Currently reading and enjoying Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare. More than anything I like the way it thinks sound in terms of vibration - terms that lie beyond the current, fairly lacklustre philosophy of sound. My intention is to engage more deeply with the book's metaphysics, particularly the idea of a virtual unsound, but for now here are some of my expanding reading notes.Chp. 8 Sonic Affect vs Sonic Effect
What's the difference between the sonic effect and sonic affect?
First - what is a sonic effect?
It is the product of a number of researchers working out of the Centre for research on sonic space & urban environment at the University of Grenoble. Their work is distilled into the book Sonic Experience edited by Jean Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue. There are various effects – drone, ubiquity, filter and so on. But they all share the same general structure, diagrammatically the sonic effect is:
The effect is the totality of what is shown above. It is the sounding object; the environmental influences shaping and forming the sound spatially - which is the subject of audio-architecture; the positioning and speed of movement of the listening subject; and finally the cultural and aesthetic priorities that determine how a sound is interpreted. Language offers a good example of this kind of determination. Everyone who can hear can hear a word, but how you determine the meaning of that word is dependent upon your cultural upbringing. It is this last part that I have had most difficulty with - how do you rigorously think an audio-culture? Isn’t that too broad a thing to be of any use?
Anyway, what’s the difference?
Affects are immediate responses to vibrational stimuli, they precede the delineation of subject and object, phenomenological notions that the effect is grounded on.
They are the products of two differing things: sounds have effects and vibrations have affects. Vibrations may be heard, but may also be beyond the threshold of perception. And so an affect can occur without any sound. Is the term experience suitable for thinking about affect? Are affects subjectless experiences?
In Harman’s terms – affect is an ontological concept as it refers to the make-up of every being (is Goodman going to develop this idea that everything is composed of vibrations?) And effect is metaphysical in that it discusses only a particular type of being – sounds (the sonic effect is an alternative theory to the objet sonore and the soundscape). This raises the question of the possibility of sonic realism for me in an admittedly rather vague and undetermined way – how can you think sound independently of anyone hearing it?
Finally - they have different relations to causality. The effect has a situational or contextual or even occasional cause (must re-read Harman on cause). The cause of the effect is not simply the sounding object, but additionally the space it sounds in and through, the subjects positioning and the culture of the individual listener. All these factors shape and to a degree cause the effect. I’m not sure what the cause of the affect is. The affect seems to function in part by not having a cause – where’s this feeling coming from? Affects appear to dissociate from the cause. What is this process of dissociation? How is the affected implicated?
So what is Goodman’s problem with effects?
Simply that human audition is given primacy. He calls CRESSON on their correlationism. And not it seems from some ontological argument but from its inadequacy in accounting for ‘post-cybernetic warfare’, which I’m not sure I get yet. He’s right though - integral to the theory of sonic effects is the correlation between sounds and listeners. Sonic effect cannot be a realist concept. (Unless, can we think it in terms of a series of Latourian translations?) He does however like the encompassing evental structure of the effect. The way the body is implicated in the production of sound effects as much as the medium, environment, sounding object and so on. This is for him (and me) a welcome development of the outdated idea of an isolated listening subject.
