Naturally a carrier of emotions, music has also become over the course of XXe century an instrument of manipulation, even a weapon of control: this is the process that Juliette Volcler describes in the work she devotes to the trajectory and research of the little-known sound engineer Harold Burris-Meyer.
Editorial Coordinator of the journal Syntone dedicated to sound, independent researcher, Juliette Volcler is the author of a fascinating book, Control. How the art of sound manipulation was invented. The work follows another, published in 2011 in the same collection, Sound as a weapon. Police and military uses of soundwhich proposed a genealogy of acoustic repression. Control seeks to broaden the point of view to other fields, industry or art. The “Sound Culture” collection of La Découverte, published in collaboration with the Cité de la musique/Philharmonie de Paris, publishes studies taking sound as a specific object, through a transdisciplinary approach. Its editorial line seems largely inspired by Sound studiesa multi-disciplinary approach studying sound in its various manifestations, including Jonathan Sterne’s flagship book, For a history of sound modernitywas recently translated in this same collection.
The subject of Juliette Volcler’s book revolves around a central figure, Harold Burris-Meyer (1902-1984), a little-known sound engineer who nevertheless embodies, according to the author, sound modernity. Juliette Volcler does not hesitate to affirm in her Foreword :
Harold Burris-Meyer is the sound of XXe century. He is its technician and its dreamer, its illusionist and its salesman, its warrior and its diplomat (page 7).
The character thus serves as a common thread to traverse the century, offering an overview of the first experiments conducted to analyze and measure the influence of sound on behavior. The author focuses on “the industrial phase of control”, “the moment when technology, driven by the capitalist system, became an instrument of domination to shape a relationship with the world that still prevails today in Western countries” (page 9). Three aspects are addressed in this sort of genealogy of sound control: theater, industry and war. The interest of the book lies as much in the central character, Burris-Meyer, as in the rapprochement of these different fields.
Theatre as a sound laboratory
It all began in the theater. Burris-Meyer worked on staging. He was particularly interested in the role of sound in dramaturgy. At a time when radio was entering every home and cinema was becoming “talkies”, Burris-Meyer deplored the fact that sound in the theater was not receiving the attention it deserved. In 1930, he introduced a first spectacular innovation. For the 50th anniversary of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Stevens Institute, a private university specializing in mechanical engineering, was responsible for staging a historical fresco of technical progress with an evocative title: Control. For the occasion, Burris-Meyer played orchestral music through loudspeakers, a practice that was unprecedented in the theater. He then realized that sound had a direct influence on the spectators, on their bodily attitudes as well as on their inner state (page 22).
It is this simple observation that will decide everything else: whether through sound realism or acoustic illusion, the use of new techniques makes it possible to manipulate people, their emotions, their reactions, their behaviors. Burris-Meyer will thus participate in the development of the “Stevens Sound Control System”, completed in 1940, which can take charge of 6 sound sources, mix them in stereo and project the result through 8 speakers, to faithfully reproduce the impression of sound sources, to play with displacement effects. With the control of the sound spectrum, distance, direction, movement and dynamics of sound, synthetic voice, infrasound or reverberation, or even with the invention of the Surround soundit is always the same conviction that drives Burris-Meyer. Sound is an effective means of producing an adapted response. Electronic means allow the artist to do what he wants with the sound, or with the listener. It is possible to manipulate the audience by simple operations, for example by recording applause at the moment when the audience applauds, which encourages the assembly to redouble its efforts in the ovation. The theater thus presents itself to Burris-Meyer as the best research laboratory for sound manipulation.
Muzak and sound design
Juliette Volcler outlines a genealogy of the sound designwhere audio productions using the means of art are mobilized to meet industrial objectives. It is therefore quite logical that the second part of the book focuses on the industrial domain. Burris-Meyer brings together these two fields, often opposed, in the same perspective, whose vanishing point is efficiency and profitability. Art is no longer an end in itself, but becomes a consumer product, asserts Juliette Vocler. In the second part of the book, the author traces in particular the history of Musicwith which Burris-Meyer collaborated very early on, and of which he became vice-president between 1943 and 1947. The company Music is dedicated to creating sound ambiances for public or private institutions: music intended to be heard, not listened to, the author rightly specifies. The work concerns both sound content, from which all speech is notably removed, as well as sequences and the way of linking them, according to the clientele or target audience.
