On Sound Unsound 7 of 8

So welcome back to OnSoundOnSound today with Lawrence Abu Hamdan. We are very happy that you could make it today instead of last time. Briefly about Lawrence. So Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a private ear. His interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background as a touring musician and facilitator of DIY music. His audio investigations has been used as evidence at the UK asylum and a migration tribunal and as advocacy for

organizations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International. together with fellow researchers from forensic architecture. Abouhamdon completed his PhD in 2018 from Goldsmith College, University of London, and is currently a fellow at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. Abouhamdon has exhibited his work at the 58th Venice Biennale, the 11th Guanyu Biennale, and the 13th and 14th Sharjah Biennale. Witte de Wyss, Rotterdam, Tate Madden, thanks, Chisendale Gallery, Hammer Museum, LA, Porticus Frankfurt, The Showroom, London and Casco Utrecht.

His work are part of collections at MoMA, Guggenheim, Van Aver Museum, St. Pompidou and Tate Madden. and Abu Hamdan's work has been awarded the 2019 Edward Munch Art Award, the 2016 Namjoon Paik Award for New Media, and in 2017 his film, Rubber Coated Steel, won the Tiger Short Film Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. For the 2019 Turner Prize, Abouhamdon, together with nominated artists Helen Kamak, Oscar Murillo and Taya Shani, formed a temporary collective in order to be jointly granted the award.

So for today, Lawrence Abouhamdon will give a lecture titled Earwitness Inventory. After the lecture, we will have a discussion based on student presentations of around 10 minutes each by Nikita, Orlando and Casio. And we have responses of around five minutes each by Catherine, Lena, Hau, Daniel, Dana and D-Chen. And please write down any questions you might have during the lecture and the presentations, so we can address them in the following discussion. And with that I will leave the word to you, Lawrence. Thank you very much. Can I make a suggestion first that we actually do the lecture followed by the questions to the lecture.

And then, because it's quite late here with the time difference, I think it would be a bit more forgiving. And then if I have to dip out early, I will have to dip out early. I have to have a flight early in the morning. Okay. Yeah. If there are any questions coming up throughout your lecture, then we can have a round after the lecture directly. That would be great. Thank you very much. Good. Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm going to do a talk today about a single project called the Ear Witness Inventory. And that's a project that really is a series of vignettes, short stories

about, I suppose, acoustic memory, acoustic unconscious. through experiences I've had and stories I've been collecting, aggregating. The Ear Witness Inventory is my own personal sound effects library. And there was a necessity to make the sound effects library after participating in an investigation into a prison called Seidnaya prison that is currently active. It's a Syrian regime prison used exclusively for protesters. It was cleared after 2011,

and it was made exclusively for the protesters who were rising up against the regime in 2011. What was happening there and what was going on inside the prison was occluded by the fact that there had been no independent observers to the place. No one was allowed access. And even those who were in the prison, who had survived it, who had escaped it, were only really ear witnesses to the event because they, were blindfolded as they moved into the space and then they would spend their entire sentence in one cell. So sounds coming into the cell, leaking in, was simultaneously both a strategy

to torture them, to produce greater kind of collateral damage when one person has struck many others, hear the sound. But at the same time, it also kind of forced these detainees to become extremely acute listeners, to develop acute strategies to listen. And after interviewing them, I kind of understood what Primo Levi writes when he say that to survive the camps witnessing was as fundamental an act as eating, as any other elemental needs. That the demand to witness surpassed and or was equal to needs that are otherwise elemental,

such as food, water. So here it's also true and in this case the category of witness is a kind of ear witness. They're really speaking to the sounds that leaked into their cell and from those sounds we try to solicit as much information as we put about what was happening inside. Those interviews happened in April 2016 in Turkey and I was asked by Amnesty International to do those interviews. The results of those interviews ended up in the Amnesty report that later that summer. And then when that report was released it became very clear to me that some of the most

lucid moments of that testimony um some of the ways that they had really kind of changed the way and my brain in fact um some of the ways they'd really affected my fundamental concerns about the relationship to of sound to violence of sound to architecture of sound to memory all these things um what i thought about them going into this interviews and what I thought coming out were entirely transformed. And so after the Amnesty Report, I set about a series of works trying to reflect on that kind of conceptual transformation, trying to encapsulate it, trying to find a language for it,

because none of those things were present in the Human Rights Report. They weren't containable to the kind of language and space and time that human rights affords. It's kind of truth producing mechanism. So I needed to develop my own kind of system by which we could hear these testimonies and hear them for what they offer beyond the violations that were done to those people. in the sense that I didn't want to just make works that reinforced the ways in which the kind of human rights gaze fell upon those subjects in the sense that this isn't terrible

what's happening in this one place in Syria. What they had to say was so much more remarkable and people who really experienced something at the threshold really can tell you something about the way power functions, right? And the way it functions not only for them in that one place, but actually for all of us. And so I set about trying to sort of translate that into works and trying to create the conditions to kind of hear those testimonies in the ways which I thought were more adept at capturing those kind of lessons or understanding them as kind of experts in their field in a different way. And so I made three works. One was The Missing 19 Decibels that reflect on the kind of state

of silence in the prison. One called World Unwalled, a film which you can watch on YouTube, and that sort of reflect on the way they made me question the semiotics of walls and the material conditions of walls. And another last piece called the Ear Witness Inventory, which is both a kind of work of art, but also a tool. When I was doing the interviews, what I experienced was that we were at a loss of words, essentially. we had about three or four ways of describing sound that did not meet the precision at which

and the attenuation and the kind of augmented states of their listening capacities. So you had people who had acute abilities to hear and listen, but extremely poor language to describe it. And I think in general that was something of interest to me because of a few reasons. One, because somehow what they endured was also unspeakable. So sound met with the kind of violence they endured, forced a kind of articulation of a language, forced a great production of language. And I started feeling that maybe if we could find a

language for one sound, that the other could start to kind of be heard as well. And so So there was that, but it was also interesting because on a broader scale of thinking about the way that earwitness testimony is often marginalized, and marginalized despite its prevalence, right? So ear witness testimony is in fact the most common form of testimony, right? Because the way that, of course, sound function within a kind of crime scene or a site of an event, because it spills, because it leaks beyond who was meant to be its intended audience.

And of course, a witness as a kind of unintended audience, that's, I mean, that could be another kind of translation for a witness, right? So if we think of any of the most high profile trials over the last 10 years, a lot of them hinged on sound. Right. Even historically. So it's not a kind of niche category, but it is incredibly underlooked. and it's often treated in courtrooms and police interview rooms and these sites as a kind of poor version of eyewitness testimony. It's treated with the same form of, the memories are solicited in the same way as eyewitness testimony,

but it's just assumed that it's a kind of worse category of testimony. and you see quite often that the language that's around in a courtroom is also very poor for discerning those sounds often sounds are just left at their kind of most elemental state like a loud banging was heard right it was the same saying I heard a I saw a bright color that's saying a loud banging, right? It's extremely vague. And I feel if someone said they saw a bright color, there would be a sort of series of follow-up questions, right? What color? Where was the color? It's just that when it comes to sound, that level of scrutiny is not there.

