to redesign these sounds afresh, and if we were to think around what they’re intended to do, rather than what they sound like in the current soundscape we’ve inherited. And to do this, I have a kind of working definition of the siren, the first kind of part of my working definition is that it’s a call to attention. And the second that it carries within it an instruction. So it’s telling you to do something. It’s telling you to move, evacuate, go to the shelter, go to a higher hill. You know, we’re not all equal monolithic listeners. Your positionality will impact how you hear the siren, whether it’s for you, whether you’re designated as the warning or whether you’re designated as the threat in that listening process.

I think it is true that we have a vocabulary of sonic weapons and certain kinds of sounds that we associate with this, whether it’s a kind of glissando, you know, rising and falling tone or low frequencies, as Steve Goodman writes about so well. But at the same time, you know. Low frequencies are also used for healing. Rising and falling towns are. Sounds are also used in other contexts and give pleasure. So I’m kind of moving slightly away from this idea that there’s an inherent quality to the sound that makes it operate in a certain way, and towards this idea that there’s all kinds of contexts and circumstances and positionality that impact the way that we might both hear on the one hand and receive and interpret the siren and understand it as directed at us or directed at someone else. 

I interviewed a grassroots organization near San Francisco. They’re called Mental Health First Image First; it’s a kind of it’s an alternative reading of what the emergency is and who is served by that understanding of the emergency. So, it’s for people of color in the US experiencing a mental health breakdown. That was like 2016 when I first started to come up with this idea. And so much has happened in between worldwide also to me on a personal level. But I wanted to, for my own sanity and for some kind of emotional, spiritual, intellectual sustenance, reach out to people that I think have the capacity to imagine alternatives. So, you know, sound wise, the alternative is just, you know, imagining a totally different siren.

Going back to Steve Goodman… in Sonic Warfare, he introduces the reader to films, radio pieces and other works of fiction. This choice seems to make it clear that Sonic Warfare is also a story of mythologies, urban legends, hyperstitional figures, impossible technologies. Steve Goodman wrote of hazy stories of secret military research, dead end after dead end of conspiracy theories, a jungle of hearsay and rumors.

Steve Goodman: The book emerged out of trying to take seriously some of the ways in which musicians would dramatise and conceptualise their own music, the way they would create fictions around their own music and would think through in perhaps often slightly amplified or melodramatic terms, the significance or the political context for what they were doing. The book starts with a quote from the film Apocalypse Now, which is about the Vietnam War. It also has some quotes from the film The Last Angel of History by the Black Audio Film Collective, which is a kind of history of the intersection between, um, black science fiction and aspects of the black avant garde in music and electronic music. So, you know, whether it be cinematic or whether it be musical, the book emerges through trying to take seriously some of these fictional episodes of the idea of acoustic weaponry. So it’s not just a book about something which I talk a lot about in the book, which is trying to find a very basic or trying to theorise a very basic vibrational ontology of sonic force. So it’s not only about theorising this ontology of vibrational force, but it’s also about, I suppose, epistemological issues and epistemological malfunctions and breakdowns: so the idea of acoustic weaponry in sonic fiction, the idea of acoustic weaponry in speculative fiction, but also when you start to look from a more documentary or historical approach, scientific research or actual episodes of the use of sound within war, for example, then you’re confronted with all of this data and conspiracy theory, rumour, myth, great science and lies, which is epistemologically problematic. In other words, you don’t know if it’s true or false. So the book comes out of that grey zone and I’m as interested in a kind of documentary approach to the to acoustic weaponry, as I am, in the more speculative dimension where any clear distinction between truth and falsity breaks down. I think, because in a way, it’s not surprising that a lot of the research about acoustic weaponry is so problematic, because. at the cutting edge of military research, secrecy is obviously very important. Secrecy and deception. I’m not quite sure of the implications yet, but I think there is some implications to do with post-truth culture and what kind of methodology is appropriate to a culture that is migrated beyond a simple distinction between truth and falsity. 

We’ve already mentioned the concept of “unsound.” The term “unsound,” juxtaposed with the term “undead”, underlies a collection of texts compiled by the research collective AUDINT in 2019, edited by Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou and Steve Goodman himself. The anthology proceeds between science fiction and essay, alternating sound research papers and the story of the imaginary artificial intelligence IREX2, a melding of digital and undead entities.

Life Chronicles of Dorothea ïesj S.P.U. draws ideas from the early 20th century theories which hold that sound can be extracted from matter. It winks at the historically blurred boundary between what we would call “science” today and what we would dismiss instead as “pseudo-sciences” or even “occult,” “esoteric” practices.

Like photography, the history of recording technologies is also filled with spectral, ghostly references to voices and sounds from the afterlife. Isn’t it fascinating, this idea that sound can constitute a special intersection of the occult and technology, empirical and data-driven knowledge? History becomes science fiction and vice-versa.

In Sonic Warfare, we read that “we still don’t know what a sonic body can do.” Steve Goodman quotes John Duncan, as reported by Rob Young in an article published by The Wire in 1997: “By now it is fairly well established that science is the accepted framework for explaining discoveries, and in this sense it is as ‘trustworthy’ as a religion is ‘trustworthy.’ It is also clear, to many scientists among others, that there is infinite knowledge that the discipline of science cannot even begin to explain. Trusting that science—or anything else—will provide all the answers to all the questions is a tragic mistake. I am interested in the whole process.” We asked Steve Goodman if he agrees with the idea that affectivity escapes dichotomous categories of thought.