With Musicbehaviorism and marketing are invading the musical field, believes Juliette Vocler. Intended to increase the well-being of employees or the willingness of consumers to buy, background music has today become a tool for shaping behaviors. But Music also invested in the industrial environment very early on, offering music to provide rhythm to the workers’ work. Juliette Vocler thus recalls that British factories were equipped with loudspeakers from 1940, and that the BBC provides them with a program called “Music While Working,” designed to increase production. For Juliette Vocler, this is nothing more or less than disciplinary music, allowing a dual control of emotion and time, giving the impression that work is easier and passes more quickly, supporting the worker when his enthusiasm slackens or calming him when he is a little too excited. The term “disciplinary” seems particularly appropriate when we know that comparable techniques have been implemented for treatment in psychiatric hospitals, by the same company Music.
The war
These sound control techniques also take place in the context of war: music serves as much to stimulate war production as to repair the men returning from the front. War is the third part of Controlthe book’s culmination point. Juliette Volcler recalls that the technologies tested in the theater, the sound control system developed in an industrial environment, the machines and their designers, were requisitioned in 1941 by the American army as part of the war effort, with the aim of creating new weapons and thinking up new tactics. We therefore find Burris-Meyer putting on his uniform, thinking about the uses of sound to detect, disconcert, trouble, frighten or annoy the enemy. In addition to the construction of sound sources of the highest intensity ever conceived, the author reports on the various experiments carried out around the idea of sound decoys, with a view to producing and broadcasting the noise of a phantom army to deceive the enemy.
This section is particularly interesting and highly topical. It shows that sound, understood as matter, can be used as a means to directly affect individuals through the physical effects it causes: unbearable or inaudible, sounds affect our mental processes, our behavior or our internal balance. Sound as a weapon takes on particular meaning with the emergence of non-lethal weapons, which do not aim to kill but to modify behavior. Juliette Volcler’s approach thus seems largely inspired by Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, where power is no longer exercised over territories but over the bodies of individuals.
Juliette Volcler’s book is instructive and stimulating. Written as a story, it has the advantage of being easy to read. Its disadvantage is that it sometimes tends to simplify things. One might have the feeling that Burris-Meyer’s portrait is in some respects a caricature: interested, apolitical, he fulfills his role as a clerk of big capital.
Several assertions are also largely debatable. For example, that in 1930, theatre was ahead of cinema in the staging of sound, while borrowing recording techniques from cinema, or that with Walt Disney’s first film to use sound, Steamboat Williein 1928, “the whole story was transformed by sound and centered on it” (page 26). Certainly, sound transforms the story but it cannot be said that in this case it forms the heart of the story, because it comes to illustrate the image. The author states in her Foreword to study “sound as such”, because she considers it as a material and not as a support for a discourse. However, whether in cinema or in theater, and although Burris-Meyer begins to dream of an autonomous sound art, emancipated from the visual component, sound always comes to redouble or evoke an image, even when it is to create sound lures. From this point of view, theater is well behind cinema, which had already desynchronized sound and image to think of sound in its autonomy. Throughout J. Volcler’s book, sound only has meaning to the extent that it comes to reproduce a reality, even a fictional one. In this sense, one can wonder whether sound is truly approached “as such” here.
On another level, sound as a weapon is presented as an invention of late capitalism; the book Sonic Warfare Steve Goodman’s article nevertheless reminds us that the use of sound for military purposes has a long history.
Similarly, when it comes to controlling emotions, one might wonder whether even classical music does not aim precisely to directly touch the public, to mobilize and play on emotions, to control the masses. But this raises a whole series of questions, which the author does not really address: what ultimately creates a break between the uses of sound analyzed in the book and the more classical uses of sound? Isn’t the orchestra already an army on the march and the symphony a weapon of mass destruction?