Lila-Zoé Krauß

The twenty-first century started with a bang, setting the resonant frequency of fear at which the planet has been vibrating, trembling, ever since. In the echo of this bang, the software designers of anonymous peer-to-peer file- sharing networks that were mutating the global music industry were drafted in as “precogs” of the actions of viral terror networks. At an irregular rhythm, audio and audiovisual cassettes would turn up on the desks of Arab media networks, relaying jihadist communiqués. Seeking to verify these rare terror clues, Western security agencies would subject these sound bytes to audio forensic analysis, a vocal parallel to fingerprint analysis, digitally hunting down transitions between phonemes, the patterns of glitches that function as unique voice identifiers. But irrelevant of truth value, these pulsed sonic signals triggered real, incorporeal transformations within the ecology of fear. These specifics are new, but the sonic dimensions of conflict are ancient. From Hitler’s use of the loudspeaker as a mechanism for affective mobilization during World War II, through to Bin Laden’s audiotaped messages, the techniques of sonic warfare have now percolated into the everyday. But how the illusive decentralized networks of contemporary asymmetric warfare resonate within the decentralized networks of sonic

culture remains a topic of marked neglect. How are sound systems (consisting of bodies, technologies, and acoustic vibrations, all in rhythmic sympathy) deployed in a war of mood, sensation, and information? And what demilitarized zones can they produce, laboratories for affect engineering and the exorcism of dread, occupying the precarious virtual threshold between dance and violence? What, in other words, is sonic warfare? It is always more useful to ask what something can do, its potential, rather than what it is, its essence. What then is the power of this phrase sonic warfare? Can it conceptually rewire the microsound of politics and the micropolitics of sound? What cultural tensions does it amplify? In what follows, an open sketch will be made in response to these questions, identifying a discontinuum of deployments of sound system concepts, cultures, and technologies across the fault lines of contemporary culture. At the dawn of a new millennium and in the midst of the cybernetic phase of war and cultural machines, an investigation of sonic warfare reveals some intriguing patterns regarding emergent modes of perception, collectivity, and cultural conflict in the twenty-first century.

– Steve Goodman

In the early stages of L.T.C. Rolt’s short story ‘Music Hath Charms’ (1948), two companions view the landscape from the train: ‘they saw the majestic shape of St.Michael’s Mount framed in the carriage window’. The scene is pictured, ‘framed’, as a distant view, stripped of any other senses, as is characteristic of ‘the tourist gaze’. In this case the journey is from London to Cornwall, as it is in other gothic fictions by authors across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Wilkie Collins’s Basil (1852) to Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and several of E.F. Benson’s ghost stories (from 1912 to the 1930s). In such stories Cornwall—along with Yorkshire, Cumbria and other rural regions with coastlines—operates as a peripheral location at the edge of England. A narrative pattern in these stories is the progress from distant, windowframed views of landscapes, laid out in front of their viewers like the page of a book, to an increasing immersion in the sounds of unsettling, sometimes dangerous environments. In Rolt’s story, as in Collins’s and Stoker’s, the sounds of the sea become especially prominent. After seeing the picture-like view from the railway carriage, the travellers arrive at the station and make their way by road to the house they are to stay in. It is on this second part of the journey that sound begins to take on a more significant role, as they hear ‘the eternal voice of the Cornish coast; the endlessly recurring thud and surge of the waves against the cliffs of Trevarthan’. These sounds intensify, their volume increasing at the climax, on a stormy night when shipwreckers return from the dead: ‘he could hear, above the tumult of the wind, the thunder of heavy seas breaking upon the rocks […] the house seemed full of sound’. Sea sounds cross the borders between the audible and palpable, and between sea and land. Sea and sound waves cross the rocky borders, their crashing against the rocks being audible from the house. In Stoker’s The Jewel, soon after his first sight of the house, the narrator similarly describes hearing ‘the crash and murmur of the waves’, a murmur that can be heardconstantly from inside the house. This sense of the sea builds up toward the climax (which in this case involves the resurrection of an Egyptian mummy), at which point the waves finally become palpable, vibrating the rock under his feet: ‘The

