Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Technologies of Lived Abstraction)

Despite the heavily academic language (lots of multi-syllable words that are often unnecessary), this book explores a range of fascinating concepts with rigorous detail. The author also makes music as Kode9 & runs the Hyperdub record label, so check this book out if you're a fan of electronic music, the science of acoustics or dystopian visions of the future.

This book was published under the name of Steve Goodman (a lecturer in Music Culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London), not of Kode9. So it is not a tutorial on how to make wobbly bass in Massive. True, because of its subject matter it can be at times heavy on the SAT phraseology, but I seriously doubt the usefulness of writing a vibrational ontology for kindergarteners, especially if that ontology is explicitly developed in the context of Leibniz, Deleuze and Guattari.If you are looking for a fresh perspective on sonic weaponry, piracy, pop music as torture, sound systems, earworms, crowd control, and the Big Bang then this is the book for you.Read the editorial review. If you feel like its phraseology is incomprehensible (it is a good indicator of the style of academic writing used in the book), save your money and buy instead Kode9's Memories of the Future.

Never read such an integrated view of psychoacoustics and physiology materialized into an impressive reading by showing examples of the many military applications and health impacts under a scientific approach, plus the amazing cultural overview the author allows through the case studies throughout time. It motivates the reader to know more about the subject and to look for references the author has based this very special book.

I'm gonna start off by saying I freaking love Kode9 and HyperDub. The guy just beams out incredible well designed sound. So when I heard he was coming out with a book regarding affecting with sound, I bought it expecting to have a pretty interesting philosophical read and perhaps come away with some fresh perspective. But Sonic Warfare as a meal is quickly filling and hard to digest. The whole thing is over-written like someone who was trying to make even the simplest statement horribly difficult to grasp. I can easily read several pages and still only have a whisper of an idea of wtf he's talking about. So unfortunately I can't recommend it.

My son wanted this book for a research paper.

This is the worst written book I have read in 40 years of serious reading in cultural criticism. How any editor let his by is a dark mystery I do not want to explore.Cultural criticism can be written clear. Consider Neil Postman. This, however, is replete with:1. Convoluted sentences, some of which approach comedy in their pretentiousness.2. Adjectival overload3. Adjectival meaninglessness4. Over use of adjectives such as "deployed," which is also misused.5. Compound words without hyphens, mot of which are unintelligible.6. Over use of other sources. The author seems to have no original ideas. Or, if he does, I have no idea what they are, given the maddening opacity of the writing.One could go on, but why bother with this execrable exercise in ugliness?

Purchased with the hopes of learning more about infrasound. If you're looking for a readable review of technology methods or state-actor practical implementations and historical implementations in any detail, this isn't it. Pompous gibberish which expands to fill the pages given. I'm certain others find it more useful than I, but it passed through me without leaving any useful residual effect after reading.

I think there is an audience for this book that would appreciate it for its ability to connect several key topics, namely, affect theory, sound studies, and 'sonic warfare'. Please don't be put off by the fact that the author is an electronic music producer, as that is the least important thing to know about this book.First of all, it is useful for trying to better understand "affect theory," which is actually a reaction against 'post-modernism'. As such, it is actually trying to go beyond the circular semantic arguments that post-modernism seemed to constantly produce and look for concrete ways to understand a variety of things through inter-disciplinary studies that bridge the sciences and humanities. For those interested in 'affect', this book draws on the main sources for this theory, which come mainly from the subjects of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Affect theory certainly has its critics (who probably outnumber its proponents), but Goodman puts his two cents into the debate in favor of it as a useful framework for understanding things that affect the mind and body at the same time.Secondly, Goodman tries to explore noise and its effects on the human body and mind from several angles, trying to bridge the psycho and physical by arguing (if I understood correctly) that a lot of factors come into play when sound is used as a non-lethal weapon to control populations and individuals. His ideas on "bass materialism" seem to be original, at least to me, and they help you conceive of sonic warfare as a use of noise that can be considered deeply unsettling, if not painful in some contexts, while in other contexts, deeply pleasurable and stimulating. Thus, his notion of noise as a potential (problematic) force for creating an "ecology of fear" is worth considering.Thirdly, the subject of sonic warfare itself is a fascination topic to many, I assume, and while it take a lot of active reading to understand what Goodman is trying to say here, I think it is possibly because he doesn't want to be accused of being a proponent of the use of noise to kill or injure other humans. If you want to learn more about this subject, some interesting cases can be found in the book "Sound Targets" by Jonathan Pieslak.Goodman's interdisciplinary agenda means that he doesn't fully explain any particular element he's putting into the mix, which can be frustrating. And yes, the writing is convoluted at times. A better introduction to all of the theory he is planning to use, followed by clear applications of the theory would have been better than the sort of random uses and reuses of theories that seem always incomplete and unresolved, and rarely fully applicable to the examples at hand.Finally, some of the sources he uses are more obscure than he would seem to make them, and I couldn't always follow up on them or find them in a good university library.

Il libro è molto interessante, il linguaggio è tecnico ma chiaro. L'unica nota negativa il materiale dells copertina, la carta e troppo sottile

Sehr interessantes Buch, kann ich nur weiter empfehlen, wenn man sich für die Wirkung von Schall und Klängen auf menschliche Körper und Massen interessiert. Die Kaufabwicklung lief einwandfrei und der Versand war schnell. Alles wunderbar.

I found the book engrossing and enjoyed the story telling edge it has, great sense of dread and a great depth on knowledge.Good work Steve.