Sounds for the End of the World
Cold War Epistemologies and the Sonic Imaginary
Sounds for the End of the World: Cold War Epistemologies and the Sonic Imaginary explores the relationship between acoustic technology, ecological destruction, and knowledge production in both the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War. Using archival research, historical acoustics, and methods from Science and Technology Studies, I argue that militarized sound technologies reconfigured geopolitical relations in the twentieth century. My case studies include underwater acoustics and submarine technologies in the wake of WWII, psychoacoustics and mind control, and nuclear testing to uncover the ways state power turned to sound as a means of global surveillance. Ultimately, this project positions what I call the “sonic Cold War” alongside the period’s lasting historical consequences for our environment and society today.
This project draws on questions asked in my first book, Socialist Noise: Sound and Soviet Identity after Stalin to consider how sound and auditory experience shape how individuals interact with the world around them. Whereas Socialist Noise explores this through questions of Soviet ideology and socialist citizenship, Sounds for the End of the World places aural experience within a broader epistemological framework for the twentieth century: what happens when an empiricism rooted in sight fails, and researchers must rely on aural confirmation of events? This was especially important given the secrecy—and need for clandestine technologies—between the global superpowers during the Cold War. Nuclear testing, ship and submarine movements, and espionage all relied on sonic technologies—Geiger counters, piezoelectric microphones, marine acoustics, and sound recording devices—as much as they did visual. Yet sound also proved challenging to scientists who were trained in visual methods of confirmation: a trust in that which they could see above all else. In asking these questions, Sounds for the End of the World upends long-held beliefs that twentieth-century science were rooted in what Martin Jay has called the “scopic regime of modernity” following the European Enlightenment.