storm still thundered round the house, and I could feel the rock on which it was built tremble under the furious onslaught of the waves.’ In Rolt’s story, the initial sea sounds pave the way for the discovery, the next day, of a music box, hidden in a concealed cupboard behind a wall. After producing the sound of a lively jig, it begins to have a physical impact on the human ear, and then on the house itself, which seems to awaken, the inanimate again coming to life: It reached a top note that, like the squeak of a bat, was almost beyond the range of audibility and whose piercing quality positively hurt the ear-drum. The tune rose to this thin yet deafening climax, or fell away again in a series of exuberant capriccios quite horrible to hear because the dissonance of their diminished intervals never seemed to find resolution. Again, despite the comparatively small volume of sound it produced, the instrument seemed to possess the power to awake sympathetic resonance, not only in the table upon which it stood, but in surrounding objects, until the whole room seemed to be whistling in unison… It was as though they had somehow awakened Trevarthen House from sleep, and that this wakefulness was hostile.

Sound here is not just heard but felt as a physical, painful and invasive force, extending ‘almost beyond the range of audibility’ with a ‘piercing quality’ that ‘hurt the ear-drum’. This is vibration operating at a specific frequency, on the border between the audible and the inaudible (‘almost beyond’ the audible), and it is this, rather than loudness, that hurts and that also awakens the house: ‘despite the comparatively small volume of sound it produced, the instrument seemed to possess the power to awake sympathetic resonance…’. Isabella van Elferen, in Gothic Music, discusses how sound is used in gothic film and other media to signal something threatening, just beyond vision. Ghosts, for example, are rarely directly visualised but are often heard, which is to imply the ‘implicit dread of terror’ rather than explicitly showing off something ghastly like a rotting corpse. These are sonorous tales, but here we may better use the term horror: it is not that sound signals the unseen terror; it is itself a threat: it is ‘horrible to hear’, it pierces (is possibly even vampiric) and it hurts.
– Shelly Trower

As opposed to sound as text, the dimension explored here is that of sound as force. Sonic warfare then, is the use of force, both seductive and violent, abstract and physical, via a range of acoustic machines (biotechnical, social, cultural, artistic, conceptual), to modulate the physical, affective, and libidinal dynamics of populations, of bodies, of crowds. Before the activation of causal or semantic, that is, cognitive listening, the sonic is a phenomenon of contact and displays, through an array of autonomic responses, a whole spectrum of affective powers. Sound has a seductive power to caress the skin, to immerse, to sooth, beckon, and heal, to modulate brain waves and massage the release of certain hormones within the body. Discussion of the physiological affects of sonic weaponry has usually centered on intensity (acoustic power), the ultrasonic or the infrasonic; the very loud, the very high pitched, and the very low pitched. At high sound pressure levels, the ear is directly damaged. Need we be reminded that noise, like anything else that touches you, can be a source of both pleasure and pain and that “beyond a certain limit, it becomes an immaterial weapon of death. The ear, which transforms vibration into electric impulses addressed to the brain, can be damaged, and even destroyed, when the frequency of a sound
exceeds 20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels. Diminished intellectual capacity,

accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion, neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the environment.” Curtis Roads notes that “the force of an explosion, for example, is an intense acoustic shock wave” and calls these potent frequencies and amplitudes “perisonic intensities (from the Latin periculus meaning ‘dangerous’).” A different conception of sonic warfare is perhaps suggested, in prototype form, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Such a conception deviates from an intrinsic relation between noise and sonic violence suggested from futurism through to Attali and beyond, and instead implies a kind of guerrilla sonics out of which any militarized investment would be constructed only through capture. Rather than the conventional monotonous artistic alliance between noise and destruction in a transgressive attempt to shock, noise instead becomes a vibrational field of rhythmic potential. A “sonic war machine” along these lines would be defined by its rhythmic consistency, would not take violence or noise as its primary object, but rather would concentrate its forces on affective mobilization and contagion. Its politics of frequency would entail the way in which vibrational force would be captured, monopolized, and redeployed.