Steve Goodman: The way I use affect is an attempt to go beyond the split between the mind and the body, between language and bodily sensation and in a way that opens out onto the unknown and the idea that science doesn’t just take us closer to a factual world out there, but simultaneously multiplies the unknown. All this is embodied in the concept of unsound on one level, unsound is the shadow of sound, so it’s sound too low in frequency to hear. Or too high in frequency to hear, but is still an active, measurable vibration. So, for example, infrasound and ultrasound, both of which can generate physiological and neurological responses that we’re not necessarily conscious of. Unsound is also about sounds. As auditory prosthetics evolve we’ll have much more access to what are currently inaudible vibrations, but also as sound generating technology evolves, new signs will be created that didn’t previously exist, for example, granular synthesis and developments in digital audio generation. New sounds will be invented. And finally. Perhaps most importantly, the pun. In English, unsound means dubious or suspect ethical, moral or political foundations. So it has this has this multi valence to it as a concept which relates not just to sound and the unknown dimensions of sound, but also to, let’s say, the ethical political context of sound. 

As we were reading Sonic Warfare, an idea came to us: the numerous attempts and urban legends about the possibility of creating sonic weapons by implementing infrasound are, in themselves, a weapon of preemptive power.

In November 2016, in Havana, a US diplomat and his wife, recently arrived in Cuba, complained to the maintenance workers of the luxury residential estate in which they resided of a loud, high pitched, metallic noise. Like cicada noise, but on steroids. The noise continues for the next three months, during which the two diplomats fell ill. They got dizzy, cloudy, lightheaded, unable to concentrate; once in Miami, the two were diagnosed with concussion-like symptoms.

It is only the first of many cases of what will be called “Havana Syndrome.” People suffering from this mystery have reported symptoms including dizziness, headaches, fatigue, nausea, anxiety, sensory alterations (including hearing impairment), and memory loss. When the media broke the news, numerous US government officials accused unnamed foreign actors of causing these incidents by using ultrasonic technology. In the spring 2017, an investigation was launched by the FBI, which sent agents to Havana: the agency claimed to have found no evidence of the use of sonic weapons. In 2018, JASON, a group of physicists and scientists advising the US government, analysed the audio recordings and concluded that the sounds were “most likely” caused by Anurogryllus Celerinictus: that is, a native species of crickets that are particularly noisy.

Berlin based brazilian artist and musician Ananda Costa used this cricket as the main source for a piece  called Sonic Weapons from Latin America, a sound collage that uses archive field recordings of tropical crickets to donate Latin American countries the natural science fiction weapons they are expected to have and explore the absurd relation of fear and demotion in the diplomatic environment.

We have come to the end of this second long episode of What Do Sounds Want? So far one might say sounds want to hurt us, to disorient us, to deceive us, to sing insubstantial paranoid lullabies while striking us like a punch. Then again, they equally want us to dance and unleash our libidinal energies and social frustration, reversing the ecologies of fear that reign on the global sprawl. No doubt they want to get to the body. And as Steve Goodman says, we still don’t know what a sonic body can do. Next, we will turn to the economies of data and their logic of extractive listening. And we will investigate how the so-called “Sonic Fictions” can not only narrate this all, but also affect and shape future scenarios and their understanding.

You can find the Italian translation of the second episode here.

Bibliography
Steve Goodman (2012), Sonic Warfare. Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, MIT Press.
Steve Goodman, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou (2019), AUDINT-Unsound:Undead, Urbanomic.
Kodwo Eshun (1998), More Brilliant Than the Sun, Quartet Books.
Juliette Volcler (2013), Extremely Loud: Sound as Weapon, translated by Carol Volk, The New Press.
Rob Young, Exotic Audio Research, The Wire, Issue 157, March 1997.
Samuel Gibbs, Samsung’s voice-recording smart TVs breach privacy law, campaigners claim, The Guardian Online (27 February 2015).
K. Tiffany, The Boom in Fireworks Conspiracy Theories, (24 June 2020), The Atlantic.
Ottenhof, Sound of the police: how US law enforcement uses noise as a weapon, The Guardian Online, (14 July 2020).
Aura Satz in conversation with Daphne Carr, Amant, (9 October 2022).  https://www.amant.org/programs/42-preemptive-listening
Barbara London, Aura Satz: A Complex Marriage of Human and Machine, Flash Art Online, (5 May 2022). https://flash—art.com/2022/05/aura-satz/
Ananda Costa, Sound Weapons from Latin America, Radio Papesse, 2018. https://www.radiopapesse.org/it/archivio/sonora/sonic-weapons-from-latin-america
Cody Mello-Klein, Crickets May Be the Cause of Havana Syndrome, Northeastern Global News reporter, (13 June 2023).  https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/06/13/havana-syndrome-cause-historys-greatest-mysteries/

You’ve been working late for days, an unmade bed awaits you at home, along with an antisocial roommate you share a bare fridge with: two yogurts gone bad, a jam blooming with mold, a leftover Chinese takeaway from three days ago.

You know it, but you open the fridge anyway, hoping that a ready-made soup has made its way onto your shelf. If you had a smart fridge, it would know what you like.

A smart fridge would have shopped for you online… but your fridge, it just keeps cooling. It takes no initiative. It knows nothing about you. But what if it did know you? It’s not science fiction.

In 2017, Whirlpool appealed to the United States government to impose duties on its competitors LG and Samsung, guilty of selling smart technology cheaply: the Korean fridges had eaten up the market and were about to eat Whirlpool as a whole. How? By understanding, ahead of others, that in a data-driven market, you win by keeping costs low, so you build a customer base, oil the data stream, and cash in over the long term. In other words, the fridge costs less, because I am prepared to sell the data you provide for free. It’s a matter of numbers. The logic of accumulation works like this, it turns a refrigerator into a machine that produces, collects and transmits data. And how that data can be used now propels new ways of doing business, governance and surveillance.

