Text page
Rumours of War
A review essay that uses Goodman's Sonic Warfare to think sound politically, focusing on frequency, vibration, and the power of bad vibes.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page argues that sound acts politically because vibration works directly on bodies and environments. Frequency becomes a mode of force and governance rather than just an aesthetic variable.
Review form is used to test how a sonic theory travels in public criticism. The essay translates Goodman's book into a broader argument about infrasonic pressure, military acoustics, and mediated affect.
That matters because the section needs pages that show sonic theory leaving specialist discourse and entering public-critical circulation. This review does that without diluting the conceptual stakes.
How to read this text
Read the opening framing of Sonic Warfare first, then track how the essay moves from book review to a wider politics of frequency.
Keep an eye on the relation between public criticism and sonic force. The page becomes strongest when those two levels are held together.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 9
When Melissa Bradshaw reviews Sonic Warfare in terms of Goodman's recently released Hyperdub 5 compilation, he advises against it saying he is more interested in the inconsistencies and divergences between the book and the label.20 It's not just the women who are missing from the book, she notes, it is humanity as a whole. She sees its being anti-anthropocentric as a good thing.21 Having recently watched the UK reggae sound system film Babylon I cannot agree.
Definition · paragraph 17
There is no ‘going fragile' here - no admission that music or noise or even theorising them can fail. As with Sonic Warfare, the maximalist claims for the direct effect of sound derive from the philosophical weakness of generalised claims of music.
Stakes · paragraph 5
Taking us to the darkside of sound, Goodman focuses in on vibration, on a politics of frequency rather than volume; in particular the ‘bad vibes' from the infrasonic bass frequencies of dub sound systems to those that engender fear and dread from military special weapons.2 He replaces the linear speed - a conjoined marker with the war and noise of the Italian Futurists at the start of the 20th century - with the angular velocity of afrofuturist music's rhythmic vortices at the start of the 21st century.
Stakes · paragraph 2
From dubstep to free improv to noise, people turn to music to express something about the world that words alone can't. How well, then, do two recent books - Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare and the group work Noise & Capitalism - serve their listener-readers? A double review by Paul Helliwell
Stakes · paragraph 15
It is far from ‘idealism', as Andrew McGettigan's review of Noise and Capitalism in Radical Philosophy maintains, to question the centrality of the recording at the moment that capitalism dissolves it as a commodity, nor at the moment when it was being installed.28 Howard Slater's is perhaps the article that approaches Sonic Warfare most closely; his ‘War of the Membrane' is about affect, but he is willing to venture into a discussion of capitalism and politicality in a way that Goodman is not.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.