1. INTRODUCTION
A significant body of field recording-based compositional work conveys political messages regarding environmental soundscapes. For instance, environmentalist themes propel the work of English sound artist Peter Cusack who, in his project Sounds of Dangerous Places (2012), investigates soundscapes of the Chernobyl exclusion zone and other sites linked to environmental disasters. Italian soundscape researcher David Monacchi’s ‘eco-acoustic composition’ approach attempts to archive the soundscapes of the world’s last remaining undisturbed primary equatorial rainforests (Monacchi Reference Monacchi2013). Cusack and Monacchi encourage an aural awareness among listeners that treats environmental soundscapes as catalysts for ecological and climate justice activism.
Canadian soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp’s body of work has critiqued urban noise pollution, as evident in Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989). Her piece Beneath the Forest Floor (1992) is a sonic meditation on Vancouver’s old-growth rainforest and also an indictment of the clear-cut logging industry. The live performance and interactive sound installation work of Australian composer Leah Barclay incorporates recordings of biospheres and rivers around the world that are under threat by climate change (Barclay Reference Barclay2017). Barclay directly collaborates with the communities living in these environments and gives their voices and perspectives a large academic platform by featuring them in her sound pieces.
While many soundscape composers focus on climate justice themes, other creative work involving recorded environmental soundscapes turns to broader themes including anti-racism and police brutality. This article explores how media activists and composers employ audio field recording as a mode of conveying social justice critiques of the political status quo. I examine how American micro-watt radio pioneer Mbanna Kantako, Palestinian electronic musician Muqata’a and American audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti disrupt mainstream news media discourse and governmental narratives that have contributed to the stigmatisation and criminalisation of economically and racially marginalised communities in both the United States and Palestine. This article posits that the act of listening itself be considered a politically radical gesture.
Three specific sound projects are analysed as case studies here: Kantako’s aural counter-surveillance and field recording of police encounters within the predominantly Black John Hay Homes low-income housing complex in Springfield, Illinois during the late 1980s and 1990s; Muqata’a’s album Inkanakuntu (2018) that incorporates field recordings of daily life in Ramallah, West Bank; as well as DeLaurenti’s experimental radio documentary Fit the Description (2015), composed using field recordings of protests in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed young Black male. There are numerous examples of sonic activism rooted in the practice of field recording. This article focuses on these three case studies because of the acoustic forms of knowledge production articulated by their common conceptual themes, namely, 1) the use of what I term aural counterpublics to amplify marginalised voices and soundscapes of resistance suppressed by mainstream news and governmental rhetoric, and 2) the radical re-appropriation of microphones and oppressive police and military audio technologies as a means of ‘speaking back’ to systems of power.
This article’s aim is to intervene within dominant soundscape studies discourse that tends to apply a colour-blindFootnote 1 and settler aural framing when examining how communities interact with their acoustic environments (see Jordan Reference Jordan2015; Droumeva Reference Droumeva2017). I work to unsettle established practices and concepts of acoustic ecology such as field recording, soundwalking and ecotonal listening and redeploy them to centre a radical politics of listening that confronts systemic social injustices.
Critical theorist Nancy Fraser conceives of subaltern counterpublics as discursive arenas where marginalised groups circulate counter-discourses (Fraser Reference Fraser1990: 67) that challenge dominant narratives. Counterpublics can be social movements or spaces in which marginalised identities and needs are affirmed. I propose the concept of aural counterpublics to articulate how sound activists remix the environmental soundscapes of politically contested urban spaces and exploit radio or online platforms to disseminate counter-discourses. These activists centre the voices of the communities that they document through their field recording-based sound practices.
In the case of Kantako, the space of his clandestine radio station Black Liberation Radio is itself an aural counterpublic that fosters community and safety and allows his fellow residents to broadcast their concerns about police brutality. His counterpublic also mobilises a form of defiant listening that counters and subverts the visual surveillance tactics used by police.
For Muqata’a, experimental sound art aesthetics are employed to construct a musical counterpublic that not only listens through his ears as a field recordist but also works as an ‘earwitness’ medium that symbolically amplifies what his fellow Palestinians may hear on a daily basis in the streets of the West Bank. Furthermore, Muqata’a disseminates his music via Bandcamp and YouTube, thus allowing his Palestinian aural counterpublic and political messaging to resonate with international audiences.
