Take Down Walls
Around 1440 BC, after Joshua had taken over the leadership of the Israelites from Moses and led them back to conquer Canaan, he spearheaded a sonic assault on the city of Jericho. Surrounded by mountainous terrain, Jericho has always been held as a promised city—a natural oasis in a vast desert.
As the Biblical story goes, the Divine Commander instructed Joshua to lay siege by completing a circuit of the city walls with his army in total silence once a day for six days, and on the seventh day (the number of wholeness and completeness in the Bible) he was to bring seven priests carrying shofars to make the circuit seven times. With the Ark by their side, they were all to blow their horns in unison while the army shouted at the top of their lungs—a sonic boom erupted over the city, a war cry strong enough to break mortar. It was the first ultrasonic bulldozer, the most powerful weapon on Earth.
As Steve Goodman points out in Sonic Warfare, audio artist Gregory Whitehead has created “a hyperstitional research institute” called the . The short radiophonic piece blurs the use of acoustic weaponry by the U.S. military and the language of the Christian Right. According to the institute’s brief, it is aiming to “synchronize the latent vibrational power of these faith networks with an infrasonic sound that formally replicates the voice of God in terms of its frequency range and overall acoustic envelop. We call this process, ‘charging the airspace,’ a process that resembles rubbing on the magic bottle until the genie comes out.”
Indeed, when Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.
