Snap Crackle And Pop Physics
9/30/2019 admin
InJuly, a bulletin on the myspace page of a group of Moroccan musicianssent my mind wandering down some strange paths, got me thinking aboutmusic as a technology, as something people use to perform certainactions. Indeed, music is possibly one of the oldest technologiesavailable to humans, a means of communication, a playful way ofstrengthening communities, and a form of transport to carry us out ofourselves. It's also currently used to terrorise, dehumanise andnarcotise individuals and populations around the globe, in ways thatallow us to draw tentative lines connecting spaces that seem to be indifferent worlds, the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, thedetention centres of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay or Diego Garcia, andthe shining consumer wonderlands of the modern shopping mall oroffice space; spaces of chaos, control and of a particular, possiblyperverse idea of freedom. We'll start our wanders around this strangeterritory in a place where the magical possibilities of sound areacknowledged and celebrated, a place where we might hear echoes of afuture music of radical potential, a sonic weapon to counteract thenarcotic spell cast over us, a musick yet to be, for as Plato saidMusical innovation is full of danger to the State.
Thevillage of Joujouka sits in the red hills of the Rif in NorthernMorocco. It is a place somewhat removed from the modern world. Thereis no electricity, no running water, no pavements or roads, thevillage being accessible only on foot. Everything that's needed heremust be carried by mules or the villagers themselves. While the RifMountains are known as a lawless and wild place in which some of theworld's finest hashish is produced, Joujouka itself is known for onlyone thing. Its music.
TheMaster Musicians of Joujouka play a strange, hybrid trance music thatdraws influences and inspiration from the various peoples who havecolonised or settled Morocco over the years, but which has its rootsin the pre-Islamic religious ceremonies of the Berber people. Themusic of Joujouka has been passed down through generations, father toson, a string of pearls stretching back further than any recordedhistory. The maleems are exempt from farming and other types ofmanual labour, their sole responsibility is to provide the world withsound, and it is a sound that vacillates between a beatific serenityand a feral abandon as the men coax supple rhythms and circularmelodies from their various hand drums, ancient guembris, flutesand rhaitas. This last instrument provides the MasterMusicians with their signature sound, for these oboe like horns areplayed by groups who time the rhythms of their breathing to ensurethe sound is endless, a hypnotic and infinitely complex wall ofbuzzing noise that colludes with the local hash to produce an awesomedelirium.
Despiteits often noisy and frenetic nature, this is not the sound of awarrior people. The music is used in service of a spirituality, itmagically opens channels of communication with the spirit world, itopens spaces of healing and protection and is performed incelebration of the glory of nature. It is concerned with theevocation and control of spiritual forces and is always used for apurpose and to obtain some definite result. Now of course, with thegrowth of a global market for 'world' music, the sound of Joujoukahas spread. It is no longer reserved for the villager's rituals andceremonies, or for the local festivals and parades. Recordings of themusicians are available to listeners all over the world as productsof the culture industry, these recordings though can often be asdifficult and jarring as those of Adorno's beloved Schoenberg andtheir arrival on the market is the result of a particular history anda particular set of counter-cultural connections. In the early '50sPaul Bowles, the proto beat writer, heard the sound while travellingin the Rif, he introduced the music to Brion Gysin who helped topopularise the group in the Interzone of post-war Tangiers. Gysinlater turned on William Burroughs to the magical sound of the 4000year old rock n roll band. As Morocco became a point on the 'hippytrail', news of the noise slowly spread. In 1968, Brian Jones arrivedin the village where he recorded the annual festival of Bou Jeloud1.The following year, Timothy Leary sampled the villager's hospitalitywhile enjoying a short break from prison2.In the '70s, the musicians recorded with Ornette Coleman and theRolling Stones, their music peppered Burroughs' Breakthrough in theGrey Room, serving as a counterpoint to his tape splicingexperiments. Since then they have travelled and played concertsaround the globe, making money that has helped sustain the wholecommunity, for even here people need money and the inhabitants ofthis remote and rocky region have little else to exchange.
Thepress release posted on Joujouka's myspace page was written by a NewYork concert promoter and announced that the group were to canceltheir summer tour of the US after encountering difficulties withtheir visa applications. A small thing, of interest to only a fewpeople. Some members of the group have names that require extrascrutiny, suspicious names that are 'similar' to some known to the USDepartment of Justice. It's a small thing, the shadow cast by the Waron Terror just falls in an unexpected place, making something thatshould be so simple frighteningly complex. The tightening of securitythat is occurring throughout the 'developed' world can often passunnoticed, but beneath our noses walls and fences become ever higher,gates are locked more tightly and entry requirements become moredifficult to meet. This bulletin reawakened me, forced me to thinkagain about the reach of the current crusade. This is nothing shortof total war, everybody is affected, no matter how remote ourhabitat, no matter how ancient our traditions or how peaceful ourintentions.