In this episode we’re talking about data, how it shapes our understanding of the world and of ourselves, and how sound and voice have been enmeshed in its logic. The voice era is here: despite a crescendo of concerns, a rising buzz of anxiety about privacy, biometric data, state control, AI taking over our lives and Black Mirror-like scenarios… voice-enabled technology is becoming pervasive.

Not only do we live in times of ubiquitous listening—where we are surrounded by sound artifacts in every moment—but we also live in times where we are listened to, wall to wall, again and again. Our homes have ears, the devices we surround ourselves with have ears.

Your fridge listens to you. And beyond the metaphor, Alexa, just to name a technology you may be familiar with, is listening to you and she’s also learning to mimic your voice: it is now widely reported that she is even able to replicate the voice of the dead… creepy, no less than eerie…

But, what for?
Well, data is the answer.
And what is data?

Data is the raw material produced by reducing reality into categories. Data is the intentional by-product of a measurement. “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”, data scientist William Edward Deming once said. Today we could argue that collected data also depends on choices and decisions, which in turn are the result of individual stories and therefore, human errors, biases, personal interests, privileges, ideologies.

And again, data does not exist regardless of ideas or technologies, it depends on the context in which it is generated. Yes, “generated”, because as Jathan Sadowsky writes in When data is capital, “data is more than knowledge about the world, it is discrete bits of info that is digitally recorded, machine processable, easily agglomerated and highly mobile.” He argues that “data is not out there waiting to be discovered as if it already exists in the world, like crude oil. The framing of data as a natural resource that is everywhere and free for the taking, reinforces regimes of data accumulation.” That’s the reason why, for instance, he speaks of data manufacturing, or data extraction, instead of data mining: data manufacturing because data is a recorded abstraction of the world, created and valorised by people using technology. Data extraction, because it emphasizes the people targeted by data surveillance and the datafication of its life, wherein its consent is not requested and the info produced is not fairly compensated.

To cut it short, collecting data means creating data. In the words of Jathan Sadowski, “to know the world is to exercise power over it and to exercise power, is to know it, to examine its features and characteristics, to sort it into categories and norms, to render it legible and observable.” But let’s take a closer look: why all this interest in data?

If you have not listened to the first two episodes of What Do Sounds Want?, this podcast complements Life Chronicles of Dorothea Iesj S.P.U., a sci-fi film and audio novel that narrates the many adventures of researcher Dorothea, as she extracts—and smuggles—sound finds from the past. The film investigates the link between data capitalism, technology, and value creation, reflecting on the use of archaeological artifacts, archives, and memory as instruments of power and control: what happens when everything, every surface and object can record us? When we are subject to a pervasive acoustic surveillance?

Well, this is not exactly 100% science fiction. It is not something to worry about in the future. This is real. The datafication of our bodies is real, we are tracked down and listened to, aware or not. And this datafication affects identity formation, as individuals come to perceive themselves and others through the lens of data.

To better understand how people and their digital data make each other, and to single out the relation between data, sound, recording and listening practices, we’ve spoken with sociologist Deborah Lupton, author of books such as The Quantified Self or Data Selves, and with Columbia University lecturer Audrey Amsellem, who’s been writing a great deal about sound and surveillance.

Audrey Amsellem: Part of my work is tracing this kind of starvation for data, this data harvesting, this constant notion in Western history of extracting, of taking away whether we are talking about land or culture…

Nick Couldry would call it Data Colonialism, a capitalization of life without limits. Shoshana Zuboff speaks of surveillance capitalism. Were we to trace the origins of the ubiquitous surveillance of our digital behavior, we could perhaps go back to the early 2000s. 9/11 and music piracy have normalized the fact that our online beings could be monitored. Piracy surveillance, as Sonia Katyal writes, gave a form of legitimacy to actually tracking people’s behavior online and to doing it in a way that was unprecedented. Audrey Amsellem…

Audrey Amsellem: To me, this is a major historical precedent for surveillance capitalism, because it becomes okay for entities to track and analyze your online behavior. And it’s interesting that it always starts with culture, with cultural material, with music, right? But surveillance capitalism, what it does is it enables listening, recording, gathering, analyzing your online behavior and your subjectivity. And, you know, all of this is turned into data about people for commercial profit.

9/11 is actually another important precedent here as well, and particularly in relation to state surveillance, that all of a sudden, because you have this terrorist threat, that it’s okay to be surveilled as well. And so people start to accept it and not necessarily think about the implications of that.

But this is no more: because of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal and the European Union’s adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation, the risks and the sociopolitical implications associated with such a control are very much talked about, especially in the Global North, and our relation with our data is more complicated than the one surveillance studies often linger into.

Deborah Lupton: I mean, one thing that we’ve often heard is the internet knows everything about us because we are tracked and monitored and surveyed and, um, you know, our personal data is recorded every time we go online. But actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

On one side data can be empowering for individuals and on the other side people, communities and groups increasingly resist data surveillance and reclaim control over their data. This is what Deborah Lupton writes about in Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives.

Deborah Lupton: We understand ourselves through digital media, but that’s only a small part of how we understand ourselves. So digital data generated with and through our interactions online and with digital devices is, you know, for many people, one form of knowledge about themselves and one form of contributing to their ideas of self, but they’re only just one of many ways that we learn about ourselves and think about ourselves. Um, you know, the whole concept of surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, which has got a huge amount of attention, particularly in surveillance studies and media and communications studies, is a very, um, I think, quite a simplistic way, which deprives people in some ways, it sees people as very passive sort of absorbers of or unknowing participants in the way that they use.

And I guess what I try to do in the book that I did call Data Selves, is challenge that and sort of talk more about people’s agency and talk about why people might choose to, you know, generate their own data and use it, use their data themselves for their own purposes. It’s not always about being manipulated by third parties…

Many people indeed do really appreciate being able to use digital devices and apps to monitor their bodies: in the self-tracking cultures, which Deborah Lupton writes about in The Quantified Self, people can have agency over their own data.

