Sound Pressure

How Speaker Systems Influence, Manipulate and Torture

Toby Heys

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786611123
• eBook ISBN: 9781786611130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Sound Pressure reveals how speaker systems mounted in public, employment, military and entertainment environments have played a pivotal role in the way that humans have been physiologically and psychologically organised and disciplined throughout the past century. The networked Wired Radio speakers of the 1920's industrialised factory, acoustically anchor a narrative based on the functional utilisation of sound systems for insidious purposes; from the surround-sound techniques of the Waco siege, to the application of sonic torture in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Crucially, Sound Pressure identifies the logic behind the miniaturisation and disappearance of visible sound system technologies as they transmute into the ultrasonic dynamics of the Hypersonic Sound System and covert bone conduction techniques of Whispering Windows. The book charts an evolution of speaker technology that has been, and will be, used to influence, manipulate and torture the collective and isolated body. It amplifies the connections between LRADs, iPods, Mosquitos, Intonarumori, loudhailers, and Sequential Arc Discharge Acoustic Generators - the meta-network of speaker systems through which rhythms and cadences of power are transmitted, connected, and modulated.

Chapter One

Muzak’s Influence in the Fordist Factory

Jensen CN-82 2 Way High Fidelity Speaker. Illustration by Krystian Griffiths

DISTRIBUTED RHYTHMS OF LABOUR

Following the onset of the Second Industrial Revolution¹, the early part of the twentieth century saw a boom in the mechanisation of European factories owing largely to the demands exerted upon the rhythms of agricultural, economic and labour production by the advent of World War I in 1914. Manuel DeLanda alludes to the national requirement for technologically fluid manufacturing systems in such times of conflict, writing, ‘As the last two great wars have shown, victory goes to the nation most capable of mobilizing its industrial might’ (DeLanda 1991, 34). As war compounded industrialisation’s drive to organise large masses of bodies into a workforce, the cultural and political will to maintain a steady production of goods and techniques to improve industrial efficiency became of paramount importance. The social sciences were harnessed in this effort to organise and systematise the most economic ways for the individual and mass social body to carry out tasks in the workplace. Methods by which to situate, order and discipline bodies en masse—what Michel Foucault called the body politic—had already been institutionalised within the prison system and would subsequently be transplanted into industrial environments. Foucault defines this somatic ordering as ‘a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge’ (Foucault 1975, 28). Nowhere is the desire to produce the industrialised body as a knowable and controllable asset more apparent than in the 1911 monograph The Principles of Scientific Management by American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911). It outlined a set of techniques that would become synonymous with Taylor, which were to be highly influential in shaping twentieth-century capitalism and continue to influence workplace procedure today.

Taylorism, influenced by military command structures and by the inventions and writings of Charles Babbage (see Babbage 1835)— especially his championing of the benefits of the division of labour (Jamieson 1991, 60)— was dedicated to the organisation of bodies and the maximisation of their labour potential. As DeLanda states, ‘The methods the military developed to shorten the chain of command were … exported, through people like Frederick Taylor, to the civilian sector’ (DeLanda 1991, 229). In the United States, industrialist Henry Ford was among the first to employ techniques determined by Taylor’s time and motion studies². When Ford discovered Taylor’s research, he had already initiated and developed the installation of moving assembly belts in his automobile factories, yielding a substantial escalation in production and sales.

While it is accepted that the succession of transformative organising principles implemented by Ford became the dominant model for the practice and comprehension of mass production and consumption in US capitalism between the 1940s and the 1960s, it could be said that, for the workers, the shift in paradigm was felt even earlier than this. A significant rise in the weekly wage—a doubling of pay to five dollars a day—and a radical reduction of the cost of the automobile aimed to provide factory workers with enough money to be able to buy their own cars, thus stimulating the potential scope and growth of the automobile market. Aligned with this improvement in workers’ conditions was a strategic restructuring of the working week, shortened to between forty and forty-eight hours, and the stability of employment status via the promise of a job for life. By 1922 all three of the traditional anxieties of the worker—concerning money, time and the future—had been addressed, and the resulting employment practices developed into dominant working tenets within the Fordist manufacturing plant. Labour turnover in Ford’s manufacturing plants became so negligible that he observed it was not even worth evaluating (Ford and Crowther 1922).