Ibegan to dream of musical reprisals, channeling my own anger andindignation through the Master Musicians themselves, imagining theirferocious, kaleidoscopic drum and rhaitajamsbeing used to bring down the walls, not of Jericho, but of thoseinstitutions that seeks to measure and judge us all, that try toorder and control human life and which increasingly, (here I'mthinking of Agamben and bare life, of orange jump suits, cages and deMenezes) have the ability to decide who has the right to life and whocounts as human. Of course, I am not the first to imagine the use ofmusic as a weapon of war, indeed the military-industrial complex isalready way ahead in that game.
Software defined radio receiver. The fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position are known as snap (or, perhaps more commonly, jounce), crackle, and pop.The latter two of these are probably infrequently used even in a serious mathematics or physics environment, and clearly get their names as humorous allusions to the characters on the Rice Krispies cereal box.
- The snap you feel at the start of the lurch? That's jounce — the fourth derivative of displacement and the derivative of jerk. Eager et al (2016) wrote up a nice analysis of these quantities for the examples of a trampolinist and roller coaster passenger. Jounce is sometimes called snap. And the next two derivatives are called crackle and pop.
- Snap, crackle and pop are terms, based on the Rice Krispies mascots, used for the fourth, fifth and sixth time derivatives of position. The first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, the second is acceleration, and the third is jerk.
- The term snap will be used throughout this paper to denote the fourth derivative of displacement with respect to time. Another name for this fourth derivative is jounce. The fifth and sixth derivatives with respect to time are referred to as crackle and pop respectively.
Musichas long been a part of the sound of the battlefield, think of theScots bagpipes or the trumpet blast of the cavalry and we can seethat the military use of noise to frighten or disturb the oppositionhas a history. More recently, Coppola's cinematic image ofhelicopters flying low like dragonflies at sunrise, blasting Wagnerfrom mounted speakers, is one of the most memorable in film history.Examination of the military use of music, of sonic warfare,ultimately slips away from what we normally think of as the theatreof war to expose some disturbing aspects of modern culture and revealthe possibility that the civilian populations of the developed worldmight regularly be subjected to techniques of psychological warfare.
Someknowledge of the American army's use of music in combat situationsstarted to filter into the popular imagination in 1989, specificallyduring the US invasion of Panama, part of George Bush Sr.'s War onDrugs. The target of the invasion was Manuel Noriega, dictator ofPanama, associate of the notorious cocaine baron Pablo Escobar andthe Medellin Cartel, and long time ally of the CIA and US governmentin their clandestine operations against various Central and SouthAmerican left wing guerilla groups3.During the invasion, 27,000 American troops landed in the countrywith the intention of deposing Noriega. The dictator went to groundin Panama's Vatican Embassy. US forces surrounded the building, butwere unable to physically attack for fear of ruining relations withthe Vatican. Instead, troops bombarded the embassy with constant loudheavy rock music in an effort to drive Noriega out. This effortlasted days before complaints from the Vatican forced the general incharge of the operation to pull the plug on the music4.Noriega's subsequent surrender had little to do with the military'ssonic experiment, but this did not deter them from again attemptingto use high volume rock 'n' roll as a 'non-lethal weapon'.
In1993, the sound systems came out again for the siege of Mount Carmelin Waco, Texas. This operation, led by the FBI, targeted David Koreshand other followers of the Branch Davidian sect. The siege lasted 51days and for parts of this time the Branch Davidians were treated tomarathon sessions of loud music in order to disturb their sleepingpatterns and break morale inside the camp. The music was just oneelement of the FBI's psychological operations to break the siege,operations that again proved unsuccessful as tensions escalated onboth sides. As the siege wore on, the event turned into a globalmedia circus that ended with the deaths of many Branch Davidians asMount Carmel went up in televised flames5.
Musichas also been used as a weapon during the conflicts in Afghanistanand Iraq. Before the brutal military attack on Fallujah in 2004, UStroops engaged in psychological operations in an attempt to weakenresistance. These operations lasted for three weeks before the tanksand troops rolled into the desert city, and again involved the use ofhigh powered speakers mounted on tanks and humvees. The army playedAC/DC, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Eminem and Barney the Purple Dinosaurat high volume for long stretches of time to disorientate and confusethe enemy, in the hope of flushing out insurgents or weakening theirability to fight6.That the attack on Fallujah resulted in so many casualties on bothsides, with much heavier resistance to allied troops than wasanticipated, perhaps points to the failure of such psychologicaltactics on the battlefield. Music has however, been used elsewhere inthe War on Terror, and perhaps more fruitfully, for it has becomecommon practice to subject 'enemy combatants' to loud music indetention centres and interrogation rooms in efforts to gaininformation about insurgent activity or terrorist organisation.
