‘Sound comes to the rescue of thought…’ But thought must reluctantly return the favour: some more reading notes on Sonic Warfare

At the core of the book lies a univocal ontology that undermines much extant theorising on sound. The principal claim is that all entities are composed of vibration - to not vibrate is to not exist. Stability occurs only at the level of perception, beneath perception, at the molecular and sub molecular level, matter is in constant flux and this flux is rhythmical.

Vibration, rhythm, concepts traditionally associated with the study of sound are here re-purposed and employed in ontological argument. I’m going to concentrate on a specific consequence of this re-deployment namely the repercussions for any metaphysics of sound (understood here as any theory attempting to grasp what those specific, audible vibrations, we call sound are). For Goodman sound is but a thin, audible slice of a much vaster vibrational spectrum and so we’re advised to move beyond theories of sound that place the listening subject at their centre and make human audition critical in theorising sound’s being. A prominent proponent of such phenomenological thinking is Pierre Schaeffer for whom sound’s essence - the sound object - is largely determined by the listening subject. Accordingly it is not what or how a sound sounds but what the subject does to it when listening that determines its essential nature. What sonic idealism fails to account for, in Goodman’s useful neologism, is unsound - those vibrations that lie beyond the threshold of human perception but are none-the-less affective. This poses a significant problem to any theory of sound - are vibrations, felt but not heard, sound? And if so how do we account for it when models of perception cannot?

Goodman’s solution is a non-anthropocentric ecology of affects where one entity (human or otherwise) affects another with its vibration. Internal vibrations, at a singular threshold, spill out into the world and reach other entities. This occurs prior to the division of subject and object and so prior to perception. An example lifted from Brain Massumi’s work on the affective sensorium: a car screeches dangerously towards you and, before you have recognised the sensation as sound, your body leaps out of harm’s way. Here the primary vibration startles and excites before the sound is meaningful. While sympathetic to Goodman’s attempt to problemetize and widen the limits of auditory experience, he is too hasty in the tout court rejection of anthropocentrism. Metaphysics of sound have long placed the human at their centre because sound is in part a human phenomenon. This isn’t to say, with the strict phenomenologists, that listening is essential to the existence of sound, but rather that it is in part a product of a very human relation to vibration. From the perspective of a theory attempting to grasp a human centred phenomena - sound - it seems retrogressive to remove the human subject. This has long been a challenge to any attempt at sonic realism: how do we understand sounds as independent objects (or events) when they are, at least partially, reliant upon human audition for there nature? Goodman’s rejection of anthropocentrism may also be troublesome for his own ecology of affects. Does not unsound have a specifically human quota? Is there not a range, albeit larger than that of audition, within which a vibration can affect the human body? And wouldn’t it be wise to start mapping this?

Another way around the unsound problem is to propose a non-Schaefferian sound object dichotomously composed of sound and unsound. Stretching Goodman’s notion a fair bit, unsound here would designate a sound object`s primary, vibrational qualities. Not just infra and ultra sonics but all transmitted (air bound) vibrations would be unsound. This dimension of the sound object would only be open to mathematical elaboration. Sound for its part would be the result of human interaction with unsound and emergent via affect, perception or an admixture of both.

Sonic Warfare: reading notes.

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.