TheSoundofFear3
Zang-tumb-tumb zang-zang-tuuumb
Tatatatatatatata
TOUM TOUUUUM
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
In 1876 the artificial speaker was patented by Alexander Graham Bell as part of the telephone. By 1950, it had been recruited by the U.S. army, which used four speakers to intervene in the Korean War
History has seen how the military world always manages to find a belligerent use for technologies. Thus was unveiled the dark side of the speaker: an indispensable tool for psywar, or psychological warfare. It is now likewise used as a weapon that can damage the hearing system, some internal organs, and the skin.
One of the most popular sonic weapons in existence today is the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device). This weapon originated from the acoustic alert devices that were introduced on U.S. military ships after the attack on the USS Cole by Al-Qaeda militants. It is known that these devices can reach 160 dB—the threshold at which the eardrum ruptures—although their official data sheets do not want to admit that. And not only that: the messages conveyed by the LRAD can also attack enemy morale. In his book Para cuando caen los cantos abatidos (For when the chants fall defeated), Daniel Toca mentions that in 2007 U.S. forces pointed a long-distance loudspeaker at Iraqi soldiers, telling them, “This is the voice of Allah, surrender.”1
The presence of an omnidirectional voice.
1 Daniel Toca, Paracuandocaenloscantosabatidos(Mexico City: Luxpluslux, 2022).
A spectrum in the air that traverses the ear canal and resonates in the eardrum…
…message without sender.
[Imagen 3: Infografía 1]
The fictions we create sow reality: a clear example is the Active Denial System (ADS), which bears suspicious similarities to the Heat-Ray from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. Although it does not set hills on fire or dismember bodies in seconds—as does its fictional analogue—the ADS is a sophisticated weapon system that emits millimeter-long sound waves traveling at the speed of light, with the ability to penetrate approximately 1/64th of an inch into the skin. It had its first appearance in 2010 in the war in Afghanistan, but retired without going into combat. Nevertheless, its capabilities had already been demonstrated at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. The volunteer who received the heat ray described it as “similar to an explosion from a very hot oven.”
Despite the permanent damage these weapons can cause to the ear and other organs, the U.S. military still considers the LRAD and the ADS to be light armaments: “non-lethal weapons.” The pages of the U.S. military display various laws and regulations that supposedly provide for the proper use of these technologies. Nevertheless, as affirmed by Judge Robert W Sweet: “‘sound can be used as a force… and the kind which could be used excessively’ by police in a manner that violates the United States Constitution. […] ‘as a projector of powerfully amplified sound, [the LRAD]
is no different from other tools in law enforcement’s arsenal that have the potential to be used either safely or harmfully.’”2
In November 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania successfully sued the government of Pittsburgh for injuries caused after the use of the LRAD during the G20 summit. Likewise, the National Lawyers Guild of New York filed a lawsuit for injuries caused by the LRAD during a Black Lives Matter march in December 2014. Possibly, in the not-too-distant future, we will speak more about these artifacts.
Aural terrorism
In 2016 the U.S. embassy in Cuba suffered a sonic attack. Twenty-two diplomats claimed to have suffered headaches, hearing loss, dizziness, tinnitus, balance problems, visual and cognitive problems, fatigue, and sleeping difficulties during their stay at the facility Those affected made public a recording of the sound that allegedly caused these discomforts. Nevertheless, the neurotologist Robert Jackler concluded that the perceptible frequencies in the recording could not have caused the symptoms reported by the diplomats, although an infrasonic frequency could have. The problem here is that, by its very nature, this frequency could not be captured in the recording made by the diplomats and, therefore, it was not possible to corroborate its existence. At the time, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made statements implicitly blaming Cuba: saying, for example, that they had reason to believe that the Cuban government was withholding information and that Cuban authorities could have done more to protect the U.S. diplomats. In contrast, Donald Trump had no reservations about accusing the Cuban government of being responsible for the attack, although he did not present any evidence or elaborate on his statements.3
2 National Lawyers Guild, “Victory for NLG NYC Members in Civil Rights Case Challenging NYPD Use of LRAD Sound Cannons Against Protesters,” June 1, 2017, available online
3 This news was a real scandal, leading many sources to reproduce it We will cite only one reference: Josh Lederman and Michael Weissenstein, “Associated Press gets recording of sound linked to injuries in Cuba,” in TheColumbian,October 12, 2017, available online.
A similar event took place in Guangzhou, China, in 2017 and 2018. In none of the cases was evidence gathered or an investigation opened. And I wonder: China? Cuba? Were these really targeted attacks or just collateral sounds from some climate-control system? Where are our new Vic Tandys?
Sonic Violence
Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Kuehl, who teaches psychological operations at the National Defense University, sounded proud of his practices when he told the St. Petersburg Times that it was God himself who introduced torture-via-music into the “field manual” of warfare:
Joshua’s army used horns to strike fear into the hearts of the people of Jericho… His men might not have been able to break down literal walls with their trumpets, but the noise eroded the enemy's courage… Maybe those psychological walls were what really crumbled.4
In the same report, the newspaper questions whether God would have liked the playlist that the U.S. Army used against its prisoners in Iraq, whose main track was “Fuck your God” by the band Deicide. It also mentions that Metallica’s song Enter Sandman was used in Guantánamo, about which vocalist James Hetfield commented:
If the Iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then I’m glad to be part of their exposure… We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?
As strange as it might seem, one of the most used songs for these purposes is “I Love You” by Barney the Dinosaur. Imagine ourselves in a prison in an unknown place: disoriented, dehydrated, we feel that life is hanging by a thread, about to break. While
4 Quoted by Clive Stafford Smith in “Welcome to ‘the disco’” in TheGuardian,June 19, 2008, available online.
someone is trying to convince us that everything we are is wrong, Barney appears. According to Clive Stafford Smith, in the torture industry this is called futility music: it aims to break the prisoner, to show them how useless it is to maintain their position, to strip them of their essence.
Another example of futile music or sounds would be the recordings used in the Vietnam War During combat, the U.S. Army launched Operation Tintinnabulation using two C-47 vessels, christened Spooky and Gabby. The first was equipped with machine guns and the second with many different speakers. The plan was simple: Gabby would emit gunshot noises and if there was a counterattack, Spooky would shoot at the opponents. The noises of this first operation were intended to fatigue the listeners, so we could say that, although there was a psychological pretension, its effect was mainly physical. In the second operation, the U.S. military used Vietnamese beliefs to its advantage: if a dead person is not properly buried, the soul of the deceased continues to roam the earth as a wandering soul. Thus again Operation Wandering Soul (Ghost Tape Number 10): a tape with the voices of South Vietnamese soldiers drastically altered to create terrifying sounds, as though they were souls in pain. Boats and helicopters would play the recording in areas where there was Vietcong activity, mainly at night. It could be said that both operations failed, since from the beginning the Vietcong understood that these were recordings and fired in the direction of the sound source. Nevertheless, the U.S. Army team that carried out the operations denied defeat, and—without conclusive evidence—declared that they had been successful.5
[Wandering Soul]
An example of the eerie GhostTapeNumber10
Finally, I would like to comment on an artifact that is not categorized as a weapon, but definitely generates controversy.
Last but not least!
5 The main evidence of the failure of these and all U S terrorist operations in Vietnam is the undeniable military defeat they experienced at the hands of the Vietcong. [Editor’s note.]
