PRESENTATIONS & DISCUSSION: SONIC WARFARE 2024 & BEYOND UNWANTED SOUND

This is a session in three parts. It begins with a 30-minute presentation by Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) and Marie Thomson, both revisiting past books. Afterwards, they will engage in a discussion and take questions from the audience.

On the advent of the forthcoming Italian translation of his 2009 book Sonic Warfare [Guerra Sonora] for Nero, Goodman will present a new preface to the text. Exploring the relation between vibration and investigative aesthetics, he will discuss issues concerning the ecology of fear, psychogenics, automation, camouflage, deception, forensics, fiction, disinformation and audio surveillance, touching on examples ranging from Havana Syndrome and the war on Gaza to his own sound installations and experience of the phantom audio of tinnitus.

Beginning with the affective ambivalences of tinnitus, feminist sound scholar Marie Thompson will offer a reflection on noise, its relationship with music, and the challenges in accounting for auditory harm. Revisiting arguments from her book Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017), she asks how we might address sound’s deleterious effects and the ethical complexities of auditory experience without reverting to the reactionary, “audist” politics that have frequently grounded dismissals of noise as unwanted, damaging or polluting.