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Mark Egan
In the summer of 2012 the London Olympic Games created a sonic landscape. Crowds roared champions to victory while camera helicopters whirled and buzzed overhead. Ticket gates clunked and clicked and chimed with the faint rhythmic splashes of a swimmer�s back kicks. The trumpeted chorus of national anthems in one arena gave notice of gold to the hearts of athletes elsewhere, whose quickening pace struck a chord with the sound of the starter�s gun. Following this rhythmic architecture outwards to the periphery of events, unnoticed and unused, floating on the tidal patterns of the Thames, there lay a �sonic weapon�, a device which had the potential to disrupt the joyous acoustic sensorium of Olympians with inauspicious noise. This American-built �long-range acoustic device� (LRAD) was a remnant of military operations in Iraq and possessed the capability to unleash 150 dB of sound towards a chosen target. During the Olympics the weapon remained silent but, as a threatening noise in storage, it still held an anticipatory power to affect with fear. The primary purpose of such weaponry is crowd control and, although the sonic device was never heard in London, there have been demonstrations of the political motives behind the weapon. Police in Pittsburgh recently used the LRAD as a �sonic cannon� against G20 protesters above an auditory threshold that caused permanent damage to the working of recipient ears. Such action shows the mobilization of sound as a body of force which modulates relations of power/resistance and can politicize the audible. In a recent book entitled Sonic warfare: Sound, affect, and the ecology of fear, Steve Goodman offers an important investigation into such relations and provides a commentary on modern auditory technology supported with analysis of the affective dimension of sound.