And that's interesting based on the, as I said, explaining for the kind of prevalence of it as a form of testimony. So basically, you know, going back to those interviews, what I had done in order to kind of account for that lack of language to describe sound was to use Warner Brothers and BBC sound effects libraries, knowing that they're incredibly imprecise, knowing that they're incredibly theatrical at times, but at least it would sort of start to guide language. And playing those sounds didn't necessarily get us closer to words

to describe that, but it became the kind of foundations of the production of language between us. So from that sound, other sounds started to be mouthed or enacted in the space or, you know, the difference between the sort of cinema sound and the one that we would sort of reproduce in the space before it started to create some kind of precision in and amongst the the sounds we were listening to so between the kind of mouth sounds the getting pens and whatever we had in front of us and and making sounds um that it seemed to me that these sound effects were actually very useful in that sense but they were just too uh they weren't precise enough for what i was after

and i started thinking well how do film sound effect studios produce their library of of objects that that produce sounds um they produce them because let's say they're working on a film about robots so then they'll have a little box of like electric toothbrushes and whatever else it is that they use to make those sounds. And then they'll do like, I don't know, like some kind of Robin Hood film and then they'll have like horse stuff and leather and weird metal things. And then later there'll be a kind of film where it's necessary to get the electric toothbrush and the kind of horse implement and put them together in some strange and unexpected way that they hadn't conceived of before their initial use.

so I needed my own kind of library that would be a tool for which I could solicit the memories of ear witnesses that was the impetus that I would rather than using Warner Brothers and BBC library I would actually use my own collection of objects and sounds and to accumulate them what I did was gather sort of At this point, I think it's like 98 ways in which witnesses use objects to describe and account for the sounds they heard in a given event. So this is a sound effects library essentially derived from the ways in which witnesses have described kind of real events.

I'm going to kind of lead you through those objects and tell the stories of a couple of them. Each object is in there for each object has its kind of testimony behind it in a way. And I'm going to give you a kind of selection of some of those objects. And through that, you'll sort of see through these small vignettes and short stories, you'll see, I suppose, the range at which this sort of collection of objects speaks to the production of a kind of acoustic unconscious or acoustic memory. So I would start with the aluminium step ladder. The metallic staircase leading to the guards' room in the central atrium of Saibnaya Prison became one of the ways we could try to approximate in which area of the prison

former detainees had been held. The witnesses I interviewed never saw this staircase, but they heard the resonant metallic tone of the guards ascending or descending the steps countless times throughout the course of the day. It was during my interview with Salam that it first occurred to me that I could try to use this sound as a way to locate his cell, and therefore determine from what perspective and proximity he could have heard other sounds in the prison. In the middle of the interview, I flipped open the laptop and typed metal stairs into a search engine for the Warner Brothers and BBC sound effects library. 245 entries came up. I quickly scanned the list. Footstep, metal stairs, cross country ski boot,

leather, no ski, right step. Low resonant metal stair. A body falling down a flight of metal stairs. Metal stairs, women, thin high heel shoes, fast steps. And then it jumped out at me. footsteps metal male sneakers up stairs i booted up the file and played it for salam salam tilted his head paused and then said it was too forceful or too loud but the essence of metallic impact was similar i lowered the volume and added reverb to soften it making it appear more distant he seemed a little more satisfied we both put on the headphones and i asked him to imagine he was in his cell facing the door. I told him I was going to move the sound from left to right and that he should signal when the sound got to the position he remembered it coming from.

He closed his eyes. I looped the sound and slowly panned across the stereo field. Increments before I reached the furthest right position of the pan control, he raised his left hand to stop. The needle of the sonic compass was pointing north-west. Cricket bats. The trial of the athlete Oscar Pistorius was dedicated to discovering if he had intended to shoot Riva's team camp through the bathroom wall or as if Pistorius claimed he had in fact believed he was shooting an armed intruder behind the bathroom door. Earwitnesses living in neighboring compounds said they heard voices shouting and arguing before they heard the gunfire.

The story has testified that after he realized it was steam camp he had shot by accident, it was he who screamed in panic and grabbed a cricket bat to smash through the locked door. During the cross-examination of the earwitnesses to the crime, a replica of this bathroom door was brought into the courtroom, and the forensic audio expert, armed with a cricket bat, began to beat it many times. This deafening this clamor was made to demonstrate that a cricket bat striking a wooden door could produce a deafening sound as intense as the blast of a gunshot. The cricket bat blast punctuated a line of questioning that sought to place a seed of doubt in the ears of the witnesses. Had they heard Steenkamp's shouts followed by gunfire

or Pistorius's scream followed by the sound of a bat striking a door. This demonstration turned the courtroom into a makeshift sound effects studio and the expert witness into a foley artist. Though his performance was billed as a forensic reenactment, what it actually achieved was a demonstration of the deceitful and illusory nature of sound, where clearly distinct and conventionally unassociated objects like guns and cricket bats become interchangeable and indistinguishable. Green Coconuts The sound effects in wildlife documentaries are extremely over the top. The loud slurp of a polar

bear licking its paw has always removed me from the arctic circle and brought me to imagine some human in a dim, echo-less basement recording studio surrounded by peculiar objects which they endlessly flick, flail, brush, strike, and squeeze into microphones. Paradoxically, I rarely ever wonder about the labor of sound effects artists in works of pure fiction like Game of Thrones. I only learned quite lately that in Game of Thrones it was revolutionary for use of green coconuts rather than watermelons for its decapitations. As many of us have never heard a real decapitation, I think that green coconuts sound more like human heads to us than

human heads actually do, meaning that if we were to hear a human head instead of a green coconut, we may not be so convinced. there was a there was one scene in game of thrones in which the sound effects did shatter my suspension of disbelief it was not the rattling growl of a dragon or the stomps of a giant ice zombie but rather the very simple gesture of one character closing a door as i heard this door shut i had an acoustic flashback i had heard that exact door sound somewhere before it was in fact the same stock door closing track I had played to Jamal from the Warner Brothers sound effects library during the investigation into Saeed Naya prison. This was enough to completely uncouple

the sound from the images in the TV show and transport me back to the moment in the interview. Lawrence. Jamal, is this the sound of the door? Plays door sound. Jamal, no, it has a more metallic sound. Maybe if we watch a film where a prison door gets closed, you'd get the sound which I'm talking about. What about this one? I played door sound number two, the one I heard in Game of Thrones. It's close but not quite right. I know where we can find the exact sound. After I got released from Saignaia, I became a refugee in Turkey and was looking for an apartment in Istanbul. I visited an apartment located on the top floor of a building and the apartment had a metal door so that burglars wouldn't break in. Metal door made the exact same sound

as the one I was telling you about from Site 9. As soon as I opened the door, I instantly told the guy, I cannot live in this apartment. It made the exact same sound. If we had time today, I would take you there so you could hear the cell doors of Site 9. Ice cream truck music box. On January 17, 2005, Fabian Bengtsson, a Swedish electronics executive, was kidnapped and kept in a narrow wooden case for 17 days before he was released. Bengtsson never saw his kidnappers or the place he was held, but the sound of the assailant's voices leaked through the walls of the wooden box, along with other acoustic signifiers.

Most importantly for the subsequent police investigation, Bankson had memorized what time the jingling song of an ice cream truck passed on the street outside every morning. This information was key in enabling investigators to find the apartment where he'd been held and to locate and convict the kidnappers. The story, which was widely circulated by Swedish news agencies, caught the ears of Anders Eriksson, forensic phonetician at the University of Gothenburg and his student Lisa Oman. They realized that although countless experimental studies had been conducted into the veracity of eyewitness testimony, there was very little research in relation to the memories of ear witnesses. This motivated for them to conduct a major study into the reliability of auditory memories.