– Steve Goodman

Early attempts to develop sonic weapons focused on the physicality of lowfequency sound and the fact that it dissolves completely into tactile vibration at frequencies around 20 hertz. Below this threshold lies the field of infrasound. Infrasonic phenomena, unlike ultrasound, maintain their power as they pass through a range of media. Surveying the limited literature on these semiaudible wave phenomena, one finds Virilio’s informational logistics of deception in operation. Research uncovers an array of conspiracy theories shrouding programs of military research into the battlefield operation of infrasonic weaponry or police experiments within crowd control situations—a war of vibration to dampen the insurgent potential of the street. The Internet, in particular, is awash with conspiracy theories on “black research.” According to this murky body of knowledge, military uptake of infrasound technologies stretches back at least to World War I, during which detectors were used to locate enemy gun positions. Resultant pathological effects in the middle ear also began to be discovered in military personnel during the two world wars in soldiers working with machines emitting low-f requency vibrations. Moreover, it has been noted that certain infrasonic frequencies plug straight into the algorithms of the brain and nervous system. Frequencies of 7 hertz, for example, coincide with theta rhythms, thought to induce moods of fear and anger.

A key hyperstitional figure, who appears as a refrain in the underground literature on infrasonic acoustic weaponry is French robotics researcher Vladimir

Gavreau, allegedly head of the Electroacoustics and Automation Laboratories of the Centre de la. Recherche Scientifique during the 1960s. Gavreau and his team, we are told, performed some pioneering experiments into the anomaly of infrasonic waves that were directional in “contradiction of a universally accepted acoustic law which states that low frequency sounds emitted by a relatively small source propagate in all directions.”After accidentally experiencing nausea in his lab with his research team (owing to unintended vibrations leaking from industrial machinery), Gavreau became obsessed by harnessing infrasonic resonance to design sonic weapons (usually in the form of huge pipe devices). After another experiment, caught in the vibratory “envelope of death,” Gavreau and team allegedly suffered sustained internal spasms as their organs hit critical resonance frequencies. It was these strange physiological anomalies, generated by inaudible vibrations, that inspired his research into infrasonic acoustic guns. The key notion was that directional inaudible sound at certain resonant frequencies “acting directly on the body” could produce “intense friction between internal organs, resulting in a severe irritation of nerve endings. ”Some versions of the Gavreau story even suggested that one of the team had his insides pulped, and reinforced tank armor was ripped open by the infrasound Levasseur whistle. The team set out developing a number of applications of their fi ndings, including acoustic guns, acoustic lasers, and acoustic “rectifiers,” all based around infrasonic frequencies.

– Steve Goodman

The Curdler, Wandering Soul / Ghost Tape No. 10
Goodman, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou

Sonically invoking the living dead in order to terrorise an adversary was not a new strategy for the US Government when they employed it during 1993’s Waco siege. Throughout the late 1960s period of the Vietnam War, the 6th Psyop Battalion and the S-5 Section of the 1/27th Wolfhounds of the United States military used a literal interpretation of haunting to induce a sense of angst and anxiety within ‘enemy’ territories. They had created the religiously charged composition ‘Wandering Soul’ (also referred to as ‘Ghost Tape Number 10’), which in turn was part of the ‘Urban Funk Campaign’—an umbrella term for the operations of sonic psychological warfare (‘planned operations to convey selected information […] to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning’) conducted by the US during the conflict. After researching Vietnamese religious beliefs and superstitions, Psyop personnel initiated this audio harassment programme, which used amplified ghostly voices to create fear within resistance fighters. Early iterations of the tape were focused on Vietnamese funeral music but as studio engineers were given wider license to stimulate the flight or fight reflex, they responded with new content. Initial experiments included sampling and looping the ‘demonic’ portion of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s 1968 hit single ‘Fire’. Realising that this basic method was not particularly effective, they developed multilayered compositions, working tirelessly to create an archive of sinister and eerie aural textures to be dropped into the phantasmal collage, with new samples such as a Tiger’s roar (given that the Viet Cong were regularly attacked by such predators) being mixed in if they had the capacity to elicit further tensions. The montages were dispatched from Hueys down into the jungle canopy, filling the clammy dense air where Charlie crouched in dread. Audio napalm. Blasting frequencies of 500–5000 Hz at an amplitude of 120 dB from a helicopter-mounted speaker system named the ‘People Repeller’ (or the ‘Curdler’), the US military transmitted their aural payload during the dark hours of the wartorn nights, often provoking hostile fire. This was a tried and tested technique. A previous strategy named ‘Operation Quick Speak’ employed C-47 aircraft with leaflet dispensing chutes and 3000-watt speaker systems fitted into their cargo doors to goad VC fighters into retaliating, the VC’s fire coming after they had been barracked with the benefits that a South Vietnamese government would apparently bring if they were to surrender. A Psyop translator would also warn them not to shoot at ‘Spooky’ (the call sign given to the AC-47 aircraft gunships that would accompany the speaker-laden C47) or else hellfire would descend on them. As soon as VC snipers were detected, Spooky (also nicknamed ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ because of its daunting firepower) would respond with 16,000 rounds per minute of staccato brutality, along with the vainglorious rejoinder of the translator: ‘See, I told you so.’ Down below, a mortal (but possibly just as tormented) version of the wandering soul was patrolling the virgin jungle floor in the Northern DMZ, providing security for the most expansive Psyop carried out during the war: the Chieu Hoi (‘Open Arms’) program. Lance Corporal Rik Davis—who would survive the war, return to Detroit, rename himself ‘3070’, and form the pioneering techno group Cybotron alongside Juan Atkins in 1980—was a rifleman wondering why he had left the ‘gutters of Detroit’, his new surroundings completely alien and dangerous at every turn. In a revealing interview, Davis recalls the activities of the Psyop unit who would try and convince potential VC defectors to surrender by giving them cigarettes and Coca-Cola. If they gave themselves up they would be airlifted out of the jungle leaving Davis and his unit ‘to rot’: You know The Walking Dead? That’s lightweight

