Two intriguing books have recently been published with similar interests in the connected histories of both modern music and technology. Steve Goodman (a.k.a. dubstep progenitor Kode9) just published an ambitious academic work on MIT Press, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, illustrating sonic technology’s potential for either a politics of control or artistic creativity. And Dave Tomkins finished a book on the vocoder after ten years of accumulated research, How To Wreck a Nice Beach (Stop Smiling pub.), named after how the vocoder, a portmanteau of voice and coder, misreads the phrase, “how to recognize speech.” Tompkin’s thoroughly funkified book traces the history of the vocoder from its military origins as designed in response to Nazi wiretapping all the way to robotic electro jams and today’s Auto-tune synthesized, pop anthems championed by T-Pain.
It’s quite strange that so much sonic technology is so tightly tied to military inventions and purposes, and even more fascinating how much music has been able to appropriate the initial intentionality of that weaponry towards its own creative-minded purposes.
In a decade where it looks like we’re going to become closer to the cyborgs that so much sci-fi art predicted (my eyes are practically glued to the laptop these days), I imagine we will need to start thinking through the notion of technology beyond the conventional poles of “man versus the machine”. These books make a great start. And with the new nuclear reduction arms pact, perhaps there still is some hope for humankind to avert self-destruction.
For now, enjoy the Jonzun’s Crew “Pack Jam” (1983).
Popular Articles