They tested a total of 949 people for their ability to blindly identify human voices. The decision to focus on the human voice recognition means that to this day there has been no major study of ear witness memories of non voice based acoustic stimuli. Chibbz. While we were attempting to reconstruct the sound of the door of Samel's ring in Saed Naya, I began playing him filmic sound effects of metal doors, but none of the door sounds I played satisfied Samel's acoustic memory. He kept telling me to raise the volume. The sounds were getting louder and louder until finally I played him the sound of a huge metal door slamming with the reverb set to Notre Dame Cathedral.

Upon hearing this, Samma was taken aback. He stopped me and said this sound was present inside night. This was the exact sound of the door, but the sound of sheets of bread being dropped to the ground outside my cell. From the weight of the sound, I could tell if it was 5, 8, 10, or 20 sheets. Some time after the interview, I conducted a test dropping packs of Arabic bread to the ground, which conferred to me that which is written in the laws of physics. That is, even 20 sheets of bread landing on the ground could not make such a vast sound. However, it was not the laws of physics that were at work here. Samer's complete conviction that this was the exact sound of food arriving made me understand that we were not talking about the intensity of sound, but inadvertently the intensity of hunger.

Metal door instrument with fold-out scissor slide feature. There exists many historical cases of the sounds of doors and locks being embedded as part of the torture process. Basques tortured by the Spanish describe el sarrojo as one of the most terrifying and damaging acts, that is the rapid and repeating bolting and unbolting of the door in order to keep them in a state of anticipation. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of Soviet gulag describes how in Russia, guards were trained to slam the door in as jarring way as possible, or to close it in equally unnerving silence. The doors inside Naya prison had a similar effect on its survivors.

Diab explained to me that the sound is impossible to erase from his memory. however the sound of the doors was not only used to spread fear Salam and others used it like a sonar an echolocation device that helped him and his fellow detainees locate the position of the guards Salam's comprehensive account of the sound of the cell doors is what allowed us to approximate how many cells were in use in his wing and one of the many details that made it possible for Amnesty to estimate how many prisoners were being incarcerated at that time Salam, this is a quote So every cell door, he said, and there are 10 cells in our wing, had a unique sound. What we would do is memorize those sounds to know which cell door was being opened. I memorized them in sequence first. So for example, the guards would open the first cell door and we'd say, that is the

sound of door number one. And we memorized the way that next door sounded different to the first door and so on and so on. After some time, we would know the distinct sound of each door. So if the guards opened a door randomly, we'd know, for example, it is door number three because of a particular squeak at the hinges or attack sound that would release from the lock. Some doors made harsh sounds, other made softer sounds. Some had specifically rusted locks. You know, each door had its own characteristic. The guards would try to use the door sound to make us think there is more than one of them patrolling the corridor. He did not want to give us the impression that he is alone. So each door had three different locks. We would open two locks at once to make it the same like two different cells of being opened by two different guards simultaneously. He would always think that he would succeed in deceiving us,

but we were onto him. Popcorn Maker At 9.30 on the 13th of August, 2013, a guest at a Florida resort was falling asleep after a long day at Walt Disney World. As she was drifting off, she was disturbed by what sounded like popcorn. These were the early warning sounds that an hour later, the resort would collapse into a hundred foot wide sinkhole. Sesame seeds. Sorry, trays. It was about 13, it was about 18 minutes after midnight.

This is a quote from Alistair Cook's account of the shooting of Bobby Kennedy. It was about 18 minutes after midnight. A few of us strolled over the swinging doors that gave on to the pantry. They had no glass peepholes, but we'd soon hear the pleasant bustle of him, Bobby Kennedy, coming through, as the waiters and the colored chef in his high hat and the busboy or two waited to see him. There was suddenly a banging repetition of a sound that I don't know how to describe, not at all like shots, like somebody dropping a rack of trays. Woollen mattresses. I'm going to do one more from another quote, actually.

Oil cloth. Because both these together are very important. The Bobby Kennedy quote and the oil cloth. It's a quote from Zenia Selenia, five years old in 1941, and she's now a journalist. And this is a quote from the book Last Witnesses, Unchildlike Stories by Svetlana Aleksa. Suddenly, small black planes popped up from somewhere. They circled around our Red Army planes, and something was rattling and booming. The strange noise reached the ground, as if someone was tearing oilcloth or linen fabric, so loud. I didn't know yet that this was the sound the machine gun fire heard from a distance or from high up. So I think in the discussion I want to get to this idea of I didn't know yet.

It's an important distinction that happened in both those last two stories. And I'll just read one last entry into the earwitness inventory and that's yellow pages. In the process of accumulating my own sound effects library, specific to the investigation of ear witness testimony, I've come across many descriptions in which ear witnesses explain the sounds they heard in the negative. It didn't sound like a punch, or not at all like gunshots, or it doesn't sound like something hitting a body. These witnesses know what it was they heard. They do not say I did not hear a punch, but that the punch they heard didn't sound like a punch, meaning that the sound we're expecting to make, which is often conditioned by the sounds they've heard on TV or in the cinema. Currently, one of the most popular punch sound effects for the screen is created by dropping a phone book to the ground.

For many of us, his primary experience of a punch is cinematic. This punch sound has become what we imagine and expect a real punch to sound like. Yet witnesses to real assaults suggest that punches sound quite different. It didn't sound like a punch, but a lighter being thrown to the ground and popping, said a witness in an Oregon courthouse, while another witness to the same punch said it sounded like the noise of cinder block falling on concrete. A New Zealand witness said of a blow he overheard that it sounded like an egg cracking, and a witness in Hastings, UK, described hearing an assault like a watermelon smashing. These are but a few examples I have encountered where witnesses first negate the sound we expect to hear, only to then describe the real sound in terms of an alternate imaginary sound effects of their own devising.

often as it was with the experience of the egg that the egg is repeated so many times along inside the testament that it appears possible to separate the sound of the egg indeed the apparition of the egg itself from the event they've witnessed our experience our experience and memories of acoustic violence is completely convolved with the production of sound effects to the extent that watermelons, eggs, cinder blocks, leather handbags, a rack of trays and a cigarette lighter are not simply objects that describe an event. They are themselves devices by which memories are encoded, stored, recalled and retrieved. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Lawrence. So do we have any questions that pop up during the lecture? Either write in the chat or just speak out. I can ask a question. Please. Just maybe it's kind of more of a thought, but it's, I guess, responding to your question at the outset in terms of like how do we explain or understand the way in which sort of testimony or evidence from sound data or sonic data differs from how we treat the

kind of visual evidence visual testimony and so on so i was kind of like trying to get go through this thought and like i think there's a lot of different aspects but i think maybe one interesting idea here is that with sound we can almost never identify uh in a way that um we can with or we tend to with visual data but we can identify that there's a presence with sound but perhaps not what the specific uh kind of cause of that is in terms of its identity. And this kind of comes back to your last point when you were talking about the idea that sound is, you know, it kind of, when you experience something through sonic data,

you then wait for a confirmation about what it is, the kind of not yet of the sound or something. So yeah, I don't know. just I'm not sure whether this comes down to like the fact that we've just you know whether it's a natural fact or whether it's kind of a social or cultural fact or you know whether that even matters to or whether we can say it's distinctively one or the other but yeah I was just kind of I was just yeah thinking I think like the question of identity versus presence or like maybe visibility versus presence but obviously visibility is is kind of ready in a different domain to send might be a way of trying to understand this yeah i mean i think that's a it's um it's a great point but i disagree in the sense that um i think we do i mean from my

experience and and specifically also in this case um where the guy uh salam can actually identify each different lock. He's going to teach himself to identify what each different lock sounds like. Those are the same locks, right? Each door has the identical lock on it, but of course, no two locks sound the same, other kind of conditions. And he identified those factors in order to survive. So I think, of course, we can have the same precision or point of origin or definition. But I think it demands new techniques by which to speak to sound.

