22Feb07

from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
FRIEDRICH KITTLER

The whole Spectrum of sound from infra- to ultrasound is, as was the case with Kafka’s mice, not art, but an expression of life. It finally allows modern detection to locate submarines wherever they may be, or tank brigades where they are not. The great musicologist Hornbostel had already spent the First World War at the front: sound location devices with huge bell-mouths and superhuman audibility ranges were supposed to enable ears to detect enemy artillery positions even at a distance of 30 kilometers. Ever since, human ears have no longer been a whim of nature but a weapon, as well as (with the usual commercial delay) a source of money. Long before the headphone adventures of rock’n'roll or original radio plays, Heinkel and Messerschmitt pilots entered the new age of soundspace. The Battle of Britain, Goring’s futile attempt to bomb the island into submission in preparation for Operation Sea Lion, began with a trick for guiding weapon systems: radio beams allowed Luftwaffe bombers to reach their destinations without having to depend on daylight or the absence of fog. Radio beams emitted from the coast facing Britain, for example from Amsterdam and Cherbourg, formed the sides of an ethereal triangle the apex of which was located precisely above the targeted city. The right transmitter beamed a continuous series of Morse dashes into the pilot’s right headphone, while the left transmitter beamed an equally continuous series of Morse dots–always exactly inbetween the dashes–into the left headphone. As a result, any deviation from the assigned course resulted in the most beautiful ping-pong stereophony (of the type that appeared on the first pop records but has since been discarded). And once the Heinkels were exactly above London or Coventry, then and only then did the two signal streams emanating from either side of the headphone, dashes from the right and dots from the left, merge into on continuous note, which the perception apparatus could not but locate within the very center of the brain. A hypnotic command that had the pilot–or rather, the center of his brain–dispose of his payload. Historically, he had become the first consumer of a headphone stereophony that today controls us all–from the circling of helicopter or Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland all the way to the simulated pseudo-monophony, in the midst of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, that once more wishes for the acoustics of targeted bombing.

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