Sonic God

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The everyday acoustic environment was not merely temporal, it was also spatial, marking out a territory with sound. Music warded off a hostile nature by asserting the presence of humans against the sounds of the wild.

But some sounds could not be tamed. Anthropologists theorize that loud sounds, especially those in the lowest acoustic registers, inspire feelings of awe and dread. Thunder, the ocean, storms, waterfalls, and volcanoes terrified primitive peoples, making them sense that God would soon punish them. This Sonic God was often not only invisible but inaudible, produced by infrasonic phenomena. That God was infrasonic explains why in Judeo-Christian tradition, he is not only invisible but his name is unutterable.

Places of worship and rulers would use church bells, gongs, and the pipe organ to simulate these loud, low-frequency sounds and thereby instill the sensation that God was present.

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