Korg Catalogue, circa 1978.
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
Dave Tompkins finished a book on the vocoder after ten years of accumulated research, How To Wreck a Nice Beach. Tompkin’s 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.
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.
Sonic Technology: Appropriating the Science of War