Muqata’a’s counterpublic directly responds to the official state archives that promote Israel’s expansionist narratives. He samples, loops and digitally processes artefacts of Arab culture including street market soundscapes and older Arabic music. This musical practice forms a radical counter-archive that insists on remembering and preserving Palestinian Arab culture and epistemologies that are systematically silenced by the state’s archives, sonic warfare, and police and military visual surveillance. I will suggest how the archival potential of Muqata’a’s counterpublic can amplify a people’s agency and right to exist.
DeLaurenti combines phonographic and experimental sound art aesthetics to construct Fit the Description (2015) as an aural counterpublic. Because he is working with field recordings collected by Black protestors in Ferguson and not his own recordings, DeLaurenti’s counterpublic is premised on empathetic and decolonised listening. I will demonstrate how DeLaurenti decentres his own white privileged listening positionality and instead serves as an earwitness to Black liberation struggles. By broadcasting his piece on Australian national radio, he attempts to disrupt the political status quo that is reinforced by news discourse related to Black Lives Matter protests. He also pushes his primarily white audience to actively listen to the soundscapes of resistance produced by the Black community in Ferguson.
This article is organised as follows. The second section analyses how the field recording and studio creation practices of Kantako, Muqata’a and DeLaurenti convey critiques of mainstream news and state narratives regarding Black communities in the United States and Palestinians in Ramallah, West Bank. The third section studies how microphones mobilised in the field can assist marginalised groups in reclaiming a sense of agency. I also outline how police and military audio technologies such as radio scanners and LRADs (long-range acoustic devices) are re-appropriated by media activists. The final section highlights the importance of ethical and self-reflexive compositional methods for non-Black composers such as DeLaurenti who are cultural outsiders to the communities they are representing sonically. Furthermore, this section asserts the need for intersectional and decolonised approaches to soundscape studies that hone in on how environmental soundscapes themselves are sites of political struggle.
2. AMPLIFYING SILENCED SOUNDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE
2.1. Field recording as political resistance against policing
Mbanna Kantako is a legally blind Black community activist who founded the micro-watt ‘pirate’ radio station Black Liberation Radio in 1986 out of his apartment living room in Springfield, Illinois. Black Liberation Radio evolved out of Kantako’s earlier practice of using a one-watt radio transmitter to form an inverted neighbourhood watch. The predominantly Black and working-class residents of the John Hay Homes housing complex used the radio transmitter to communicate critical information to each other and monitor the police who they perceived as a threat (Shields and Ogles Reference Shields and Ogles1995: 176). Kantako expanded this covert communication network into his unlicensed radio station where he could broadcast field recordings he collected while walking around his neighbourhood with a tape recorder.
It is important to note how systemic racism is built into American federal radio broadcasting policies. Only 2 per cent of the licensed radio stations in the United States were owned by non-whites at the time Kantako started broadcasting in the 1980s (Fiske Reference Fiske1994: 229). Because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required the demonstration of substantial financial resources to operate even a low-powered FM station, the proliferation of numerous renegade micro-watt stations such as Kantako’s provided an alternative voice for the economically disenfranchised (Shields and Ogles Reference Shields and Ogles1995: 174). Furthermore, the racial segregation and dense population of Springfield meant that a large majority of its Black residents were able to receive Kantako’s broadcasts despite the fact that his transmitter only reached a 1.5 mile radius (Fouché Reference Fouché2006: 654). Kantako’s small-scale radio practice thus functioned as a form of what radio artist Tetsuo Kogawa (Reference Kogawa, Augaitis and Lander1994: 287) terms ‘narrowcasting’ as opposed to traditional long-distance broadcasting.