compared to what it did to us […] The jungle will actually eat the flesh right off your bones. Every scratch turns to cancer and won’t heal. You can do whatever you want, put every kind of ointment in the world on it, and the jungle will actually eat you to the bone if you don’t get out of it. On his website explaining the rationale behind ‘getting into it’ (the deeply rooted psyche of the jungle) via Wandering Soul, SGM Herbert A. Friedman (Ret.) relates that the cries and wails were intended to represent souls of the enemy’s dead who had failed to find the peace of a proper burial. The wailing soul cannot be put to rest until this proper burial takes place. The purpose of these sounds was to panic and disrupt the enemy and cause him to flee his position. Helicopters were used to broadcast Vietnamese voices pretending to be from beyond the grave. They called on their ‘descendants’ in the Vietcong to defect, to cease fighting. Even if the soldiers did not believe that the voice truly came from a ghost, more importantly it forced them to think about the loved ones they had left behind, the hardships they were going though, and, finally, the relative certainty that they were not going to be buried in ancestral grounds. Backed by macabre sound effects, the following excerpt is typical of the recorded content: Girl’s voice: Daddy, daddy, come home with me, come home. Daddy! Daddy! Man’s voice: Who is that? Who is calling me? My daughter? My wife? Your Father is back home with you, my daughter. Your Husband is back home with you, my wife. But my body is gone. I am dead, my family. Tragic…how tragic. My friends, I come back to let you know that I am dead, I am dead, I am in Hell, just Hell. It was a senseless death. How senseless, how senseless. But when I realized the truth, it was too late, too late. Friends…while you are still alive there is still a chance that you can be reunited with your loved ones. Do you hear what I say? Go home. Go home friends. Hurry. If not, you will end up like me. Go home my friends before it is too late. Countering Bill Rutledge’s (Aviation Electricians Mate Senior) statement that ‘killing was our business and the Psyop tape helped make business damned good’, this martial hauntology was not invested in the oscillations of breakneck execution. Rather, it was a technique that required longevity, as it slowly diminished resistance by infiltrating every psychological pore of the enemy and sapping their will to resist. The recordings also penetrated the earth itself, with reports that VC hiding out in the labyrinthine underground tunnels could still hear it. As Paul Virilio states, the purpose of employing such techniques is [n]ot to be driven to desperate combat, but to provoke a prolonged desperation in the enemy, to inflict permanent moral and material sufferings that diminish him and melt him away: this is the role of indirect strategy, which can make a population give up in despair without recourse to bloodshed. As the old saying goes, ‘Fear is the cruellest of assassins: it never kills, but keeps you from living.’ The location of the speakers in Vietnam—on the sides of helicopters—differs greatly from the surround-sound placement of speakers applied during the conflict at Waco.
The more random transient nature of the amplified wailing sounds in Vietnam reiterated the idea of ‘the restless’ being trapped in an environment unsuited to their noncorporeal status. From on high, the sonic demarcation enacted was more of an audio erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, rendering the absent distressingly present. The proposed psychology of this tactic suggested slippage and existential echo, the sonic portals of disquietude at being mortally
out of body, place, and time eliciting conceptions in which the ‘night of the living’ and the ‘day of the dead’ were inverted and coexisted in the same location. For the Viet Cong, the airborne sonic virus that was ‘Wandering Soul’ propagated anxiety and apprehension as it made communicable the oscillating channel of purgatory. Quite literally, it was the sound of ‘hell on earth’.