Even with such advances in the working conditions for unskilled labourers, many critics condemned the problematic dynamics of labour within the Taylorist-Fordist factory, none more incisively than Italian communist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci, who famously argued that industrialisation had succeeded ‘in making the whole life of the nation revolve around production. Hegemony here is born in the factory’ (Gramsci 1999, 285). In one of his many perceptive analyses of the plight of workers in their new, mechanically oriented and ‘degrading’ roles, Gramsci eruditely deconstructed the ways in which important psychological aspects of the labour process were suppressed so that the body could carry out monotonous, repetitive actions in coordination with the new ‘life-draining’ technical regime of the conveyor belt and its attendant mechanisms. Gramsci made it clear that he regarded the process of constructing impersonal and standardised mechanistic bodies—bodies that in many ways reflect the status of the objects being produced—as one that began with industrialisation. ‘Taylor’, Gramsci wrote, ‘is in fact expressing with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society—developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect. But these things, in reality, are not original or novel: they represent simply the most recent phase of a long process that began with industrialism itself’ (302).

James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos sum up the historical and ongoing importance of Ford’s industrial methodologies when they surmise that the auto industry has ‘twice in this century … changed our most fundamental ideas about how we make things. And how we make things dictates not only how we work but what we buy, how we think, and the way we live’ (Womack, Jones and Roos 1990, 11). Most pertinent to our purposes in this book are the ways in which the early industrial factory shaped and composed the industrial workspace, its rhythms of labour, the psychological rupture of alienated labour, the workforce’s collective and individuated movements in coordination with automated processes and, in particular, the workers’ relationship with the sonic landscape of the factory environment. The dynamics that configure all of these relations were irrevocably changed when the electrically powered moving assembly line was introduced as the automated conductor of workers’ rhythms, techniques and agency. In terms of sound and hearing, as the sonic terrain of the worker changed from natural to machine-driven, the continual motion of the conveyor belt became an aural signifier of these transformations. Never allowing for silence or interruption, the industrialised sonic domain—noisy, repetitious and relentless—marked out the territory of the factory and bled outwards onto the street and beyond.

Moreover, just as Taylor’s monograph became the industrial handbook of scientific rationalism, helping to shape ‘Fordism’, so it also preempted the utilisation of sonic media within the factory to assist in ensuring efficient practices and attaining the manufacturing goals set by management. In 1922, as the Fordist doctrine of functional specialisation and the division of labour flourished, and at a time when the workforce had gained some ground and found some satisfaction in their working conditions, a new system of ‘Wired Radio’ was made available for the industrial space of the automated industrial plant. Created by US Major General George Owen Squier, this technology allowed radio programming to be wired into factories, restaurants, small businesses and individual subscribers’ homes. Overcoming the problems of signal loss that were all too regular with radio broadcasts, Wired Radio supplied an endless programme of music over electrical lines, with no commercials or interruptions, for both of which Squier had a known contempt. He also had little patience for the waves of privatisation that had slowed down development of the early telephone industry. In response, he patented his invention in the name of the American public, making the technology legally available for anyone to develop further in the hopes that improved versions would be produced.

As a communications technology, radio is commonly lauded, or indeed denounced, for its capacity to produce a coherent mediated social body through simultaneous long-distance delivery of sonic programming to many listeners. This desire to collapse space and time through technological means has long been a central human ambition (as exemplified by the US military’s public development of the Internet). The invention of Wired Radio would go some way towards sonically shaping and moulding this coherent social body, but primarily in the form of the workforce in its concentrated industrial setting. Having rebaptised his technology with a new name under which it was to become famous, Squier would not live long enough to witness the first successful transmission of ‘Muzak’³ into commercial outlets in New York City in 1936. Shortly after the system had been sold to Warner Bros., and then again to William Benton, World War II broke out, and the potential of Muzak to help orchestrate and conduct work rhythms in factories became apparent as it became the ‘naturalised’ environmental soundtrack of the manufacturing complex.