2.1.1. Black Liberation Radio as a platform for aural counterpublics
The 1989 beating of a local Black boxing coach and his son by Springfield security officers was the main catalyst that caused Kantako to adopt more politically confrontational themes in his broadcasts. A taped hospital bedside interview with the coach and his son was broadcast to considerable outrage among Kantako’s listeners (Shields and Ogles Reference Shields and Ogles1995: 176). Kantako also started to incorporate a radical field recording practice into Black Liberation Radio to help foster a safe media space where residents could voice their grievances and mobilise politically. For instance, in 1996, Kantako broadcasted 7 Years of Sounds, a three-hour radio mix that combined political roots reggae music interspersed with field recordings of everyday events at the John Hay Homes. In this sound piece we sometimes hear residents giving oral testimonies about racism and police brutality, while the oppressive soundscapes of police sirens, on-site police interventions, and police radio dispatch calls are heard in the background. Kantako collected the police dispatch recordings using an illegal radio scanner he owned. Soundscapes of resistance are amplified in 7 Years of Sounds by way of dissenting voices being remixed and juxtaposed with roots reggae singer Gregory Isaacs proclaiming, ‘Don’t want to be a part of your corrupted policy. I want to live my life, so please hear my plea’.
As suggested through 7 Years of Sounds, Kantako’s mere act of listening in racially contested urban spaces is a politically radical gesture and an act of defiance against police surveillance. He documents and broadcasts these everyday neighbourhood soundscapes as his own form of news dissemination. Fiske (Reference Fiske1994) suggests Black Liberation Radio operated as an alternative Black communication system. This system produced its own counter-meanings in relation to dominant media narratives that often repress Black free speech (Fiske Reference Fiske1994: 232).
The sampled environmental sounds and voices of 7 Years of Sounds were generally excluded from mainstream local news coverage. Sensational news pieces focused on Kantako’s use of curse words on air and the numerous attempts by the FCC to shut down his illegal radio operation (Shields and Ogles Reference Shields and Ogles1995: 176). There was seldom any reporting on the Springfield Black community’s concerns about police brutality. Therefore, I argue it is fruitful to examine Kantako’s 7 Years of Sounds through Fraser’s concept of the subaltern counterpublic (Fraser Reference Fraser1990: 67). Kantako facilitated what I term aural counterpublics through his radio practice, whereby residents’ grievances that were previously silenced in dominant discourse were now being amplified and legitimised via an on-air platform. We may also hear Palestinian aural counterpublics in the field recording and music practice of Muqata’a.
2.2. Tactics of sonic resistance against Israeli occupation
Similar to Kantako’s field recording and sonic resistance against an oppressive and heavily policed neighbourhood, Muqata’a documents the everyday soundscapes of the occupied West Bank. The Arabic word muqata’a means a disruption, boycott or interference (Kelly Reference Kelly2018). As a sonic disruption of the current stagnant political situation he lives in, Muqata’a gathers environmental field recordings and incorporates them into his experimental electronic music. This may include the sounds of military checkpoints or surveillance helicopters flying overhead. Muqata’a asserts that the state of Israel uses sonic weapons as a violent form of psychological warfare on Palestinians. He addresses how Israeli F16 fighter jets that travel faster than the speed of sound create an extremely loud sonic boom that resembles the sound of a bomb blast (Mendez and Anthony Reference Mendez and Anthony2016).Footnote 2 Consequently, environmental soundscapes in the West Bank are disorienting and anxiety-provoking, as citizens are unable to determine whether or not they have been bombed by rockets launched by Israel. During the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)’s five-week sonic warfare campaign in 2005, F16s flew over Gaza at low altitude and high speed on a nightly basis. The sonic booms were reported to have caused shattered windows, ear pain, nosebleeds and even miscarriages resulting from the physical and psychological trauma sustained by Palestinian civilians (McGreal quoted in Parker Reference Parker2019: 74).
Muqata’a uses his field recording and compositional methods as tactics of sonic resistance against the state’s daily sonic attacks. His musical aesthetics are aggressive at times. He creates digital glitches, ominous beats and blasts of noise to counter Israel’s wielding of military noise to control civilian populations.
While Muqata’a does not include lyrical content in his music, he still conveys aural counter-narratives. He exposes and critiques the seemingly mundane but violent everyday sounds of Israeli occupation rarely discussed in visually biased news representations of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Like Black Liberation Radio, Muqata’a creates a medium for insurgent communication that centres and amplifies the lived experiences of marginalised people living under constant surveillance.