And I think we need to find techniques which are continuous with the medium of sound, right? Because I think as long as we continually try to apply it with the same logics in which we think visibility and we think the kind of point of origin you describe, right, I think it will always just be a crapper sense. It will always just be a worse sense. And what I've experienced is that it's entirely rich. Like, again, so I mean, I put these two examples next to each other, right? So the sound of being able to identify with perfect precision each lock next to the moment where I was playing the sound of a door and it suddenly becomes the sound of food, a kind of impossibly amplified experience, right?

And we start understanding that the sensory, just like the way that sound behaves in space, was also kind of happening in the sensorial space in some respects, right? Like wires were being crossed. There was frontiers that were bleeding between, let's say, let's say the violence convolved with the door, convolved with the experience of hunger. They've become somehow like sort of one thing. And there was a kind of bleed, an acoustic bleed happening internally in the kind of cortex, if you want. and that again I cannot sort of like underestimate how rich that is as a source of testament because it was the you can tell me you

didn't eat and I can somehow understand that but when if I play you the sound which I sometimes doing talks and sometimes don't i sometimes like you to sort of hear that if i play you that sound and you sort of measure the force somehow of hunger across a completely different spectrum of experience you sort of suddenly you don't get it but it's it's measurable it's you you're kind of like you you you you i don't know how to describe it it's and and so i think you know like i like i try to say that um i think it's about trying to understand or listen for those moments when we speak about sound it's about trying to understand bleed it's about listening

for bleed it's about making patterns of listening to testimony that is continuous with the ways in which it's actually experienced um instead of uh yeah and and i think that's what i'm trying to begin to articulate with this collection of objects, at least it's the very fundamental beginning of that because I'm just kind of accumulating them as stories. But that's my observation through sort of gathering them. And you mentioned this not yet aspect, and I just wanted to touch on that because that too was really important for me because the object is retained despite of knowing what happened afterwards right so it's they don't go

like I thought I heard a rack of trays but it was in fact a gunshot. We say it didn't sound like gunshots. It sounded like a rack of trays dropping to the ground right. Even though you know they know this is all testimony after the fact right. At that point Alistair Cook knows what has happened entirely. And what's really interesting about the the excerpt from from Unchildlike Memories I forgot the book by Svetlana Aleksevich I quoted. She says, I did not know yet. So it's like she remembered the sound of the oilcloth ripping, but she didn't. And also it's really strange. The oilcloth ripping so loud.

Again, these really weird terms put together. So kind of the idea of an oilcloth ripping is not for me something that's so loud. But then it's sort of like this oilcloth is there, despite the fact that later she knows and articulates that it was, in fact, this machine gun fire. So these moments are also really key for me, these kind of moments where the event is kind of petrified around an object and how those objects are kind of retained. and the retaining of the kind of processing of sound is what is stored in those kind of moments. So some of the objects in the inventory, of course, of, let's say, forensic reenactment concern,

and others are not about trying to get to that kind of form of truth production, but rather arrive at some sort of space of acoustic, the kind of production of acoustic knowledge, the kind of moment it's conceived, the moment it forms into language or turn into kind of language, the kind of like nascent translation of the thing into its form. And I think, so yeah, so it's great you mentioned that because that's of another kind of category of the inventory, another kind of part of what it's trying to do. Do we have any other immediate questions about the lecture?

I have one question. I was wondering, when you played the sounds for them, some of them obviously have strong attacks and what was the reaction? I just my questions pertains to the idea that they had they're so used to the sound that the attack really doesn't have any effect on them or they have basically some kind of physical reaction to it. Um yeah so I uh I was really nervous of that going into the um interviews but actually something quite surprising happens when you realize that again when you change the kind of

form of the interview because it's actually more affecting and burden and and the burden is heavier on the subject if you ask them simply to reiterate again and again what happened to them, right? What was happening here was totally different. It was collaborative. So in a sense, we're constantly moving back and forth. We're working to sort of produce something together, a kind of map, if you like, right? We're working to find... So I'm never asking them to descend into their memories. I'm actually never really, you know, not in that same way where they have to kind of go back and force themselves to remember these things.

It's very detail oriented. So we start speaking about locks and doors and these things and start building out from them. And then it's a lot of back and forth that is very kind of like would seem very petty. Right. So you start going, well, was it like this sound or like this sound? and they go, no, it was more like this. And it was more like, you know, so there are these kind of small iterative comments that go towards building these narratives. It's not like asking, it's not like forcing the speaker back into that space. Actually, it's quite the opposite. It's really, it's actually kind of commodifying it in a weird way. It's actually, it seems as if we would be getting proximity, like producing greater proximity back to the prison. But actually that happens internally

if you ask them to close their eyes and explain what happened what we were doing was producing distance we were we were turning the thing into its object quality into its into its observable kind of space if you like that that was quite remarkable um and you know i was of course really pleased that that's how it went um but yeah it's not to say it's not difficult but um I would say that most people I interviewed were very pleased to have a very detail-oriented sort of experience. A reiteration, because they knew more than anything that it was in the details in which the thing articulated itself.

And I'll just give you a strange example. So, for example, it kept saying like something that later in December proved to be entirely correlated to the testimony of defectors, right? People doing the torturing and the killing. They say that there was this 15-minute gap that people would come. They would come into the cell. They would read names. you know so when the guards come you have to face the wall you don't see anything they would read the names they would memorize those names those people go the truck goes they're put into a truck the truck goes and the truck comes back

in something it was like a figure it was like 12 minutes something like that right and they say we we don't know what happened to those people because that's not long enough to free them right so what happened and so the weird thing is that what we're speaking about is 12 minutes of silence between a truck leaving and coming back and those things um those were the details that mattered right that emerged through a sound approach right that had not come before they you know it all seemed like speculation or whatever but until you understood it it was measured not even in its sound but in in the kind of absence of sound right those 12 minutes that were not enough uh they were not enough distance between the going and returning of that truck

so it's really strange details started to emerge that became very important um for the investigation um and also uh um what else did i want to say there was one other thing yeah and and also this kind of strange approach um is you know so you start to like i sort of described with the bread or or whatever you you start thinking you're talking about one thing with details and you you're talking about something else entirely you know you start you you start asking what kind of lock or what kind of tile or what kind of staircase or how many steps and you come away struggling to understand your conception of a wall or of a room right so so there was like

they knew that they knew that their sensorial space was so much about and embedded in those details and i think it was important to have a kind of detailed approach in that sense Any other immediate questions? Otherwise, I think we should go to the presentations on the literature we got from you, Lawrence, and then they will keep on the discussion based on those inputs as well. And we have presentations from Nikita, Rolando and Cascio. Let's start with Nikita.