– Goodman, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou

At the turn of twentieth century, the notion of propelling two forces backwards and forwards, to meet at the point where they negate each other, takes hold within military think tanks across Europe. They are searching for a more expansive comprehension of the collision of the subliminal message and the spoken word, matter and anti-matter, and existence and nonexistence. Research is carried out into these phenomena through war, entertainment systems, vortexes of urban unrest, mass anxiety, mobile music playback technologies, and the plethora of sonic portals that make up the global matrix of the speaker network. For it is the human sensorium that will become the next battleground to be mapped, strategized, and conquered. At the end of the tenth century of the second millennium, the military will brief government officials about their cultivation of hypogean activities and networks. Comprehending that the underground is the space in which technological innovation meets speculative thinking, the dark occultists of the white Western ring of scientific power will, in response, magnify AUDINT’s 1946 TwoRing Table experiments by technically coming full circle and completing the evolution of the underground groove. It is 1998 at CERN, Switzerland. Construction begins one hundred meters below ground level in order to assemble the Large Hadron Collider, a massive locked groove measuring twenty-seven kilometres in circumference. In this particle-accelerated underworld the purest form of collision will be orchestrated by smashing particle beams of protons or lead nuclei together (six hundred million times per second) in an attempt to mimic the elemental circumstances of the universe in the first trillionth of a second that succeeded the big bang; this being the point at which everything we comprehend as having mass begins to be endowed with weight as the projected energy of the Higgs Field is attracted to fundamental particles. Traversing science’sh circular answer to the cultural rise of ambiently organized violence, detectors trawl the subatomic wreckage after each impact. They record every percussive breakdown in an attempt to locate echoes of the celestial sticky voice that binds together the total mass of the universe. Along with decoding divine voices, there are other notes on the agenda of the LHC score. Scientists will search for evidence of dark matter—the unlit and non-radiated dead quarter(s) of the universe. They will examine antimatter and the reason why the universe is not made up of it; supersymmetry, which predicts that each and every fundamental particle has an unperceivable heavier phantom twin, an ethereal operator adorned with a plethora of names such as the squark, the twin of the quark, the photino, the stuff of light; and finally and most crucially (for a certain select group of researchers) will be the investigation of extra dimensions whose existence they have to believe in, since otherwise their journey to the tenebrous side of enlightenment will have all been in vain. For the majority of scientists at the LHC, however, the ultimate goal is to make contact with the ‘God Particle’ (the Higgs Boson) and thus with the forces that produced the known universe and our place within it. Once they have achieved this, their hopes rest upon the idea that they will be able to influence and modulate the resonant frequencies of all matter. Fourteen months on from the initial magnetic quench problem that results in

