Unlike his more secretive peers, dubstep guru Kode9 doesn't keep his everyday identity a secret. The producer, who also runs the taste-making Hyperdub imprint, spends his days as PhD-holding philosopher and university professor named Steve Goodman. Now, he can add to his wildly varied curriculum vitae, as he has just released the brand new book, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear.
According to a blurb from publisher MIT Press, the book explores the darker side of sound, and is to be "deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread - to produce a bad vibe."
The Stranger points to a blurb from fellow academic Steven Shaviro, who writes, "In the beginning, there was rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman surveys the soundscape, or 'vibrational nexus,' in the midst of which we live today, tracking it in its various guises, from Jamaican dub soundsystems to U.S. military infrasound crowd-control devices, from Muzak as mind-numbing sonic architecture to grime and dubstep as enhancers of postapocalyptic dread, and from the cosmic vibrations left behind by the Big Bang to the latest viral sound contagions."
If you'd like to get all heady with Goodman's concepts on sound and bad vibes, Sonic Warfare might be just the thing for your Christmas list. The book is currently availablehere.
According to a blurb from publisher MIT Press, the book explores the darker side of sound, and is to be "deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread - to produce a bad vibe."
The Stranger points to a blurb from fellow academic Steven Shaviro, who writes, "In the beginning, there was rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman surveys the soundscape, or 'vibrational nexus,' in the midst of which we live today, tracking it in its various guises, from Jamaican dub soundsystems to U.S. military infrasound crowd-control devices, from Muzak as mind-numbing sonic architecture to grime and dubstep as enhancers of postapocalyptic dread, and from the cosmic vibrations left behind by the Big Bang to the latest viral sound contagions."
If you'd like to get all heady with Goodman's concepts on sound and bad vibes, Sonic Warfare might be just the thing for your Christmas list. The book is currently availablehere.