Yeah, hello, Lawrence. Thank you for the presentation. So as for the readings, I'm not having like a visual presentation, so I'll be mostly reading some notes ahead. So the three texts look at different historic and present instances of violence, atrocities, and catastrophes analyzed through the field of sound. Such approach enables new and great Limonians to look at how these kinds of events should be archived, studied, judged, and inscribed into larger socio-political landscapes and ways such hearing environments can be constructed. The primacy of the visual is contested heavily in Nancy Rose Hunt's text and acoustic register, tenacious images and Congolese scenes of rape and repetition. Through numerous narratives out of several archives, she offers the traces made of words and sounds that translate the immediacy of violence,

making the unspeakable instances of violence, especially sexual ones against women, accessible to fixation and documentation. It is otherwise still to boot for depiction and description in the visual, first of all, and thus is ignored or collapsed into indistinct medical statistics. The strategy that Hunt pursues is tethering the past to present, she is analysing King Leopold's conga and the situation there in the beginning of the 21st century. So tethering the past to the present, not with repetition of suggestive violent imagery, with hearing a non-spectral acoustic register that addresses a productive memory. This approach indeed crafts a horrifying reality of what is emitted by the overly replicated and easily

overlooked visual and it seems that it is in part because of the particular role that sound plays in human sensory navigation in the world and necessity for the reader to concentrate on ordeal sensory experience which is often deafened or experienced or thought of as supplementary to vision together with that actually playing a great role in the background processes of location and building the picture of the environment addressing the ordeal an even clearer path to membrane imagination is paved but it seems that this should as well be dealt with caution and with caution among other things because the audio experiences are emphasized to have a particular relation to truth production as in Roger Caseman's report of atrocities in Congo when quoting loosely the text

he was aware that reporting on things heard from their lips would double the truth effect and as stated in Lawrence Abuham-Down's thesis the oral field amplified by technology nowadays is transposed easily to judicial layer which at the same time often does not have the capacity at its output to enclose the whole context and a variety of an event and its environment with judiciary being formed in different circumstances and engineered to produce very distinct and discrete statements. So talking about the oral field, the whole variety and multiple layers of a soundscape need to be collapsed into some of its indistinct evidential traits. Several dangers are stated throughout the text,

all connected with a meaningful extraction of signal and noise from an oral evidence. For instance, in the Minor Sea by Rosalind C. Morris, the problem of locating signals emphasized, such as tone and noise deafness leading to inability to locate a danger of seeing how. She also illustrates it greatly through the very text itself, noting on the similarity of the sounding of the words Aurelius meaning in ear and Aurum gold in Latin, marking it as an accidental resonance. Silence and deafness should also be treated as signals of something being overlooked, unable to be spoken of, and often the most problematic and pointing at structural biases and repeated violence, such as the silencing of black miners

through naming them for the tools they used, silence of a Congolese woman with her while her leg is being cut to loot a bracelet or deafness of a person hearing gunshots while recording a message in an app with this recording presented in Michael Brown's case. So I believe we do meet such deafness in the everyday. For instance, I was thinking of a project I'm doing connected with my experience of meeting closely with post-soviet military infrastructure and it was in my childhood when I often walked through the woods near summer country house my parents had where military research and proven ground for evasion systems was situated and being found being founded days after the start of the great patriotic war in 1941 this proven ground found

itself in a fairly decomposed but functioning condition by the 90s and 2000s and a lot of its territory was not guarded and accessible to anyone and this trespassable yet secret military complex also produced a strange aural landscape. There was a siren heard four kilometers away and it would go off once in a while from the depth of the forest followed by a blow of a tested evasion weaponry presumably echoing for some time and with no prior experience it's impossible to say if that was an object passing sound barrier, a weapon shot or an ammunition exploded. And in everyday life this kind of event was almost always ignored and taken for granted, never questioned was and still is the proximity of the proving ground to the settlements as well as

an emotional effort that is produced by such interference of military soundscape with a peaceful one or what kind of political or social consequences such interference may have. And this kinds of silence and deafness are not easy to document, analyze and contextualize, especially in non-extreme environments without sufficient attention to technological infrastructures, social and political environments and zones of exclusion formed by those, as well as effort they produce and reproduce. and it's still a question for me of what kind of social bodies should be engaged or created in order to hear and act upon this kind of silence, as it surely becomes a task of a certain type of communality being formed, as well as a language for it,

and that's something that was, that Lawrence was talking about, I think, in his presentation. And yeah, not only the interface for hearing the not-sound it presented. That would be for me. Thank you a lot, Nikita. Lawrence, do you have any comments on that? No, it's a very good summary. Yeah, not specifically, but I'm sure we can. Yeah, sure. Good. Let's jump to next. Rolando. He was online before.

Okay, then, Casio, I know you have some troubles with your connection. Yes, thank you. Hello everyone. Hello, Lawrence. Thank you and Nikita for presentations. I like it very much. I'll keep my camera off because my connection very unstable. And I'll read some slides in which I wrote some notes on the Beyond Human Hearing, the same text I believe that Nikita was talking about. I will share my screen just a minute.

Oh, thank you. Thank you, Jacob. Can you pass, please, to the next one? I can try to share my screen. Can you see it? Oh, thank you. Okay, so I'll start. Can you pass to the next one, Jacob, please? In this chapter, Lawrence aims to provide the genealogical approach that accounts for the transformations of forensic listening processes due to relatively recent developments in audio technology. Rather than attributing a passive status to those kinds of processes, the chapter furnishes

evidences that audio technologies ended up creating a whole new space in which the grammar of concepts such as justice and truth, but not only these, are subjected to its further developments. Can you pass it? Thank you. The central concept here appears to be that of infrastructure. The infrastructures of the voice and gunshots, for example, are transformed into data and figure as the core of analysis. The infrastructure of actions, in the most general sense, is captured by audio technologies in an attempt to obtain objectivity in its higher possible level.

But when it comes to human action, in a time when the subject is individualized in order to become more easily quantifiable, the risk is to lose sight of what constitutes a subject, whether a patient or someone being judged, for example, as more than merely a set of acoustic signs. Can you go to the next one, please? Thank you. Tone, intonation of the voice, as well as other non-linguistic aspects of the voice, phoné, is transformed into data, of which we are the metadata, and analyzed both in its particularity within a certain natural language, and in its relation to

a wider context within which the uterance is made, deriving therefore intentionality and mood. The outcome of this is a reformulation of the parameters used for determining what counts as a true or legitimate uterance. It can be said that putting this kind of technology at the service of civil surveillance is a perverse, although allegedly neutral, generalization of speech acts subtracting from them the nuances of natural language. The text does present an interplay between neutrality and silence, unmasking them both as actual contextual elements, but mostly relegated to the background.

There's a quote from John Cage, there's no such a thing as silence. The exercise is just think about silence as the outcome of a procedure that sends signal to the background. When properly understood, this procedure reveals its intentional character, that of a deliberative manipulation of figure-ground perception by control and surveillance mechanisms. Since absolute silence is radically impossible, there is always the possibility of carrying investigations about the reasons that lead us to perceive something as silence, or noise for that matter. Static harsh noise walls, such as those produced by Vermeer and Derrita, can sound as silence when listening for a long time, depending on material conditions of listening.

Let alone its specificity, forensic audio technology borrows its model from the stethoscope, introducing distance and generating a doubling of the subject as a physiological object, as in egophony. The phoneme is doubled as much as it is the pitch fluctuations of the voice translated into verdicts by a computing machine. Software such as the LVA 6.50 fails to capture a series of important aspects in regards to the relation between acoustic signs and meaning understood as a necessarily social product that presupposes interlocution.