Deborah Lupton: So again, I would emphasize that agency that people do have and that the critical capacities they have to recognise that those  data only, you know, tells one facet of themselves and their bodies and their health and other social relationships. I guess where the big difference comes into it is that there, of course, are many, many other ways that digital data is generated about people that they don’t have a lot of control over, and they don’t know where their data is going and they don’t know who is using that data. And of course, there are many situations like that.

So, the self-tracking practices go far beyond the individual pursuit of self-optimization—as desired for instance by the techno-optimists, affiliated to The Quantified Self movement initiated by Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired. Deborah Lupton is rather clear about that in the homonymous book The Quantified Self: self-tracking practices are culturally embedded; they made their way into various social realms, such as education, healthcare, insurance assessments and very often are imposed and exploitative.

And here it’s time to bring sound into the equation between control and data. Audrey Amsellem has been researching the legal and ethical ramification of our use of apps and devices that measure and keep track of our habits through the listening and recording of our voice or music consumption. She talks about a neoliberal ear.

Audrey Amsellem: So if we look at the hallmarks of neoliberalism, we have the idea of the free market. We have this notion of valuing profit over public good. We have this notion of individualism. So that’s the ideology of neoliberalism, but it’s also a mode of governance, that is coupled with the recording and tracking capacities of modern technology, and together that forms a specific way of listening. So we see emerging not just the ability or, I guess, the perceived ability to listen for and to collect human subjectivity but we actually see, um, the deep rooted belief that this collection of subjectivity has inherent value and that it can be marketed and quantified and sold for profit. So, um, the neoliberal ear is a form of listening that is the product of neoliberal ideology and neoliberal governance.

ALEXA play….(registrare)

The voice-activated technologies you might have at home literally listen to you. Always. You know about that and that’s also one of their main appeals, right? It makes you feel in control of things, right?

Stephen Neville, who also studies auditory surveillance, has introduced the concept of “eavesmining.” It stems from the combination of data mining and eavesdropping, and describes a set of digital listening processes, a mode of surveillance that operates at the edge of acoustic space and digital infrastructure.

Let’s take Alexa: she is listening to everything that happens around her because she must be ready to answer your questions when you pronounce the word ALEXA. But what you might not know is that she is constantly recording to process sound…Amazon and others are building devices that normalize constant recording of users. Amsellem says that they should know they’ve been recorded.

Audrey Amsellem: But the ambiguity is whether those particular snippets of their voices or sonic moments and their lives, are those snippets stored, or if they are kept or analyzed to then be sort of fed back to them in forms of ads or even at times, form of manipulation.

There is an ethical necessity, in my opinion, to let people know that they are being recorded because it is actually a different experience of being in the world. We have this notion of listening that’s ephemeral, right? And we have recordings that now are forever. But it’s not only that. They can be distorted. They can be used for purposes that are outside of our control. And this is where this ambiguity exists. And it’s also a very unsettling one.

In her book Sound and Surveillance: The Making of the Neoliberal Ear, Audrey Amsellem writes that listening responds to the constant data starvations of these big companies and that the voice, “as a means of identification, seems to offer a more stable and truthful versions of the selves (and therefore more identifiable habits).”

As she says: “Our searches, our queries, our questions across platforms, are but mere echoes of our thoughts taken as truth by tech companies and the advertisers who purchase our recordings to form a picture of our identities. Our echoes, in the form of data, are a reflective distortion of us, but not us. Tech companies are aware of this issue, and developing voice technology is their solution.”

Audrey Amsellem: So we have, you know, these companies that, they gather data about people and they treat this data as raw, as objective, as valuable in itself, and they analyze it to and for some kind of information about our subjectivities and who we are, what we think. But we are actually complex beings. We are beings that have very unclear inputs and outputs, so these little bits of information that they can collect, they’re not us. They are what I call echoes. They’re tied to us in some way but they distort us.

But what voice does, and this is according to tech companies and their discourse and the hundreds of patent applications I studied, right, is that it’s supposed to offer context. So what they believe is that they can infer what you actually mean by analyzing your voice data and that full sentence in the context in which it’s operating in. So in order to make this analysis, they have to record you, not just in a moment. They have to do it over time so that they know, you know, what is your neutral voice? Uh, when are you being sarcastic? When are you being serious? So we have, you know, an obvious privacy issue here. And this is also the constant starvation for more data and this idea that the more data you have, the more precise of a picture you can paint. But the caveat is that voice is actually not as stable as it seems. So they believe that with voice they can identify gender, age, accent, race and they believe that it’s useful data to them. But the reality actually tends to be much more complex. And, they tend to sort of treat complex problems with, in a way, simple solutions.

So both Deborah Lupton and Audrey Amsellem seem to agree that human subjectivity can’t be fully and easily categorized or commodified as data, not even through one’s voice that, luckily for us!, is more opaque and unstable than any prediction.

And furthermore, as Lupton points out, data always comes from the past: whatever has been recorded of my habits is already old, past tense… She asks…what if we thought of our personal data as a new form of human remains? As archeological artifacts? Are they like our bones?

