Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear: by Steve Goodman, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2009, 296 pp., $25.00 (pb), ISBN 9780262517959

There are few texts with a premise as seductive as that of Sonic Warfare, the first monograph by philosopher and musician Steve Goodman. A decade ago, Goodman weaved together a sonic-materialist philosophy with analyses of aesthetic, military, and corporate deployments of sonic weapons. Notably, the work pays attention to the materialism of Afro-diasporic sound system culture, reflecting the author’s own activities in this space as Kode9, a DJ-producer in London, where he contributed to the early development of dubstep and remains the owner-operator of the record label Hyperdub. In this retrospective review, I celebrate ten years since Sonic Warfare’s publication and reflect on its significance to Sound Studies.