The sound of the electrical network is perceived as silence until the moment that Kathleen Gregorius was able to encounter a pattern in it. The possibility to find sonic irregularity is increased by digital technology, but the ways through which these regularities are interpreted and mobilized as justifications for such and such actions are a matter of decision. However, these decisions that function like filters are obscured in an attempt to present these mechanisms as being as neutral as possible.

For example, the role of the interrogator or police brutality. The Texas approach is in the end very similar to that of noise music, in bringing to the forefront and describing the seemingly silent functioning of the infrastructure that supports forensic audio technology. And in doing so, it accomplished to amplify the systematic defects of such mechanisms, exposing its failure to capture a broader picture of meaning. The technological innovations are welcome, but only to the extent that they promote increasingly complex and effective methods to bring about figure ground shifts.

It is in the fusion or constant interplay between foreground and background that new ways for collective interference in sonic landscapes emerges. Both the genealogical approach to forensic listening techniques and the comparison of how audio technologies and the concepts of noise and silence are treated by forensics and avant-garde noise music furnishes a conceptual but also practical arsenal to pursue strategies that aim to collectively contest and call for new ideas. laws that govern the currently

gray legal areas of our audible horizons. And I believe that's it. Thank you. Wow, thank you very much, Cassio. It's great. Thank you, Cassio. Do you have any response to that, Lawrence? It's great. It's written better than I write it. You want to write me for me the book, Cassio? It's better. Thank you, Lawrence. We have some shorter responses from Catherine, Lina, Hau, Daniel, Dana, and Dichen. Let's start with Catherine. Hi, thank you, Lawrence, for your presentation and also everyone else who's gone so far.

I wanted to, in my response, to mostly focus on the text about the Congo and talk a little bit about how sound is used there and maybe how it relates to the previous presentations as well. In the introduction to that text and situation, there's a reflection on sound as providing this ability to corroborate evidence or to shift the focus of how a claim was evaluated, which is similar to what we've spoken about already. And at the same time, this piece talks about how in this context sound was considered in some way unfit for repetition. And so as is described in that text, there were specific images of that violence that circulated widely in humanitarian circles and in outside of the country that were what

was mobilizing the humanitarian response. But at the same time, other less visible forms of violence were not really treated. So I wanted to talk about how these two different ways of circulating news about the violence relate to the usual language that we use to talk about trauma. Because I think that sound offers a form of repetition that's different from what we usually think of as traumatic repetition, as something that both repeats and erases the traumatic experience. And I think, in fact, that that kind of simultaneous repetition and erasure is more suited to something that's rendered in a visual mode.

And I think that this piece partly shows that. So we tend to think of trauma as associated with kind of overriding and reliving trauma, but also maybe obscuring features of it. So the use of the visual images to talk about the violence in the Congo seems to have had a kind of visual shock on the humanitarian community that almost created a sort of secondary trauma. trauma. And I think part of what the text describes is a way in which the resulting response was one that sort of focused on mitigating the viewers shock rather than really addressing the kind of specific violence in the community.

community. And so that's kind of the basis on which the author argues for the need of a sonic archive, I think. There's a sense in which the sonic is able to capture the future implications of trauma for those who actually have undergone it, for instance, in the Congo. It captures the implications for future relationships, captures the sort of interrelational aspects of experience. And so this sound provides a sort of hyper frame of the event that shows both the traumatic experience which maybe corresponds more to our understanding of that visual shocking image but also it captures this it's that experience is situatedness within the network um that includes having to continue through living with the collateral damage and so on um so basically i

think part of what the text shows is that sound kind of gives uh this violence that has um in an optic mode a sort of um creates a sort of allergy to actually thinking through the event sound on the contrary uh supplies this evidence of how how the violence continues to be a lived situation and not just an event um so yeah that was my reading of it thanks captain anything to add to that lawrence yeah i think that's um that's an interesting flip i mean on a on an entirely imperfect text right i mean in some way why i share that is because there's something

that is being worked out in that text um before our eyes and i think it's kind of quite it's like I think exactly on the kind of mode in which you kind of inquire and unpicketed Catherine that there's like there's something there that's not quite right it's not quite working it's also like kind of someone coming to terms with listening almost for the first time in a strange way but at the same time what I think is important about it as people who practice sound or think about sounds relation to politics is the sort of working through of an idea that is proposed at the beginning

and sort of seeing and try and like like really actually kind of witnessing her trying to listen to not sounds but testimony right and I think that her kind of sincere attempt to do that is productive. And it's productive not necessarily in the forms of argumentation she makes, but actually in the, in sort of understanding and following what that, how to listen to, to something that is in fact not sound, right? And so, so for me, it provided a kind of important method, methodology almost for, for work. Even if I think some of the argumentations often contradict or go in sort of you know strange way she taught

I remember there's this moment where she talks about um Conrad's hallucinatory prose and then I mean does exactly that I think you know to some respect so yeah I mean I think uh it's for me it's an interesting thing to share because it's always I feel it's very raw in a way both of course subject matter and also in her kind of working to articulate that through that. The next one in the list is Lena. I don't think Lena is online. Then we would go to how How are you there?

Yeah, sorry. Well, thanks for presentation Lawrence. I think it's interesting that your presentation is kind of using images to invoke an ordinary imagination and and through some narratives and maybe in order to counteract the ocular dominant environment. And I found it's quite strong. And my, however, my initial response to your presentation is quite differentiated

a political manner, which I'm looking at the public sphere in particular, and all the sound phenomenon that I noticed during the pandemic, like the Italian balconies ensemble and the evening applause for the NHS in the UK and maybe protest slogan in the streets. And when they repeatedly occurs, does sound like reduce everything to a statement like encourage soothing, prohibition support does does it merely conveys emotion without producing content

so i just like to hear from you thanks thanks how uh thank you how uh yeah i mean i think like everything there's just sort of productive and unproductive ways to think about the you know the kinds of sound what sound where but i would never i don't think i've used this term talk ocular dominance because as i said before there is an entire prevalence of ear witness testimony it's not it's not that we don't I mean I think there's an over almost an over experience

to sound and sometimes a kind of taking sound for granted to the extent that it is so much part of how we move through the world so yeah I don't really it's not really that kind of binary I'm trying to articulate, nor would I agree necessarily that sound is only affect, because as I've tried to show through the presentation, that some things which are extremely result-based are able to be articulated through sound. For example, how many people were held in the prison.

