The Sound-Sweep

Ballard, J. G. "The Sound-Sweep". Science Fantasy 39 (Jan. 1960). Collected, The Complete Short Stories. London: Flamingo, 2001 (Sellars, note 1). Also The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard vol. 1. 2006. The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard. New York: Norton, 2010.

Summarized by Simon Sellars in "Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment," Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009, pp. 82-7, linked below,

In JG Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’,[1] the sonic strata of everyday urban life – a ‘frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines’[2] – is so without respite that it is literally embedded within walls and surfaces and must be vacuumed away with a device called the ‘sonovac’. The central character, Mangon, is a mute who has developed hyperacute hearing, making him a valued sound-sweep. His main client is Madame Gioconda, an ex-opera singer whose career ended with the advent of ‘ultrasonic music’. Ultrasonic producers electronically rescore classical symphonies into musical notation that operates on a subliminal level, making use of the sensorium beyond the normal range of the human ear. Supposedly the new music, ostensibly silent, has richer texture, theme and emotion, but whether this is merely a placebo effect to placate the frazzled masses remains ambiguous.

Mangon strives to resurrect Gioconda’s career, but when he does eventually stage her comeback, she botches it, her voice so [...] out of tune that it causes great distress to all who hear it. The story ends with Mangon driving off in his sound truck as he turns on the vehicle’s inbuilt sonovac – filled with the city’s sonic detritus – to drown out Gioconda [...].

Discussed briefly and placed into the context of a larger motif in "The Technology of Omniscience: Past Viewers in Science Fiction".

See for the sonovac and ultrasonic music and humans embedded in a world of sound, frequently related to technology.

RDE, Initial Compiler