SCRYING THE LADSCAPE VIII w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack
The history of sound in warfare and its application to control and exert violence has been most prominently explored by Steve Goodman in his seminal book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2012). The book maps out the political landscape of vibration that is routinely exploited with aims to generate domination, by utilizing the violence of sound through its ideological, psychological, or physiological threats. These threats take form as the affect of noise in its widest meaning, or sound technologies designed to conquer, such as “sonic booms”, previously hidden military techniques of torture, LRADs, and more. This episode of Scrying the Landscape aims to claim techniques of sonic warfare to retaliate with dissidence and agency found within the psychoacoustics of violence; its bass and noise magnified to infect the domineering culture, including many artists whose music amplify voices and stories of those standing against a prevailing establishment.

Image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Earshot (2016)