Deborah Lupton: So in the book Data Selves, one thing that really sparked my thinking and I guess creative thinking about how we might understand digital data, um, in terms of how we understand its relationship to ourselves and our identities, is making that analogy between human body parts. It  gets back again to how there’s a digital data economy where people’s data is not all of it, but, you know, some of their digital data is sold by data brokers and used for commercial purposes. So, I’ve been quite interested in what’s called the bio economy, which is the way that human cells or blood or gametes are marketed, uh, become commodities for sale, their body organs, those kinds of things, parts of human bodies. That’s where I sort of talk about digital data in a way, as being both part of an economy of parts of humans, because you could see digital data as parts of humans in terms of generating information about their bodies and their selves and their everyday lives and practices. I also read a really interesting book about the way that human bones became used—back in the sort of early days of anatomy teaching and medical science, so in the late 1700s into the 1800s in Europe—skeletons—or for that matter  corpses—were stolen and sold for anonymous to teach medicine. But there was this actual job where people would put together, take the bones from people’s skeletons and sort of put them together as a teaching skeleton that could be, you know, wired together for teaching purposes at medical schools. And so that really sparked my, really built on my idea of the fact that, well, digital data about people’s bodies, it’s not a sort of material part of their bodies, like bones are or, um, blood or cells, but it’s also part of the bio economy these days. But the other analogy I was trying to draw there with, particularly with the bones, human bones, is that they can be used in lots of different ways. They can be in museums, they can be in medical schools, they can be in graveyards. So they can be used in art and I was arguing that the same can be said of people’s personal data, that they are brought together and sort of processed and, you know, mixed up in lots of different ways. I use the term lively data, by the way, to talk about people’s personal data, because it does have its own sort of life that once it’s generated by the people the data is about, it goes on to be formed and reformed and reprocessed, or maybe just sitting in archives, like, I guess like dead bodies, but might be brought out again to be used and reused again. So I guess that was the sort of analogy really I was trying to make, by talking about remains, the human remains and sort of making those, sort of riffing off that idea, particularly of human skeletons or human bones.

So let’s go back to Life Chronicle of Dorothea Iesj S.P.U. Let’s go back to Dorothea and the sounds she extracts from the past and she smuggles…

[Audio excerpt from Life Chronicle of Dorothea Iesj S.P.U.]

Gli audio-reperti, i ritrovamenti acustici in generale,
profanati dal suo meticoloso setaccio origliatorio.
Secretioni uditive. Reliquie parlanti.

The audio-specimens are talking relics.

E beninteso, ECHO
non estrae invero i suoni dalla materia,
ma ne formula una resa, una simulatione.
Questa la sua proprietà fondamentale
e il suo limite intrinseco.

ECHO—the technology Dorothea is using—does not indeed extract sound from matter, it formulates a simulation. This is ECHO’s fundamental property, and its intrinsic limitation.

We might say that sounds like bones are lively data.

This podcast serves as a pair to Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., a project by ALMARE curated by Radio Papesse, promoted in collaboration with Timespan and produced thanks to the support of the Italian Council—a program to promote Italian art by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

If you’d like to know more about Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., please visit almareproject.it and radiopapesse.org.

In the next episode we’ll dive into sonic fiction. Stay tuned.

You can find the Italian translation of the third episode here.

Bibliography
Audrey Amsellem (2022), Sound and Surveillance: The Making of the Neoliberal Ear, Doctoral dissertation at Columbia University.
Kathleen Battles (2014), The Sonic Roots of Surveillance Society: Intimacy, Mobility, and Radio. soundstudiesblog.com
Ignacio Gallego (2021), The value of sound: Datafication of the sound industries in the age of surveillance and platform capitalism, First Monday, Volume 26, Number 6–7 June.
Robin James (2014), Acousmatic Surveillance and Big Data, soundstudiesblog.com
Deborah Lupton (2016), The Quantified Self, Polity Press.
Deborah Lupton (2018), Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives, Polity Press.
Stephen J. Neville (2020), Eavesmining: A Critical Audit of the Amazon Echo and Alexa Conditions of Use in Surveillance & Society – Vol. 18 No. 3.
Jathan Sadowsky (2019), When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction, Big Data & Society.
Jathan Sadowsky (2020), Too Smart. How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World, The MIT Press.
Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundaram (2021), Colonial Infrastructures and Techno-social Networks, e-flux Journal.

On March 13, 2024, the German UNESCO Commission chose to recognize Berlin’s techno scene as part of its national cultural heritage. The press went crazy, even though UNESCO actually had nothing to do with it. Berlin’s techno was “only” added to the German national register of intangible heritage. Correction aside, the news was greeted with great enthusiasm, underscoring its inherently enlightened and progressive nature.

But not everyone feels that way. There’s always some killjoy voice. Like the one of American author Tajh Morris who, in an article published in Resident Advisor, wrote in no uncertain terms, that “this is infuriating when you consider techno’s origins.” In this article, Morris reminded that techno originated from the cultural and musical movements of Detroit’s predominantly black youth, and that the fact that many claim techno music would not have survived without the response it got in Europe exposes an old, long-standing problem: nothing has value until it is accepted into mainstream white society.

Tajh Morris’s comment immediately reminded us of the book Assembling a Black Counter Culture by DeForrest Brown Jr., a media theorist and curator also known as Speaker Music. DeForrest Brown Jr. is clear; in  the first pages of Assembling a Black Counter Culture he writes: “the primary intention of this book is to detach the term “techno” from the electronic dance music culture industry and the British lexical standard of the hardcore continuum to reconsider its origins in the community of Detroit and its context within African American history.” As if we were going to read Lord of the Rings or perhaps consult a geopolitical magazine, at the beginning of the book we find a map.

This map is made of a series of images from Drexciya’s album The Quest published in 1997. Drexciya is a historic band from Detroit. Their name hints at a whole mythopoetic process, reminiscent, if you will, of Plato’s Atlantis: Drexciya is an underwater world populated by the unborn sons and daughters of pregnant African women thrown into the sea during the slave trade. In the Ocean, they grow to be amphibious warriors, fighting for justice in aquatic cities.