But also, sometimes in the things which you don't expect and open to hear, you can start to hear information in those gaps, for example, I'd articulate before, and that would also account for the same gap that I tried to speak about in the Beyond Hearing piece, as, you know, in the gap between, which contained the shooting of Michael Brown, the gap between the pause in the speech. All these things, I think it would be wrong to assume they're just appealing to some kind of emotional content. I think that what I'm trying to say is that

there's, these are ways of measuring structural conditions, structural political conditions, rather than individual and, you know, ways of seeing the world in terms of, you know, liberal politics, free subjects, this kind of thing, but rather kind of trying to understand and unpack structural racism, structural violence. So I think I'm not really sure where I would sort of come to your comment, because it's just, if that's where you think the work is going,

then it's a little bit alien to me, so it's hard to put the two things together. Of course, the sounds that you mentioned are completely appealing to kind of liberal subject formation in the sense that, of course, you know, every night they got together and they made a sound for the frontline workers, but no one really spoke about how those people aren't paid enough, right? So instead of going out and clapping, let's just pay them better. and I think that's exactly where I would say that those things differ so it's not every sound appear to you know sounds are just kind of like embodied in the kind of politics in which it

which produces them but it's for us to understand where we can read specific sounds for for the kinds of politics and political claims we want to make, and where sound sits in counter to that, like the clapping for frontline workers. Great, then we have Daniel. Thank you for all the presentations. It was very interesting. For me it was very intriguing to see how many ways silence can function. Several examples were shown in the articles that it can be the voice of the strike, signifier

of fright and shame, fear generator, truth quantifier, the measure of the institutionalized violence and police brutality, the communication. All these, it has a much higher significance than only filling out the gap between sounds of interest. It is a very powerful device to acquire knowledge and also a very powerful tool, for example, to intentionally dramatize protest. The same can be told about noise. Noise and silence are woven in the same fabric and their materiality is sometimes interchangeable. I'm wondering whether noise or silence has more political power in your opinion based on your artistic types.

For example, can a silent protest be louder than a violent one, or how can we better approach truth by listening to silence or to noise? yeah questions yeah again it's a little bit as a continuation on the last point that it's never that I would hope that when you read the kind of chapter beyond human hearing you see a sort of spectrum of those figure ground shifts that also Cassio was speaking about right that's that's what's important and and and to be to be keenly looking at where in which

the shift from signal to noise happens for when when noise becomes signal um and when and and in those shifts i'm arguing you can start to kind of map the um the ways in which power is modulating upon its subjects and the ways in which we can kind of also sort of move. And if we see that those sort of shifts in power, then we can kind of respond accordingly. So I guess my point was, you know, in the end that what we had against ShotSpotter was all these claims of privacy. and it seemed to me that those were political claims

that were not made through understanding really how power was operating, how background had actually become foreground. People still imagine their own voices as being in the very forefront and I think they have a hard time understanding that actually maybe this thing doesn't care what you say people don't like to feel like that so for me it's important to take these things that they were to actually understand well okay they're not listening for human voices and something even you know if we really understand what it means to be in the background for a moment maybe we can understand where power is listening what it's what what how it's because

I think you know in the overall thesis I think what I'm trying to say is that that who is in power define what is and what isn't legitimate speech right so they would suddenly module you know move between a kind of witness testimony to a main's hum buzz right if they need and I think that's that's where kind of power lies that's where power articulates itself And I think I'm trying to mark those shifts because I feel like that's our best chance, or at least the way I think about it. It's our best chance to sort of listen back and to create political claims that actually meet the context and the sort of space in which power is articulating itself and subjects are being formed.

So it's not that one silent protest can be better than this. It's just, again, making sure that we are also able to sort of shift between sort of foreground and background as adeptly as we're seeing those modulations and those shifts in technology articulate over the last, since 1984. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Then I have Dana on my list here, but she's online. Yeah, I'm on there as Burns. So I just wanted to track some reaction that I had to the miner's ear,

particularly the way in which the sound of the sinkhole was was compared analogically to the sound of the wagon wheels and how this was noted as kind of an echo of this original violence that began this kind of snowball effect of violence and how how this process of the original human action or the original human noise then being picked up and given this recurrent vitality by nature was kind of in parallel with this poem by Blake that I was reading. So I'm going to share that, which is from Songs of Innocence, begins with,

the voices of children are heard on the green and laughing is heard on the hill. And so that contains the action, which then ends with the hills being given the voice and then echoing. So here we see sort of this positive manifestation, this innocence being corroborated by nature and taken up and how there's this kind of continuous idea through this that nature with a capital N is the fallible and human is the one that's doing the penetrating literally with the minds and kind of that old trope, which is kind of this diffused

version, a hum maybe of this sort of like imperialization over both people and over the landscape. And then I wanted to just kind of draw that into something that happens here in New York where I live, where, can you see this picture? There's a, is this visible? No, we just see the poems still. Okay, I'm not exactly sure how to change that. So in New York, the The NYPD, which is basically a brand at this point, actually collaborated with the Chicago Crime Lab on this big project about

the effects of artificial light at night through these NYPD floodlights and how that's a cheap way essentially to reduce crime. and how these are of course employed in low-income areas and how this in effect robs the natural occurrence of nighttime from people who are already taken completely out of like I don't know just the just the violence of having the having nature robbed and not allotted to you and that's end of my thinking. Of course, there's a very I've seen them in New York, they're extremely noisy as well, right? I mean, that's the that's the point. They're not only visit like a lot of light pollution,

but it's very noisy. The generators are super loud. So it's also yeah, they're very it's awful. It's really it's like really bleak thing to witness that technology. So last but not least we have De Chen. Hi, thank you everyone for your presentations. I guess my response would be some questions as a general response. In Lauren's presentation, you mentioned about this vocabulary library of acoustic experience.

And I was just, I'm a bit curious about this kind of the most basic unit of these kind vocabulary in terms of like what these kind of units would be like in relationship to the the question of measurability or because I feel like the Sorry, I'm a bit nervous.

No problem. Also in Nikita's presentation, mentioned about this, like, political, social aspects of these kind of vocabulary building. So I was wondering, um um how uh also in katherine's presentation this this situatedness of um acoustic experience and i'm just thinking about um also in nowadays pandemic situation it's it feels like um the

the physicality is somehow a bit less compared to how was before. So I was wondering how would you think about this vocabulary building in terms of, in the context of today's this trend of planetary computational like everything getting more and more computationable and also is this digitalization of things and quantifying of things and

And so like new kind of different forms of violence and control. So how would you, how would the merit of this vocabulary and the materiality and this relationship to this digitalization of experiences? um so i might like need you to just set me on the right course if i uh if i didn't understand properly the question or like but i think i got it but i just if if you think i'm going off somewhere just tell me um i think uh yeah i think there's a fine line isn't there between kind of

like creating sort of generic unsituated experiences and trying to sort of create a kind of codable force out of like things which, you know, happen in really in their own small space and time. and a line between that and I suppose trying to formulate collectivities that would not otherwise be able to exist together, right? so a bit like I said before about the sort of the gun and the cricket bats right this is like a

moment where two readily unassociated objects suddenly actually are you know interchangeable things we would never have in the sort of same sentence or really think about together start to become indistinguishable or there's an argument made for that so it's sort of like that's I guess that example kind of articulating more my intention than to create a kind of United Colors of Benetton hearing experience if I understand what you mean it's much more about trying to put these things together to try to create sort of collectivities and to aggregate these stories to see where and what sort of things emerge between them, rather than to sort of

have them in their sort of units of inspection, isolatable units of inspection. It's really not the not the point. So there's that and also I suppose it's much more to do with trying to yeah I mean I was gonna it was a secondary point but I forgot. It's a bit late here. But I suppose coming back again to the chapter, as you mentioned that that that seemed to you to also be present in the kind of chapter that I wrote. It's

again trying to understand how if you take something like a sort of shift, an acoustic shift in registers from foreground to background when we think about it in all these spaces what is it what kind of collectivities emerge right between um you know catalina grigoris in romania and michael brown and uh mine in south africa i mean i think things, I think, I think it's about trying to use sound in its sort of relational and follow it in its kind of relational path and its sort of reflections and its echoes and its in the way

in which it produces a kind of what some would call like a vibrational ontology, whatever, between through objects to to sort of use that to produce the relations that you sort of see argued foreign with and in association and so I hope yeah I hope that kind of answers your question or did I completely not get it? Yeah, I think so. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. So now there's no more presentations or responses, but

I would have to leave quite soon. I'm sorry for that. I know it's late where you are, so if there are any further questions that I have a question. Hey Lawrence. Hey. How's it going? Good, how are you? Good. So I'm thinking about the relationship between images and sound, and especially just thinking about in the work by Nancy Hunt. And what I struggled with that writing, I think,

has to do with just sort of the loudness of the images that she mentions, which have had this sort of reverberation for like so many years now and how you know just just the mention of them even without like necessarily like having them be printed it's really difficult I'm trying to see like how these images sort of like have overtaken or overtake sort of any testimony that can come out of what is happening right now and sort of what is sort of the what's that fine line between like it's so easy to just fall back into sort of like the humanitarian. And I feel like with the work, like there's moments where I'm like, oh, this is really weird territory that you're taking us to.