fifty superconducting magnets being damaged, the Large Hadron Collider reopens in November 2009 for both godly and ungodly business. Whilst the godly research is undertaken in the glare of the media spotlight, a camouflaged cabal of technologists, engineers, military personnel, and economists will quietly conduct another investigative program for a different entity—that of the god-damned. They will search for the ultimate force carrier and elementary particle that will provide answers as to how execrable, destructive, and malevolent phenomena are formed and propagated. They will listen for, and record, the compositional elements of dark matter. But it is here they will deviate from the mandated programme as they circumvent the cosmic tendons that exert their force upon galaxies (in the theorized form of the neutralino) and aim instead to find the Diabolus Particle. It is ventured that the accelerated collision revealing this obsidian speck will subsequently open up the vaults of the Bank of Hell; the only cadaverous fiscal institution European governments can turn to after 2012’s economic cataclysm. will come at a price that can never be repaid.As tones of civil unrest come to score the post-9/11 period, culminating in the crises of Brexit and the possible implosion of the Euro (as well as the ushering in of the spectres of war that inevitably become palpable in times of severe economic downturn), the treasury of Erebus offers a desperate final chance for economic absolution. As the fixers, programmers, and dealmakers must know, any deal between the Bank of Hell and the Military-Banking complex. For if the living transgress the realm of the here and now and enter the databases of the dead, the present will lose its meaning. It will temporally fragment and decompose into the future and the past, meaning that humans will live through the end of linear time. Working day and night to unearth this particle, what the scientists do not know (but what AUDINT suspect) is that upon locating the Diabolus Particle in the underground groove, a ringing sound will be triggered; a clarion call for the gates of the Bank of Hell to be opened. A high-pitched set of heterodyning tones that will cause tinnitus in each and every human on earth—a global ringing that will allow a third-eared network to grow and transmit. The perception of a high-pitched whining or whistling sound (with no apparent external source) will cause a rapid increase in the size of the corpus callosum, the great commissure responsible for connecting the right and left hemisphere of the brain (a neurological process that takes years to occur and is only evident in the brains of musicians). It will also render each human being with a new embodied perfect pitch, which means that the planum temporale will also become asymmetrically enlarged. Being bestowed with this capacity will allow humans to develop the efficacy of the third ear and the ability to communicate through their entire corporeal structure as a transmitter/receiver. As such, the body will be able to perceive frequencies beyond the 20–20,000Hz vibrational straitjacket that the current somatic model finds itself bound within. In other words, the release of knowledge concerning the origins of the big bang and the release of the dead into the world of the living will give birth to a new sonic and somatic modality—that of the big ring. A new post-hearing world, in which the body becomes the eardrum.

– Toby Heys

Fear:
a feeling induced by perceived danger or threat that occurs in certain types of organisms, which causes a change in metabolic and organ functions and ultimately a change in behavior, such as fleeing, hiding, or freezing from perceived traumatic events.
Fear in human beings may occur in response to a certain stimulus occurring in the present, or in anticipation or expectation of a future threat perceived as a risk to oneself. The fear response arises from the perception of danger leading to confrontation with or escape from/avoiding the threat (also known as the fight-or-flight response, which in extreme cases of fear (horror and terror) can be a freeze response or paralysis.
In humans and animals, fear is modulated by the process of cognition and learning. Thus fear is judged as rational or appropriate and irrational or inappropriate. An irrational fear is called a phobia.

Paralysis:
is a loss of muscle function in one or more muscles. Paralysis can be accompanied by a loss of feeling (sensory loss) in the affected area if there is sensory damage as well as motor. In the United States, roughly 1 in 50 people have been diagnosed with some form of permanent or transient paralysis.The word comes from the Greek παράλυσις, „disabling of the nerves“, itself from παρά (para), „beside, by“ and λύσις (lysis), „making loose“. A paralysis accompanied by involuntary tremors is usually called „palsy“.

Fight-or-flight-response:
The fight-or-flight response (also called hyperarousal, or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.

Ultrasound
is sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing. Ultrasound is not different from „normal“ (audible) sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hear it. This limit varies from person to person and is approximately 20 kilohertz (20,000 hertz) in healthy young adults. Ultrasound devices operate with frequencies from 20 kHz up to several gigahertz.

Infrasound:
sometimes referred to as low-frequency sound, describes sound waves with a frequency below the lower limit of audibility (generally 20 Hz). Hearing becomes gradually less sensitive as frequency decreases, so for humans to perceive infrasound, the sound pressure must be sufficiently high. The ear is the primary organ for sensing infrasound, but at higher intensities it is possible to feel infrasound vibrations in various parts of the body. Ultrasound is sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of human hearing. Ultrasound is not different from „normal“ (audible) sound in its physical properties, except that humans cannot hear it. This limit varies from person to person and is approximately 20 kilohertz (20,000 hertz) in healthy young adults. Ultrasound devices operate with frequencies from 20 kHz up to several gigahertz.

Hyperstition:
a concept developed by the Ccru, relates to fictional entities or agencies that make themselves real. The classic example is William Gibson´s concept of yberspace from the 1980´s.

Sonic Fiction:
In More Brilliant Than the Sun, he described sonic fiction as “frequencies fictionalized, synthesized and organized into escape routes” through “real- world environments that are already alien.” “Sonic fiction, phono- fictions generate a landscape extending out into possibility space . . . an engine . . . [to] people the world with audio hallucinations.” Sonic fiction is a subspecies of what the anomalous research collective, the Ccru, called Hyperstition, that is, the “element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time traveling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier.”