Month: May 2023

During the Vietnamese War, the US devised several uses of psychological warfare tactics, or psy-ops. Perhaps the most famous of these is known as Operation Wandering Soul, or ‘Ghost Tape 10’. In Vietnamese culture, honoring the dead and ensuring that they have a proper burial is extremely important, otherwise the dead will continue to roam the Earth as ‘Wandering Soul’. Knowing this, the US created a sound piece in which the ‘voices of the dead’ can be heard crying out over a soundscape composed of eerie field recordings. They would play this out of speakers, nicknamed ‘the clanger’, in areas where Viet-Cong were active in order to try and scare them out of hiding. Although the operation was not a success, and they stopped using the technique in the early 1970s, the tape itself has allowed me to think about the concept of control using sound, especially in relation to auralism. 

My interest in psy-ops, and psychological warfare in general, speaks to my greater interest in control. This is also where the inspiration I take from fetish and from operations like Wandering Soul come together, as I find these different methods of control useful to think about. For Voice Pigs, I wanted to interrogate the link between control, trauma and sexuality hence why I interviewed a dominatrix whose subs fetish is held in sexual trauma. In terms of Operation Wandering Soul, the reason why the US army believed it would work is because of the beliefs that the Viet-Cong hold over the dead. For someone to be controlled by sound, specifically the noise rather than what is actually being said, there has to be some element of trauma attached to it. In Voice Pigs, it is that the singing the dominatrix performs for the sub is the same as songs his mother would sing to him. This comes from a space where he, clearly, is unable to process his relationship with his mother and how this manifests into his sexuality. In terms of Wandering Soul, I find the link between the ways in which traumatic sounds can be used to control someone and how being forced to listen to a sound can elicit various responses fascinating.  

The tape itself is a mixture of ambient sound and crying voices. One of a young girl sobbing for her father, another of a soldier telling his friends that he has returned to announce his death. All of them are lost souls, their voices distorted against the ambient grain of the tape. However, what the voices are saying can all clearly be heard. Although the US claimed that the operation was a success, there is no evidence to support this claim. Instead, it has been reported that the Viet-Cong knew that Wandering Soul was a recording. Therefore, they fired and revealed their snipers hiding spots which was not the intention behind the tape. That was, rather, to get the Viet-Cong to leave by tricking them into thinking that their dead were coming back to haunt them. To me, it is a point of interest to consider how using someones loved ones against them can be a form of control and to privilege the superstitions that come alongside this. 

A girl lies on her side with two contact mics attached to her stomach. She announces in the video’s title that there is an entire rotisserie chicken inside of her, which she is going to be digesting. The contact mics pick up the sounds of grumbling and growling. Although this is not inherently sexual, the comments are filled with people timestamping the video with the best sounds or the times when the stomach is loudest as well as people lamenting that they would like to be eaten by the person. Mostly, the latter comments are focused on wanting to be inside of the stomach. On various porn sites and fetish forums, people swallow gummy bears whole and film the digestion process with a microphone attached, people who endeavor to eat the most amount of food possible and then listen to it digest. While the community appears to have much overlap with those who are into vore (being swallowed), they are specifically attracted to the sounds of stomachs, and how stomachs digest or hold objects.

While looking at different kinds of auralism, or concepts which have auralist potential, I stumbled across a short clip of a woman swallowing a hundred marbles and using an internal microphone, as well as contact mics, to record the sound of them sloshing and clinking inside of her as they roll about. At one point, she rolls onto her side and the marbles tip over themselves inside of her creating a very loud sound. Here, she is conducting a kind of ‘object vore’, but one where people can imprint their own ideas and subjectivity onto the sounds. As has been prevalent throughout my research for Voice Pigs, sound is being used as a method of fetish, and in particular a form of paraphilia. 

For Voice Pigs, as I have constantly reiterated, the piece is focused on auralism and the ways in which someone can be controlled by sound alone. Digestion fetishists became interesting to think about because of the specificity of the sounds that are erotic to them. I would have loved to interview someone with this fetish, but they are difficult to get into contact with and much of the content I found online is from years ago. However, when conducting the work for Voice Pigs I wanted to have a wide range of sound fetishism to draw from and inform me. Digestion fetishes are strange, and while I struggle to understand the appeal of the sounds I find it fascinating how these everyday sounds can provide such a strong allure.