Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds
Jean-François Augoyard, Henri Torgue,
McGill-Queen's Press
Sonic Experience is about musicology, electro-acoustic composition, architecture, urban studies, communication, phenomenology, social theory, physics, and psychology.
The research is about sonic effects, anticipation, vibrato, echoes,and the physical spaces in which sounds occur. There are also studies about the cultural contexts and the individual auditory experience.
The book explores the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe.
Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambiance of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army. The Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls.
Artists and musicians generate electronic intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations.
Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture.
Goodman concludes with the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.