From 1991 to 2002, the complex world of Drexciya took shape through track titles, album artwork, and notes in the back covers, revealing what DeForrest Brown Jr. called the “Sonic Fiction of underwater civilization’s aquatic invasion of the world on the surface.” When talking about his own book, Brown states that he wrote a “historical science-fiction book about Black contributions to the electronic music industry, with a central focus on Detroit techno’s innovations in DIY ‘studio performance music’ that produce Sonic Fictions.”

But what is a Sonic Fiction?

Let’s take a step back for those of you who come across What Do Sounds Want? for the first time. What you are listening to is the fourth episode of a collection of audio essays accompanying Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., a film and audio novel set in an imaginary society, which follows the researcher Dorothea in her adventures as she extracts (and resells) sounds from the past.

It’s not our intention to qualify our film and audio-novel Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U. as Sonic Fiction. We cannot tell you that it is, because we struggle to think of “Sonic Fiction” as a category. The premises for coining this term are quite different, as you will see. Besides, as we understand it, you don’t decide from the start to make Sonic Fiction. To us, it seems more correct to say that Sonic Fiction works are phenomena. It’s a bit confusing… isn’t it? Let’s try to navigate it.

In 1998, the small London publishing house Quartet Books published More Brilliant Than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun. The term “Sonic Fiction” appears right in the subtitle, Adventures in Sonic Fiction, but don’t expect to find any specific definition of it in the book. To talk about Sonic Fiction, we asked for help from Holger Schulze, who is professor of musicology at the University of Copenhagen and coordinator of the Sound Studies Lab. Among his credits he has edited The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Art, has written texts such as The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound, Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design and, indeed, Sonic Fiction: The Study of Sound. We had the pleasure of meeting Holger Schulze in Copenhagen, where we interviewed him and met with students from the Sound Studies Lab.

Schulze’s book provides a basic introduction to the concept of Sonic Fiction, doing justice to the layers of meaning it has taken on over the years without reducing its expressive possibilities to an academic exercise. In six chapters, Schulze illustrates its principles and transformations by exploring its various applications in sound art, sonic studies, musicology, epistemology, critical theory and political activism.
He writes: “Any small note, any aphorism or fragment of sound can qualify as a Sonic Fiction,” (…) “Any small musical piece—any ever so small performative gesture—any bit of liner notes or cover design—stage clothing—any gossip about performers or musicians… Where one can find sounds one will also detect bits of fiction.” To unravel this complex and ramified concept, Schulze starts from Kodwo Eshun and his book More Brilliant than the Sun.

Holger Schulze: And in this book he makes an effort to rewrite black music history without a sociological or historical background, but through the imagination connected to songs, to music, to musical practices, to technological practices. So sonic fiction in that sense refers to the imagination, to the embodied, to the sonic imagination, to the, if you will, also kinesthetic and dancing imagination that is related to music. It doesn’t intend to explicate music and sound productions according to composition, historical background, recording situations, sociological environments, but through the imaginations that are and were relevant at the time of the production, at the time of listening and at our times. 

More Brilliant Than the Sun is not a conventional essay, and to read it you must throw yourself into Eshun’s narrative, accepting that you will lose your coordinates sometimes. The book is a journey into the realms of free jazz and electronic music. It is a rhapsodic, eclectic, swirling navigation. Schulze calls it a kind of black Finnegan’s Wake.

Holger Schulze: When we listen to music, we indulge in the imagination, in fantasies, in connections we make. But that’s often not addressed in analyzing music and sound. He does that. There are three terms that are crucial and reappear again and again in the writing of quotations in that book. And these are the terms Mythscience, Mixilllogic, and Mutantextures. […] 

One could start with the term Mythscience. […] Mythscience is an approach to understanding the world that combines scientific insights with, you could say again, imagination’s personal limit, imagination’s personal sensibilities. 

Then we can move to what Eshun coined the Mixillogics […] that refers to the embodied sensibilities, the practices that play a role in the writing of Eshun. But also Steve Goodman […] they are not just writing about finished musical products. They are writing about how musicians, DJs, instrumentalists perform at the decks, at the mixing desk, with a computer, tools and so on. […] One example is, for instance, when Kodwo writes about Sun Ra, be it Kraftwerk, be it Four Tet.

Taking in sonic practices the Mixillogics, you arrive at so-called Mutantextures. These are musical sonic textures that are very different from the textures that you would arrive at if you would compose it without these practices and without these sensory imaginations. […] These mutantextures he observes in the music and in the sounds he analyzes. And they are, if you will, the product of Sonic Fiction. And they create different artifacts.

Eshun’s journey starts from the imagery of Afrofuturism, which re-examines conventional representations of racialized black subjectivities and deconstructs their narratives. Afrofuturism uses the topoi of science fiction space literature, imagining African American people as the first aliens, dragged into a foreign land without history, disconnected from the past and their homeland through slavery.

Both Eshun and Schulze mention Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place from 1974, which is an extremely clear example of the way Afrofuturism starts from the memory of the African diaspora to develop extremely vital forms of futurism. Steve Goodman, who we already met in the second episode of What do sounds want?, speaks of an appropriation of futurism, freed from white rationality to promote an epistemological and ontological position that is deeply rooted in the idea of the body as an instrument of knowledge. Now let’s try to understand how we should interpret the term fiction.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Eshun was part of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a group of writers, researchers and artists founded in 1995 within the philosophy department of the University of Warwick. Initially, the CCRU gravitated around Sadie Plant and Nick Land, the latter known as a pioneer of accelerationist theory and later infamous for becoming one of the most emblematic figures of today’s neo-reactionary currents of thought.

We could say that Kodwo Eshun and Nick Land certainly shared an idiosyncrasy for conventional academic practices, and that their writings absorbed characteristics of literary fiction, referring back to a synaesthetic, bodily experience of the world. Eshun and Land coined two neologisms destined to become a tool shared by many: Eshun gave us the concept of Sonic Fiction, while Land spoke of Theory-Fiction.

