http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/6092/1/543845.pdf
SONIC, INFRASONIC, AND ULTRASONIC FREQUENCIES:
The Utilisation of Waveforms as Weapons, Apparatus for
Psychological Manipulation, and as Instruments of
Physiological Influence by Industrial, Entertainment,
and Military Organisations.
TOBY HEYS
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements of Liverpool John Moores University
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
March 2011
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ABSTRACT
This study is a trans-disciplinary and trans-historical investigation into civilian and
battlefield contexts in which speaker systems have been utilised by the military-industrial
and military-entertainment complexes to apply pressure to mass social groupings and the
individuated body. Drawing on authors such as historian/sociologist Michel Foucault,
economist Jacques Attali, philosopher Michel Serres, political geographer/urban planner
Edward Soja, musician/sonic theorist Steve Goodman, and cultural theorist/urbanist Paul
Virilio, this study engages a wide range of texts to orchestrate its arguments. Conducting
new strains of viral theory that resonate with architectural, neurological, and political
significance, this research provides new and original analysis about the composition of
waveformed geography. Ultimately, this study listens to the ways in which the past and
current utilisation of sonic, infrasonic, and ultrasonic frequencies as weapons, apparatus
for psychological manipulation, and instruments of physiological influence, by industrial,
civilian, entertainment, and military organisations, predict future techniques of sociospatialised organisation.
In chapter one it is argued that since the inception of wired radio speaker systems into
U.S. industrial factories in 1922, the development of sonic strategies based primarily on
the scoring of architectonic spatiality, cycles of repetition, and the enveloping dynamics of
surround sound can be traced to the sonic torture occurring in Guantanamo Bay during
the first decade of the twenty-first century. Exploring the use of surround sound speaker
techniques by the FBI during the Waco Siege in Texas, this argument is developed in
chapter two. In chapter three it is further contended that the acoustic techniques utilised in
the Guantanamo torture cells represent the final modality and the logical conclusion of
these strategies that have evolved between civilian and military contexts over the past 80
years. In chapter four, the speaker system instrumentality of the HSS ultrasonic beam -
occurring post Guantanamo - comes to symbolise an epistemic shift in the application of
waveformed pressure; the dynamics of directional ultrasound technology signalling the
orchestration of a new set of frequency-based relations between the transmitter and the
receiver, the speaker system and architectural context, and the civilian and war torn
environment.
The concluding proposition of the study submits that a waveformed cartography - mapping
the soundscape's territorialisation by the military-entertainment complex - needs to be
composed and arranged so that forms of recording, amplification, and resistance can be
made coherent. Given the new set of non-sound politics announced by the HSS, this
philosophy of frequency-based mapping will have to re-evaluate the taxonomy and
indexical nature of spatial relations. This discipline will be a waveformed psychogeography; a frequency-based modality that heuristically charts the spatial concerns of
the neural environment as well as the environs of the material and the built. As a field of
research it will have a wide-ranging remit to explore the spatial, psychological,
physiological, social, economic, and sexual effects that waveforms have upon our
subjectivity. Its methodology - as suggested through the structuring of this study - will be
multi-disciplined and multi-channelled. It will create new forms of knowledge about
LRADs, iPods, Mosquitos, I ntonarumori , loudhailers, and Sequential Arc Discharge
Acoustic Generators - the meta-network of speaker systems through which rhythms and
cadences of power are transmitted, connected, and modulated.
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Title Page
Abstract
List of Contents
I ntrod uction
Literature Review
Methodology
List of Contents
Chapter 1: A Convergence of Electricity, Networked Amplification,
and Music: The Influence of Muzak in the Fordist Factory 65
Section 1:
The First Movements of the Muzakal Body
The Rhythmical Ordering of Audioanalgesia
Transnational Harmonies
Section 2:
The Industrialised Logic of 'It is all in the Mind'
Top of the Charts - The Worker's Emotional Terrain
Section 3:
Disconnecting the Global Village
The Fleshy Cadence of the Antenna Body
A Cognitive Mapping of Audio Architecture