Notes on the Third Ear / Phantom Lure

Two original essays scrutinize the use of acoustic camouflage and the outer limits of unsound.

In Phantom Lure Angus Carlyle explores the ways in which the frequency spectrum can become a site for disguise and deception. Acoustic camouflage is deployed in the concrete curves of sound mirrors, military battlefield sensors, and snipers’ sonic concealment tactics, but also in the silent steps of the hunter and the mimicry of duck calls, antler rattles, and fox flutes.

This trail of decoys leads us into forensic acoustic analysis, electronic voice phenomena, and music encrypted with secret signals—from Metal Gear Solid to "Windowlicker," from moths’ thoraxes to horror-film whispers, from Silent Escape to Turing tests and vocoders.

In Notes on the Third Ear Steve Goodman plunges further into the thresholds of audibility and the Janus-faced instrumentalization of vibration involved in sonic warfare. Taking cues from the lore surrounding Nguyễn Văn Phong, an elusive Vietnamese bio-acoustician alleged to have influenced several US psyops campaigns, and folding in the friction and fabulations of his own experiences as an artist, Goodman charts the outskirts of aurality with an inventory of the tones, booms, blasts, bleeps, roars, hisses, and purrs that populate the liminal space between art and war, attack and defense, destruction and healing, detection and deception, aggression and seduction, fear and delight, signal and camouflage, the ferocious and the cute. In an era marked by the auricular multiplication of machine listening, three ears is the absolute minimum.

An Urbanomic K-Pulp Switch: singular texts by two different authors in a classic pulp format.

About the Author :
Steve Goodman is a Lecturer in Music Culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), and the founder of the record label Hyperdub and the sub label Flatlines to focus on audio essays and sonic fiction.

Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape at University of the Arts London. He studied law as an undergraduate, completed a masters in political theory, and a doctorate on the conditions of vocalised political exchange. With Cathy Lane, he co-wrote the oral histories In the Field (2013) and Sound Arts Now (2021). His creative work shifts between a documentary impulse and a more poetic register, and has involved collaborations with anthropologists, and filmmakers in documentary, field recording, and experimental writing projects.