Don't Listen To The Voice That Controls You

The words uttered through her voice can be annoying, super annoying, borderline infuriating.

It's like a dissonant sound that hits my state of consciousness, causing disruptions that make it nearly impossible to focus on anything else.

But this noise isn't so much of a threat that would compel me to take action and remedy the situation. Say forcefully shut it out or move to a place where I wouldn't hear it anymore.

For those unaware, dissonant sounds are harsh, discordant combination of notes that introduces tension onto one's state of consciousness.

They're the musical equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

Compared to a repetitive rhythm, what makes dissonance specifically powerful is how it bypasses our rational sense of self and strikes directly at a deeper core of our primal self.

There's a rhythm and a broken rhythm. The rhythm establishes a pattern, a predictable flow that our minds can follow and find comfort in.

But the broken rhythm keeps breaking it up, creating cognitive dissonance that leaves us perpetually off-balance, waiting for resolution that sometimes never comes.

Upstream Of Reality

An extreme example of this could be seen in movies where a screeching sound is introduced and characters start doing all sorts of madness influenced by this auditory assault.

If I memory serves me well, films like "A Quiet Place" demonstrate how sound can become both salvation and destruction, or how in "Bird Box," it's not what you see but what you hear that can drive you to madness.

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So far, the most interesting example I've seen on this is from the Dune Universe, specifically some of the recent movies that were inspired by the books of Frank Herbert, such as the recent adaptations by Denis Villeneuve.

The Bene Gesserit have this skill of controlling people with the power of their voices and Herbert called it "The Voice."

There's a certain tone, inflection point with their voices that makes the victim of this power do whatever the voice asked it to do, even if it means killing himself or herself.

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And while that is happening, people like me are wondering where the self has disappeared to, or is it merely submerged beneath layers of acoustic manipulation?

I'm trying to simulate what happens to personal agency when it encounters a force that can rewrite the commands our brain gives to our body.

I know it's in the sci-fi realm, so we could dismiss it as pure fantasy.

Subtle Everyday Undercurrents

But it does also seem to me as a reality pushed to its extreme. What I mean by that is we're all influenced by voices and sounds in our daily lives, albeit in a more subconscious than conscious way.

Consider how a parent's tone can instantly change a child's behavior or a lover's whisper melting defenses that logic never could penetrate.

We see this every time in advertising jingles that burrow into our minds. Certain accents make us trust or distrust speakers and music can manipulate our emotions in films without us even realizing it.

Essentially, the human voice carries information far beyond mere words and I think Frank Herbert was revealing to us how we surrender our autonomy to voices without recognizing it's happening.

It could well also be a message about the fragility of free will as the Bene Gesserit make explicitly clear that voice can be a form of psychological warfare.

Prelude For The Future

I'm not sure if there's actually a route to realizing this voice to such extremes at this point in time or whether it even exists in the first place.

The thing with sci-fi is it predicts the future in a way that's eerily prescient through mostly laying the conceptual groundwork for technologies that later become reality.

How they later become reality is left with human ingenuity and this desire to make the impossible inevitable.

But I wouldn't be surprised if such a power becomes a reality in the future, either through artificial means or otherwise.

Wouldn't that make every conversation one has a potential battlefield?


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