In both cases the term “fiction” should not make us think of novels, but rather of rhetorical strategies to stimulate the imagination of those who approach the study of a theory; strategies to create fiction that seems so real that it can have direct effects on daily life, leading people to act. Both, as Steve Goodman says, add a “psychedelic function to theory.” And this is a fundamental property of any work of Sonic Fiction which, as Schulze writes, incorporates the generativity of sound.The “machine” of writing is no longer just a technical machine, it is a real vector to the world.

Holger Schulze: The sonic is, needless to say, always intermixed and interwoven with language, with words, with fractures of signs, of significations, of letters, of words. So also contraction in his writing refers again and again to the role of words and the role of written text within or around musical productions. Specifically speaking, he refers to the example of the recordings of the electronic group Drexciya on the para texts. So small text like liner notes given with the CD or with a vinyl record to the song titles on the record, maybe even to somewhat hidden or camouflaged messages scratched into the record label. So signs, significations, even band names, track names, and all other written elements surrounding a recording or sound production play a role. He’s not ignorant of that, and he doesn’t take a purist stance and say a Sonic Fiction may only operate through sound and through nothing else. […] The difference to, if you will, a literary fiction or other fictions that operate solely through words and through language is that these forms of fiction do, needless to say, not have the sonic side, and they rely only on the word. In the case of Sonic Fiction, this fiction relies mainly and massively to the sound experience and gives little, you could say, framing hints or little attacks, little injections of other signatures and other significations, also like words and also like imagery and design. […] Our imagination is never as purist as only to get its cues from the sonic. And so also the concept of Sonic Fiction includes all these other cues to our imagination.

I feel it’s important if we speak about Sonic Fiction as a common, as a concept by a person of color, by quotation. […] So to me, really the critical and explosive and subversive power of Sonic Fiction lies in this mixture, and these mutant actors, coming from highly diverse sensibilities and practices and embodied musical knowledge. If you take away that, you have lost a lot of that. So I feel that is really crucial to understand what Sonic Fiction can do politically.

The ability to imagine new or alternative and parallel ways of inhabiting the world, seems to be a recurring feature of Sonic Fictions. And we know, that the great potential of these sonic experiences is not only to represent reality, but since they affect the body, they act on the plane of reality, modifying the way our bodies move through social and political ecosystems.

Now, this kind of dynamic might ring a bell with someone: muzak, earworms and the vast majority of the ways capitalism implements the functions of sound also work this way. Some fundamental questions arise: are Sonic Fictions intentional operations? And does a militant dimension have to be part of the author’s perspective?

Or should we think of a storm of different elements that coagulate, “accelerated” as they move closer through the agency of a certain author or authors, maybe a tendency or a trend? Or could the liberating power of Sonic Fictions inhabit both these perspectives? To answer these questions, we return to Giada dalla Bontà, whom we met in the first episode.

Giada dalla Bontà: In the context of Sonic Fictions, it is important to consider the intentional operations behind them. As Steve Goodman suggests in Sonic Warfare, “The question of intentionality is central to understanding the politics of sound.” Sonic Fictions can be intentional operations, where sound is purposefully employed to shape and manipulate reality. In this respect, I think it is absolutely fundamental to keep in mind where the concept of Sonic Fiction comes from. […] Kodwo Eshun states very clearly that Sonic Fiction emerged in the context of black liberation and identity. […] However, it is not necessary for the militant dimension to be solely part of the author’s perspective. Sonic fictions can emerge from a convergence of various elements, such as the agency of different authors or trends, but even solely psychoacoustic impulses, which coalesce to create a transformative effect. The liberating power of Sonic Fictions can be found within both intentional and emergent perspectives: as it has been remarked already a long time ago in the realm of literature and art, the original intention of the author often undergoes transformations when the artwork becomes public. […] Julia Kristeva talks about intertextuality: when readers engage with a work, they bring their knowledge of other texts and cultural references, which can alter the interpretation of the original work. The public’s perception of Sonic Fictions and other works changes depending on the cultural context, the historical time, the listener’s positionality including their memories, psychology, and even the body they inhabit.

In her article Sonic Agency in Unsustainable Worlds, Giada dalla Bontà writes that “Sonic Fictions are tightly intertwined with knowledge production, subject constitution, and materiality. They do not merely offer a brief moment of escapism and refusal of the real world, but rather substantiate the desire for alternative possible ones in concrete and transformative self-affirmative manifestation.”

Giada dalla Bontà: Desire is the propeller for the creation of new possible worlds, as Salomé Voegelin would call them. Music, encompassing visual, performative, and fleeting elements that revolve around the immediate experience of sound, serves as the origin story of fictional universes by generating fresh narratives and systems of meaning that express desires for acknowledgment and change. Sonic Fictions, as exemplified in the Afrofuturist tradition, are intricately linked with desire: the creation of knowledge, the shaping of individual identities, and the tangible aspects of existence. They do more than simply provide temporary escapes from the real world; instead, they validate and substantiate such desire for tangible and self-affirming expressions of alternative possibilities.

Let’s go back to Detroit. The city had witnessed the crumbling of the automotive empire since the late 1960s, and since the industry had woven an inseparable liaison with black music for half a century, it is almost a given to point out how its collapse affected the generation of black youth left without jobs and welfare, but also without the fulcrum of Detroit music production represented by Motown, which moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1972.

DeForrest Brown Jr. writes that “In the years after Motown’s departure from Detroit,” a youthful Black music scene (had) gained access to second-hand electronic instruments, underused recording studios, and mastering plants to develop what they thought of as progressive music. What was that youthful Black music scene up to with those second-hand electronic instruments?

