Scarcity and Surplus
Not even secrecy can account for how rare it is to find a sonic document of a nuclear blast. The sheer volume of other material from these tests means that even the smallest lifts of secrecy's veil have generated more visual material and texts than any one person can meaningfully consume and comprehend. So one must turn to other explanations for the paucity of audio records of the bomb.
It's good to begin such speculation by remembering that the images, testimonies, and textual reports we do have of nuclear tests are no mere souvenirs. Documentation was an essential part of nuclear weapons development, producing data for scientists and engineers, evidence for military in their development of war plans, reports for legislators and executives looking for progress from their investments, and of course media for use in managing the bomb's social, psychological, and political effects. Perhaps the relative scarcity of the sonic or aural in this work reveals something about the kind of information these documentation efforts required.
Recorded sound and images certainly came to fulfill differing roles and expectations within 20th century information and media cultures. Whereas we regularly isolate a single photograph for purposes of measurement and identification, sound events present challenges to such an approach. Sound events are dynamic, affording measurement and identification only as a moving record of some change in state. Where recorded image affords the kind of information sought, for example, by Edward Muybridge in his photographs of horses, slicing time into bits, recorded sound offers something more like the images of Etiennes Jules Marey. Images capture states; sound recordings convey flows. (Marey should have been a musician.)
Recorded sound carries more information about change than about the nature of the event that originated that change. The recorded sound of a hand clap tells us something about the hands, but also the air in the room and the room itself. Maybe recorded sound brings the wrong kind of information for the project of nuclear testing, or too much altogether.
We should also not forget that sound, compared to image, acts on us. Sound is always an event, and one that registers through the movement of air, flesh, and bone inside our very bodies. We can receive images more passively; within acceptable limits, they do not leave us changed, where even the smallest sound changes our very state.