And I'm just, so I'm just wondering, like, you know, with something where the images are just like overpower in some ways, how can we attend to sound in a different way that doesn't mimic that? with specific relation to her text or you mean in general? I think in, I mean like this text made me think about that but I think just like in general like you know the images of violence have you know how do we separate that or find ways to approach the sound in a way that's not sort of mimicking that violence somehow.

I mean, I don't know if it's specific to sound. I mean, I don't think that's specific to sound. I mean, I think, you know, there's been a horrible sort of like beginning to an acoustic and like a, bibliography on sound right where um it starts with this thing like we can't shut our ears but we can shut our eyes right and i think what you're speaking about kelly is exactly sort of

the point where it's actually no we can shut our eyes but we still like see all that stuff and we can easily shut our ears i mean go to a law court and tell me that it's hard to shut one's ears i mean it's just so easy so i think first and foremost i think it's about it's not about you know i think that's a general point in relation to thinking trying to think violence trying to think power and the way it articulates itself I don't think that is specific to sound or image as I understand it I mean I think there's ways of dealing with images which don't do that and I think there's ways of dealing with sound which do do that but yeah I mean I think she's

specific yeah I mean I think I agree with you it's a bit like what I said before with her like it's it's and I think this is why in a way it's productive because it does exactly that it sort of proposes something and then it kind of falls back into the previous proposition then it comes out of it and then it sort of falls back and I think seeing those things work out through her methodology is why I like to return to that text because I find it again quite I find it very somehow I don't want to use this word honest but somehow like kind of just it's there it's all there right it's not it's not really like uh cleaned up or it's it's

quite clumsy um also uh so i find that that quite productive but yeah i mean i think of course there's there's um there's ways of um representing yeah i don't know i i don't i wouldn't like to proposed that I would have the answer to that question. But I think I do think about it a lot. And I hope I think about it enough that I'm not just reproducing those kinds of violences. Of course, specifically with relation to Saitanya, because it began in a kind of humanitarian space.

and I think a lot of the works were trying to find conditions by which to hear those people otherwise. And one of the conclusions I've come to is actually, and this would sound quite violent, is actually not seeing them give their testimony, repeating it, rereading it, me reading it in my voice out loud. all those things which representative politics tell us is wrong, it's overriding, it's muting, actually allow you to hear that testimony in a much more clear way, right? So weird inversions start happening, specifically when you butt against sort of like politics that is purely

representative or seeks that, where in which, especially, I mean, I think, at least the question I asked myself with the work is not how to work about this or represent this or that kind of violent incident, but it's how can we produce the conditions to hear this in a way that is meaningful to hear this testimony. I think, of course, with some words that's answered and I feel satisfied with that answer. And in other words, it's a failure. And I think, but I think that's where the failure sits. It's whether or not the conditions were produced to adequately kind of like shift how we can or can't hear something.

And to acknowledge that the other forums that we've given them kind of monopoly to let us hear those kinds of testimonies are also not adequate. So I mean, there is a demand for experimentation in that space. And there's a demand for artists to step up and produce new kinds of conditions. And so yeah, I think that's why I want to keep doing it. Not that it would always, it wouldn't sometimes also fail. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So I actually have a question.

Maybe it's like the same as Achilles, but maybe from a different angle. So it's about how the how is the project presented. And in the context of, you are an artist, but you're also an academic researcher. And then how you explained the project, you are also a forensic investigator and you're a sound designer. So what can the artists do in this, or do you see it as a research project? project. Like I know most of your work is exhibited in art museums or galleries. So maybe I think it's exactly the same answer in the sense

that I don't see I mean increasingly not seeing what I do as the making of a specific artwork, but trying to produce conditions for listening and those can be entirely visual those can be entirely silent right and if that's what the kind of demand on the listener is or at least that i think it is or i i imagine could be again this is not to say that this is a resolved thing um but i think that's yeah i think that's what it is. So I think the space of art allow me to account and experiment with conditions

for listening, both material, spatial, and kind of conceptual and political, that I don't find the possibility of doing in a text alone or in a human rights investigation. certainly. So yeah. Did you present this project somewhere? Yeah, so this project, I mean, it's it's both right. I mean, that's also why it's hard to answer the question. It's both a kind of tool, right? These I've recorded all these sounds, I would want to use them in such a similar investigation in the future. There's a genuine idea that exactly as I explained in the beginning that the sound effects libraries were not adequate, and I needed my own. And so in a way, it's the production of a tool.

And in the other way, yeah, at the same time, I show the objects. I show them in two different ways. On the one hand, it's a six-channel sound installation with the sounds of those objects and the stories. And in that, and then in the other way, I show it just as the objects themselves, the 96 objects. And inversely, I think the objects presentation is a sound work and the sound piece is a visual work. Precisely because they appeal to different kinds of ways of different kinds of sensory spaces and those are not what is given to the audience, but what they produce.

right so if you see a mute like some people would say oh it's just a collection of silent objects i'll be like oh okay then i would know that these people don't have sonic imagination right like i i don't know how you see an egg and don't hear the egg or and then you sort of read the egg and then you you know the egg is again transformed so um and then likewise with the sound piece it's really you don't know which of those objects is producing that sound. So it's really, it's just animated text and sound. And I think, again, inversely, it's just a series of images that are being produced in the audience's kind of mind's ear, eye, whatever. So I think, yeah, again, it's this sort of, I never show them together, actually, the sounds

precisely for that reason. They're two different kind of works, to appear into two different sensory spaces. But do they show you in parallel in the same gallery, for example? I haven't done that yet, but it might be coming to a town near you soon. I'm doing that in Sweden this year. I don't know. Maybe we just, yeah, when you see it, you can copyright that idea. You can say that you gave me that idea. I will. With credits to you, Jacob. are there other questions maybe from people who haven't said anything i'll just be like one last question because i'm dying trying to hold on to you

if not then um i think you should be able to have a good night's sleep now and light tomorrow to catch. Yeah. Thank you so much for all your insights and everybody's presentations. It's super actually inspiring to hear. And yeah, very happy to be with you today. Yeah. The pleasure is on my and our side. It's been really great. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Ciao. So if there anyone having any questions in general to the course, or want to proceed

the discussion. I'll just check the chat. Not really. Good. Then we have an earlier night tonight. Night where I am. Yeah. See you on next Sunday with the last session. I'll send out the text tomorrow or Tuesday. And I'll be presenting. And I hope that you don't have arachnophobia, too many of you. So with that cliffhanger, see you on Sunday. Thank you.