With the advent of Muzak, the electrically powered arteries that carried music to all parts of the workplace become the sonic equivalent of the electrically powered assembly line that utilises and demarcates each space of the factory. The whole spatiality of the factory building is composed around the productive sequencing of the assembly line, with no section of the industrial manufacturing space left untouched or unmarked by its movement, rhythm and repetition. The factory space with its open planning introduced a new fluid architecture predicated around the assembly line’s free-ranging access to mark and touch every space, every subjectivity; its call is to assemble all present around its modal logic of distributed transience. The repetitive processing of this flow engaged the body in a direct relationship with industrial transfer, and it is Muzak that scored the body, orchestrating its part in an extended symphony of staccato manoeuvres.

The architectural form of the cell—so important to Foucault’s analysis of the history of the prison in Discipline and Punish (where he declares that ‘the disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular’; 1975, 143)—was redeployed in the waveform domain by Muzak’s temporal ordering of the factory’s sonic environment. While the conveyor belt effectively deconstructed the rationale of the monastic cell, with its compartmentalisation of space and time, Muzak sonically contradicted it by mimicking it. In the new musical industryscape, rhythms, spaces and workers were connected by a melodic structuring of time, as the work day was sonically reorganised and categorised via Muzak’s harmonious formulas and by the (musical) silences between musical programming (although of course, there is never silence in the factory, except in the case of mechanical failure). Accordingly, the cellular programming of silence became a way to produce temporal, physiological and psychological meaning within the factory and a way to classify the rationale of the sound that preceded or followed it.

Analogously to the spatial-networking capacity of the conveyor belt, the musical wires of the speaker system constructed and rationalised the architecture of the industrial soundscape with a new transcellular order. The speakers at the end of each set of wires became aural portals through which workers entered and exited the overlapping soundtracks of the machinery and the amplified camouflage of the parasitic musical programming. Viral in nature, the epistemic modality of the piped music required the systemic architecture of capital’s spatial logic to operate as a carrier. Inversely, with the arrival of Wired Radio the factory finds itself furnished with a new nervous system, a network of cables to propagate and redistribute its sonic load. From this point on, the Muzak sound system possessed the capacity to recompose the factory’s sonic spatiality, from one filled with the fractious and chaotic aural byproducts of workers and machinery to one made subservient and predictable.

Just as Ford was one of the first to use an electric motor to drive the assembly line, Muzak was the first industrially functional music to be electrically amplified and distributed throughout the work environment. In this way electricity radically respatialised the flow of manufacturing in the Fordist workplace, for the first time allowing a single piece of music to transfer simultaneously into each and every part of its architecture. As such, the spatial code of the industrial sonic landscape was reimagined by Squier as the relationships between the factory’s peripheral latitudes and centralised concerns were recomposed by Muzak’s radio-controlled pathogens.

AUDIOANALGESIA

The rationalisation of time and space via the logic of capital seems to find its perfect soundtrack in the form of Muzak. Yet writers such as Joseph Lanza have claimed that Muzak in the factory was predicated more on the healing of workers than their organisation by and for capital: ‘music was not entertainment but an “audioanalgesia” to kill the pain of urban din’ (Lanza 2004, 11–12). In this reading, Muzak in the workplace is posited as a harmonious gesture of empathy from management, a waveformed method of pacifying the body in its new inhuman relation with machinery. There are many problems with this analysis, however, none more telling than the fact that the ‘pain’ Lanza alludes to was caused not so much by the body being subjected to a new mechanical soundscape as by the requirement of adherence to this new noisy territory. In the overall symphony of the production line, the body is rendered as a numbed note within the staccato rhythms of industry. Muzak would ultimately become the lullaby of the automaton, as the dystopia of random noise was blanketed by the capitalist utopia of repetitive melody. The factories and mills were the places in which these incongruous modes of sonic spatiality would fuse for the first time to produce bodies disciplined against their own natural biorhythms; it was the forced industrial choreography of the work day that necessitated musicality in the soundscape to shape the bodies’ new mechanised rhythms and movements. This is the sonic terrain adroitly comprehended by French politician and economist Léon Faucher as that spatiality where the disjunctive power relation of the machine over the body can most easily be perceived. ‘Go into a cotton-mill’, Faucher wrote. ‘Listen to the conversations of the workers and the whistling of the machines. Is there any contrast in the world more afflicting than the regularity and predictability of these mechanical movements, compared with the disorder of ideas and morals, produced by the contact of so many men, women, and children’ (quoted in Foucault 1975, 244).