InApril 2004, photographs from the Abu Ghraib detention centre hit thenews. These disquieting images depicted naked and contorted Iraqiprisoners suffering humiliation at the hands of grinning US soldiers.The world let out a collective gasp of disgust when presented withsuch horrifying evidence of the dark face of modern warfare. DonaldRumsfeld blew gas about 'bad apples' and placed the responsibilitywith a handful of low ranking soldiers, rubbishing the idea that thiscould be part of any kind of policy, but by the time further evidencestarted to emerge the visceral impact of the original story had lostmomentum. Since the Abu Ghraib pictures, it has become apparent thatthe techniques depicted in the photographs are being used in a numberof detention centres and prisons associated with the War on Terror,including at Guantanamo Bay itself. These techniques include the useof stress positions, sleep deprivation, and alternating sensorydeprivation and sensory overload. Considered as a constellation ofpractices, these techniques have been called 'no-touch torture', ortorture-lite. This phrase makes it all sound like the low fat,vanilla version of what should presumably be thought of as heavytorture, which I suppose would include the use of pliers, thumbscrews and electric shocks. Torture lite in contrast involves none ofthis medieval stuff, for its aim is not to physically degrade itssubject, but to psychologically attack the victim's sense of self, toerode his or her subjectivity.
Theterm conceals the reality of these devastating practices, for it isonly when we hear first hand reports of torture-lite that we canbegin to estimate the distance between actual practice and officialrhetoric. In 2003, a BBC report suggested that Iraqi enemy combatantswere being locked in shipping containers in the desert heat, andsubjected to songs such as Metallica's “Enter Sandman”, or Barneythe Dinosaur's “I Love You” at high volume for extended periods7.Since then, first hand accounts collected by Human Rights Watch havedescribed many other instances in detention centres and prisonsacross the region. Benyan Mohammed, a prisoner at Guantanamo, toldhuman rights lawyers that high volume rap music was pumped into hiscell for twenty solid days before it was replaced by twisted laughterand “Halloween sounds”8.If we try to imagine ourselves subjected to such treatment, and thenthink of how the music is often played while we are kept in completedarkness, or in rooms with strobe lighting in which the temperaturefluctuates between extreme heat and extreme cold, then we can beginto come to a vague understanding of how such treatment may push aperson to the brink of insanity.
Thefact that such similar practices are being revealed in detentioncamps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay destabilises Rumsfeld'sinsistence that the practices depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographswere the work of a few corrupt soldiers. Indeed, Alfred McCoy arguesin his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, fromthe Cold War to the War on Terror (2006)9that these practices are the result of five or six decades worth ofresearch conducted by the CIA and British and Canadian secretservices. According to McCoy, the techniques of no-touch tortureoriginate in the experimentsconducted during the Cold War in programs such as MKUltra, the CIA'snotorious mind control program that saw thousands of Americansoldiers and civilians used as guinea pigs in the search for truthdrugs and mind control techniques10.In John Marks' 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, wefind descriptions of early experiments with some of the techniques incurrent use including ultrasonics, solitary confinement, sleepdeprivation, fluctuating temperatures and strobe lighting, whileother experiments involved all kinds of drugs, electroshocktreatments, even neurosurgery. These programs all carried out bysecretive state sanctioned institutions acting in contravention ofinternational laws and treaties, have led to the modern system oftorture lite that was tested in counter insurgency operations duringthe Vietnam War, and again by British secret services during itscampaign against the IRA in the '70s and '80s, and by police unitsacross South and Central America11.It may be comforting to imagine that such techniques are reserved forremote detention centres and interrogation cells, but music is alsoused to manipulate behaviour in more subtle and insidious ways thatwe may recognise from our own everyday experiences.
Theuse of music to manipulate workers and consumers for commercial endshas a long history that perhaps provided some inspiration to thoseCIA operatives who first decided to use sound as part of theirrepertoire of interrogation techniques. The Muzak Corporation wasborn in 1934, the brainchild of Major General George O. Squier. Overthe course of the century, the Muzak Corporation came to define thepiped music industry, tirelessly promoting their product until now,in the 21st Century world of consumer capitalism, thismusic is almost ubiquitous in public space. Squier recognised music'slink to the emotions and looked for ways to capitalise. He developedsystems to deliver music through telephone cable and proceeded tosell this piped music to businesses. While the styles of musicavailable through the Muzak Corporation and other similar companieshas changed radically over the years, the purpose of this music hashowever, always remained the same; to manipulate human behaviour.
