“When power founds its legitimacy on the fear it inspires, on its capacity to create social oder, on its univocal monopoly of violence, it monopolizes noise.” -Jacques Attali

These last two weeks, I’ve been reading on themes of the soundscape, noise, and sonic weaponry. As part of my final directed study with Professor Kay Dickinson, and to prepare for my sound studies comprehensive exam, the works that I’ve been looking at are: Jacques Attali’s Noise, Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity, Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare, and Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise.

I first became interested in concepts of the soundscape and noise through close listenings of recorded poetry readings. As I listened to more recordings, the poet’s reading of the work became just one of several sonic dimensions upon which I might critically focus. Audience interactivity, atmospheric noise within and outside of the reading space, room tone, these have all become points of engagement for close listening to the poetry phonotext. I have become interested in how a poet, say, might interact with or incorporate these paratextual sounds into their work, or, alternatively, choose to refuse them into the space of their work. I believe that this negotiation with sounds supposedly exterior to the poem might, when unpacked, reveal particular aspects about not only the poet and her/his practice, but also about the context for a reading. I will go into more depth with this line of thought in weeknotes soon as I prepare a paper on Jackson Mac Low’s 1971 reading in Montreal, in which I focus on specifically this topic.

The soundscape/noise writing that I’ve been working on this week is on the long range acoustic device, or LRAD. Last year, while beginning to concentrate on the poetry phonotext, the Quebec student strikes were going on, and I became fascinated with how much of the battle between state forces and protestors took place within a sonic field. I wrote on one aspect of this topic here. This may seem like a whole other trajectory from the kind of literary phonocritical practice I began with above, but these kinds of critical listening are closely related. With this current writing, I had planned to first simply write about the LRAD, and to think of it and its sound in terms of Attali’s coded noise and Deleuze and Guattari’s refrain. As I began to research more into the LRAD, I became more interested in specific mediated examples of its production and the ways it has been used since its development as a technology. The many infomercial-like videos on the internet that offered a general overview of this sonic weaponry and its uses have become particularly interesting for me, as here one can see the packaging of this weaponry, how media attempts to normalize such violence, and the specific sets of concerns that this weapon is aimed to defend. Take, for example, this video:

In this video, there is the intense digital blert-alarm in repetition of the LRAD. There is the husky, militarily succint straight-talk of the host Terry Schappert, and the carefully manipulated phrases of the corporate spokesperson Robert Putnam that have been heavily edited in post-production. There is, also, the synthesizer score to the video that is meant to clean off the edges of the transitions, as well as to boost sensation and anticipation: this is Monday Night Football for prime time TV, this is a video game that is the world which is a video game.

Barely discernible is another field of sound, one that continues throughout the video, a sound so common that it’s easy for the ear to not even register it. Throughout the parking lot presentations, the monologues by host and corporate spokesperson, there is an ambient background shushing noise. It is so constant, so consistent in its tone that it is nearly imperceptible, so perfectly embedded into the site. It is a highway and the shushing is the continuous movement of automobiles across it. Though unintended in this clip, it is the official soundscape of this production, and one might say of the LRAD itself. It is the atmospheric tone from which the intense digital blert of the LRAD is borne, the soundscape this weaponry has been developed to serve and protect: the petrocapital ambient soundtrack.

In the weeks ahead, I will continue with this writing, and hope the works above, accompanied with Michael Watts’s discussions of petrocapitalism, will open new spaces to think critically about the petrocapital soundscape.