The predictability of mechanical movements became the kinaesthetic cornerstone of industrialisation’s relation to the body, structuring and training its operations from the minute employees entered the workplace to the minute they left. According to DeLanda, this process of rendering the organic unpredictability of the human body subservient to the logic and rationale of the machine had begun much earlier. ‘The military process of transforming soldiers into machines, as well as related campaigns to organise the management of human bodies (in military hospitals, for instance) generated much knowledge about the body’s internal mechanisms’, writes DeLanda. ‘The “great book of Man-the-machine” was both the blueprint of the human body created by doctors and philosophers and the operating manual for obedient individuals produced by the great Protestant military commanders—among them, Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus and Frederick the Great’ (De-Landa 1991, 138).

DeLanda maintains that the military-industrial complex had been material-ising over centuries of practical and logistical exchange between the civilian economy and the army. As economic and military organisations were transformed and mutated by this continual dialogue, it became clear that military inventions such as Muzak could also aid in the industrial organisation of the mass body of labour to directly support the war effort. The ultimate goal was to mass produce objects that had interchangeable parts, with a labour force that was itself dispensable and—partly through the intervention of music— standardised, a set of precursor techniques that point to the contemporary obsolescence inherent in the production and distribution of music, architecture and objects in general.

Muzak’s standardisation of music was the first time in history that an attempt had been made to quantify, categorise and classify waveforms via their functional disposition in an industrial environment. This ordering of frequencies also pertained to the movement of workers’ bodies at specific times of day (and night). As such, its scientific rationale emerged at the nexus of industrialised temporality, somatic engineering and architectural routine. When elucidating the founding principles of the prison system, Foucault also registers the strategies and disciplinary techniques that would subsequently be transferred into the industrial realm, making it clear how the body was subjugated to political, social and economic methods of utility. ‘The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’, wrote Foucault. ‘A “political anatomy”, which was also a “mechanics of power”, was being born; it defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, the speed and the efficiency that one determines. Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile’ bodies”’ (Foucault 1975, 138).

Foucault’s ‘docile body’ recalls Lanza’s conception of ‘audioanalgesia’ and the composition of the numbed body it implies. For Lanza inadvertently hits upon the notion of the sedated body here—the body that wishes to kill the pain by having its industrial organs soothed by music. This early-industrial body is laid bare, vulnerable in its newly composed state, awaiting its sonic anaesthesia so that the operation can begin. What is interesting here is that the process Ford applied to mass production and consumption—namely, his system of standardisation, of manufacturing techniques and components—was also applied to the soundscape in order to achieve a spatiality characterised by modular interchangeability and repetition. Serial numbers were inscribed on parts of objects such as those belonging to guns and cars so that they could be classified and easily swapped out or repaired. And similarly, to produce waveformed Muzakal objects, the working day was broken down into fifteen-minute segments that were subsequently serialised and categorised in much the same way as parts of an automobile so that each Muzakal module could be broken down, replaced or repaired if it was deemed dysfunctional—that is, if it stimulated the workers too much or too little.

As the conveyor belt repetitively delivered objects to be worked on, one task at a time, so Muzak conveyed sonic parts, one track after another, to complete a full fifteen-minute sonic object that worked on the employee. The process was almost an inverse of the conveyor belt—an ...

Table of contents

• Foreword: Speakers
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Frequency-Based Force
• 1 Muzak’s Influence in the Fordist Factory
• 2 Surround-Sound Manipulation at the Waco Siege
• 3 Torture in Black Ecstasy at Guantánamo Bay
• 4 The Covert Aims of Directional Ultrasound
• 5 Whispering to Talking Windows
• Conclusion: Phantom Sound Systems
• References
• About the Authors