We just have to go back to the protagonists of that era. In the words of Dj and producer Derrick May, the “philosopher” of Detroit techno: “The old industrial Detroit is falling apart; the structures have collapsed. It’s the murder capital of America. Six-year-olds carry guns and thousands of Black people have stopped caring if they ever work again. If you make music in that environment, it can’t be straight music. In Britain you have New Order, well Detroit’s music is the New Disorder.”

Or we could also mention musician Juan Atkins who said: “We’re tired of hearing about being in love or falling out, tired of the R&B system, so a new progressive sound has emerged. We call it techno!”

In 1984, Juan Atkins, together with Richard Davis published the record Techno City under the collective moniker Cybotron. And guess how DeForrest Brown Jr. described it? “The song is a Sonic Fiction about being born and raised in a city designed for technical workers; this resonated with listeners around the world who were also hoping to rethink their urban surroundings and leap into the future.”
The sample you have just listened to comes from The Last Angel of History by the Black Audio Film Collective, a video work somewhere between fiction and documentary, described as “a truly masterful film essay about Black aesthetics” [“John Akomfrah, A Poet in the Archives”, Harvard Film Archive].

In the second episode of this podcast, Steve Goodman, author of the book Sonic Warfare, had already told us about The Last Angel of History because of its peculiar use of fiction. But The Last Angel of History is not the only fiction Goodman refers to; he also devotes numerous pages to Project Jericho, a radio docufiction by writer and artist Gregory Whitehead.

Sonic Warfare is full of mythologies, urban legends, hyperstitional characters, impossible technologies, military operations and instruments, but it is also a story of collective artistic-musical narratives that had the substance needed to shape the world. It holds the same generative power we were just talking about with Schulze, that strength to imprint itself in the malleable matter that History and Time are basically made of. But why do we speak now of malleable matter? Let’s try to explain.

Sonic Fictions play with time, passing through it, winking at the techniques by which science fiction uses the future and the past to deal with the present. This layering, this possibility of playing with the malleable surface of time is also found in the latest example of Sonic Fiction we would like to tell you about.

Steve Goodman has lived in London for many years, but he is originally from Glasgow and has close ties to the Scottish Highlands. In 2022, under the moniker Kode9, Goodman published Astro-Darien, a 26-minute audio novel that speculates on the possible disintegration of the United Kingdom.

Steve Goodman: Astro-Darien was really the result of a number of convergences between the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, the Brexit referendum and the pandemic, and finding out that there was actually a space race going on in the north of Scotland, to be the first place in the UK to build vertical rocket launch sites, and also because of Brexit. Thinking a little bit about the origin of the UK, what happened to make the act of union between Scotland and England occur? 

Astro-Darien starts with a road trip along the northern coast of Scotland. The fiction develops from a historical event, the so-called “Darien scheme”.

What was that? To put it briefly: in the late 17th century, Scotland attempted to colonise part of present-day Panama, but with catastrophic results. Many settlers died from starvation and diseases unknown to them. The failure of the “Darien scheme” is considered one of the reasons why Scotland signed the controversial Act of Union to England in 1707 that resulted in the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

In fact, the English agreed to shoulder the Scottish government’s debt to those who had joined the Scheme, and this was probably one of the main reasons why the Scottish parliament   did not oppose the Act of Union.

Astro-Darien mixes these historical facts with the contemporary events of Brexit and the claims for Scottish independence, ending up investigating some ongoing tenders for the construction of a space launch station for satellites in the Highlands. The story is narrated by synthetic Scottish voices, and is presented as if it were a video game.

Steve Goodman: The other way is that Astro Darien is a videogame produced by a fictional video game company called Transtar North, who are based on the idea, based on the real company called Rockstar Games, who produce Grand Theft Auto, which is probably one of the biggest video games ever produced, which is a Scottish company, originally a Scottish company. So the idea of what kind of video game would they produce if they stopped trying to simulate American street life and did something about the Break-Up of Britain? […] Weather and fiction often operates through resonance. It helps forge connections, connections which are speculative. Open ended. An often ambiguous and an abstract. 

You can find Astro-Darien in its entirety on Kode9’s bandcamp.

And with that we have reached the conclusion of this fourth episode, as well as the end of the series What Do Sounds Want? In order to try to investigate the themes underlying the film and audio-novel Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., we began by defining the scope of our research in the relationship between listening and public space.

We focused on sound weapons and the ability of sound to affect the body and our perception of the world. Then, we tried to understand more about how people and their digital data make each other in the context of the relation between data, sound, recording and listening practices. Finally, we have tried to explore the notion of Sonic Fiction, which, as you have heard, is more than just a notion or a category.

If we really had to find a word, it seems to us that a Sonic Fiction is a phenomenon, one that is created in the moment of listening, rather than in the moment of production.

In an article published in the Journal of Sound Studies in 2018, Holger Schulze lists ten principles  that can help us understand Sonic Fictions. Among these, Sonic Fictions do inspire other Sonic Fictions […] Sonic Fictions do emerge as an inspiration or a provocation of a narrative discourse, a back and forth of telling and re-telling […] move and countermove […] a call and response between narration and counter-narration […]. I like to call this: a conversation. A confluence.

Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U. may not even be Sonic Fiction, but it is certainly the story we felt the urge to translate into sound, generated at the confluence of everything we have heard, seen and talked about so far.

This podcast serves as a pair to Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., a project by ALMARE curated by Radio Papesse, promoted in collaboration with Timespan and produced thanks to the support of the Italian Council – a program to promote Italian art by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

If you’d like to know more about Life Chronicles of Dorothea Ïesj S.P.U., please visit almareproject.it and radiopapesse.org.

Thank you for your time and for listening.

You can find the Italian translation of the forth episode here.

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