Muzak'sStimulus Progression(R) system was designed to “..boostproductivity, reduce errors and improve morale in businessesthroughout the country”12.The system uses songs programmed in fifteen minute blocks, imprintinga kind of counterfeit bio-rhythm to provide workers or shoppers witha subconscious sense of 'forward movement'. The corporation claimtheir product helps to reduce the stress of shoppers and workers,leading to increased brand perception, loyalty, sales andproductivity. If we “..employ the science of Muzak: inan office, workers tend to get more done, more efficiently, and feelhappier. In an industrial plant, people feel better and, with lessfatigue and tension, their jobs seem less monotonous. In a store,people seem to shop in a more relaxed and leisurely manner. In abank, customers are generally more calm, tellers and other personnelare more efficient. In general, people feel better about where theyare; whether it's during work or leisure time”13.Such statements made in Muzak's corporate literature place thecompany's invisible product squarely in the realms of the behaviouralsciences.
Althoughthe effects of piped music are seldom considered, there have been agrowing number of complaints in recent years that help us to make theconnection between muzak and Abu Ghraib. The negative psychologicaleffects of muzak become most acute during the consumer frenzy ofChristmas, when shop workers and harassed consumers, bullied from allsides into spending beyond their means or needs, are subjected to anendless stream of inane Christmas songs. Some have likened thisbombardment to a kind of psychological torture. A spokesman forPipedown, the anti-muzak pressure group said Christmas muzak is“..acoustic torture ..it's not loud but therepetitive nature causes psychological stress”14.Meanwhile, an Austrian shopworker's union has tried to limit theamount of time shops are allowed to play festive music each day,claiming it is a health and safety issue. A union representative toldreporters that “..shop workers can't escape theChristmas muzak. They feel as if they are terrorised all day.Especially Jingle Bells. It arouses aggressive feelings”15.
Andso, the soundtrack to so much of our experience of public space isrevealed as a scientifically engineered instrument to pacify apotentially unruly workforce and to narcotise the consumer. Music'sabilities to connect with the emotions and to alter our psychologicalstate are being exploited and perverted in a number of ways in avariety of locations, from office or commercial spaces to clandestineinterrogation cells. What we generally consider to be a harmless formof creative expression becomes a tool, coldly employed in themanipulation and control of populations, numb from the constantstimulus of programmed information.
Iagain imagine the musicians of Joujouka, dressed in dusty djellabas,pounding hand drums, fire music from broken saxophones. They arejoined by drummers from Burundi and Kerala, Tibetan monks from remotemountaintops blow trumpets carved from the thighbones of dead saints,bleary eyed kids with whistles and pans, punks with electric guitarsmodified for maximum feedback. Sound systems mounted on trucks blastnon repetitive beats unleashing crazed movement, fearsome wardancing.All are collaborators in a spontaneous sonic uprising that intends toawaken us from our collective dream. The streets fill with people, wecongregate in the centres of power, in prisons and militaryinstallations, banks and marketplaces, we reclaim public space andfill it with an unpredictable and invigorating noise, a musick thatembodies the creative power of humanity, harnessed and concentratedto banish the evil spirits that haunt the modern world.
Jones released sections of these recordings as the infamous album Brian Jones Presents The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka. (1971) Rolling Stones Records.
Leary describes his stay in the village in a chapter entitled “The Four Thousand Year Old Rock 'n' Roll Band: A Memory Experienced” in Leary, T. (1970) Jail Notes London: New English Library.
If this sounds like an unlikely alliance, check out White-Out: The CIA, Drugs & the Press, Cockburn, A. & St. Clair, J. (1998) London: Verso, for a comprehensive analysis of the CIA's involvement in the global drugs trade.
Cusick, S. (2006) “Music as Torture/Music as a Weapon” in Trans: Transcultural Music Review #10, December 2006 available at http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/indice10.htm
Stafford Smith, C. (2008) “Welcome to the Disco” The Guardian;Thursday, June 19th 2008
“Sesame Street breaks Iraqi POWs”, 20 May 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3042907.stm
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/12/19/afghan12319_txt.htm
McCoy, A. W. (2006) A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror New York: Owl Books
Snap Crackle And Pop Elves
For extended discussion of this dark period in history, have a look at Lee, M. & Shlain, B. (1994) Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond New York: Grove Press, or John Marks' equally frightening The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate': The CIA & Mind Control, the Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences (1991) New York: Norton
Cusick, S. (2006) “Music as Torture/Music as a Weapon” in Trans: Transcultural Music Review #10, December 2006 available at http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/indice10.htm
Cusick, S. (2006) “Music as Torture/Music as a Weapon” in Trans: Transcultural Music Review #10, December 2006 available at http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/indice10.htm
Snap Crackle And Pop Physics
http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/articles/muzak.html
Snap Crackle And Pop Physics Uses
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