"The history of civilization is discovering and manufacturing new auditory phenomena and the privatization of sound."
A thread on sound, noise, silence, cosmic background radiation, echolocation, memory, and civilization.
A couple of my short sound/noise comics are now on view in Apocalypse Magazine. You can check them out as references for this thread.
apocalypse-confidential.com/2022/05/28/noise-a-history-white-noise/
The following notes and theories here are compiled by Adalbert Arcane for my book, Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse. They can also be read here:
transatlantis.net/2022/05/27/beta-testing-the-ongoing-apocalypse-adalbert-arcanes-notes-and-theories-to-the-sound-strips/
I am often asked if the first strip, WHITE NOISE, is inspired by Don DeLillo's novel. No, it isn't; I was not aware of this novel at the time of the strip's creation.
What did Big Bang sound like? According to some scientists, gigantic sound waves pulsed through the super-heated matter that made up the Universe shortly after Big Bang.
All matter was affected by this noise, sometimes described as a deep hum. This primordial sound left an imprint on the Universe as the so-called cosmic microwave background noise.
In a sense, Big Bang contained all the sounds of the Universe. When you add all the sounds together, do you get silence? Or a massive cacophony? WHITE NOISE?
Another strip, NOISE, A HISTORY, attempts to historicize the question: "If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?" Asked another way: "If a tree fell in the extinct primordial forest, did it make a sound?"
The history of civilization is discovering and manufacturing new auditory phenomena and the privatization of sound. The buzz of civilization is the comfortable WHITE NOISE masking the uncomfortable hum of nature.
We co-evolved with sound, it surrounds us at all times. It's surprising how much humans rely on echolocation for their stability & their relationship to the world. Memories are spatial. We're built from accrued layers of spatially tagged memories—we are a memory echo chamber.
The ambient sound of the world acts as an aetheric substance that allows us to move through the world by orienting via sound and vision. It allows us to be outward-oriented, following the sounds and sights of the world as a desiring machine; Deleuze's 'body without organs.'
What happens when we encounter silence? The quietest room in the world is in Minnesota, approximately five minutes from where the author currently lives. Many describe the experience inside the room as "maddening."
Our relationship with world-sound breaks fundamentally when you 'become the sound' inside the anechoic chamber. The sound of your internal organs reminds you that there's no there, there–nothing to anchor you. The desiring machine breaks down.
You become 'organ without body'… analogous to a schizophrenic steaming mass of microbial life arranged in shapes and patterns; a chattering miasmic fluid; a viscous semi-liquid bag of mostly water with skin stretched tight like a drum. Who is playing the drum?
Adalbert Arcane's notes & theories to those strips on my blog:
transatlantis.net/2022/05/27/beta-testing-the-ongoing-apocalypse-adalbert-arcanes-notes-and-theories-to-the-sound-strips/
Order signed copies of Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse here:
transatlantis.net/product/beta-testing-the-ongoing-apocalypse/
cartoon hermeneutics
@BetaTestingTomK
theoretical cartoonist comics as technology of consciousness publisher at @unciv