Muqata’a’s music in itself is evidently not a direct form of social justice activism or political organising. However, we may interpret his defiant soundwalking and recording of the West Bank as a symbolic march for social justice. Street protests have sometimes been theorised as communities gathering to reclaim and redefine cities through sound (DeLaurenti Reference DeLaurenti2015a: 93). As a mode of protest, Muqata’a takes his field recordings of occupation into the studio to disrupt the IDF’s control over urban acoustic spaces. He uses music as a way to reclaim and occupy acoustic territories in the West Bank.
Some social movement scholars have suggested the limits of activists using persuasion as a tactic to educate the public about their political grievances. Counterpublic movements such as Black Lives Matter and Idle No More instead chose to wield their own power and disrupt the status quo by way of provocative agitation and a rejection of ‘appropriate decorum’ norms imposed by the dominant society (Daum Reference Daum2017: 531). Muqata’a’s music can perhaps be conceptualised as aural counterpublic resistance that foregrounds the marginalised identities of Palestinians and refuses to gently persuade Western listeners into sympathising with Palestinian liberation struggles. Muqata’a rather forces listeners to bear ‘earwitness’ to the aural violence meted out by the state of Israel on a daily basis.
Muqata’a is likely aware of the repercussions (e.g., state surveillance) that may result from political artists openly critiquing the Israeli government. His modes of sonic resistance and agitation are thus often strategically obscured or concealed. He states: ‘I bought a Tascam recorder a few years ago, which is a recording device I used to try and sample the sounds around me. It looks a bit like a taser, so it’s a bit dodgy carrying that around, so now I just use my phone, which is way more discreet. I just put it in my pocket, start recording and walk around’ (Yates Reference Yates2018).
While Kantako’s 7 Years of Sounds is explicit in its use of political reggae lyrics and testimonials from Black community members, Muqata’a is covert in his remixing of urban environmental sounds. Aside from a recording of anti-occupation protestors marching and chanting in Ramallah as heard in the piece Taqamus Muqawim (2018), most of Muqata’a’s sound pieces abstract military soundscapes using digital audio processing effects such as time stretching, frequency equalisation (EQ) and echo. This means his sampled sound sources are not immediately obvious for listeners unfamiliar with his field recording method or his political themes. Some may interpret this compositional approach as a limitation in terms of effectively conveying political critiques of Israel. I suggest it works to confront oppressive soundscapes in a tactical and pragmatic manner, allowing Muqata’a to evade state surveillance and censorship.
2.2.1. Muqata’a as a context-based composer
Upon superficial listening, Muqata’a’s electronic musical aesthetic may resemble that of acousmatic music. Acousmatic composers generally apply an abstracted syntax such that the acoustic properties of sounds themselves are used to determine how sounds are organised in a composition rather than real-world associations (Truax Reference Truax2002: 7). These composers, who may sometimes sample environmental sounds, attempt to separate their sound sources from their original real-world contexts in order to create a purely aural and ‘blind’ listening experience for audiences.
However, considering that Muqata’a incorporates politically loaded environmental field recordings in his music and is open in interviews about his unapologetic opposition to Israeli occupation, it is arguably more fruitful to situate his music alongside the tradition of soundscape composition. Canadian composer Hildegard Westerkamp defines soundscape composition as ‘the artistic, sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception’ (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp2002: 52). While soundscape composers employ processing effects including digital time stretching and frequency filtering, the conveyance of contextual information to listeners via the composition’s sounds is a key element of the genre. On a political and activist level, soundscape composition often creates a strong oppositional place of conscious listening and a means of ‘speaking back’ to problematic ‘voices’ in the soundscape (Westerkamp Reference Westerkamp2002: 52). Similar to this compositional philosophy, Muqata’a renders audible the referential meanings linked to Ramallah’s militarised soundscapes by way of his sampling and processing methods. His music works as a sounding out of the disorienting and traumatic daily navigations through physical and sonic environments that Palestinians endure.
2.2.2. Field recording as a counter-archiving practice
Muqata’a also employs sampling as an audio counter-archiving process that subverts the State of Israel’s systematic exclusion of Palestinian histories and memories. Official state archives often extend settler colonialism into the spaces of knowledge preservation and production, where Palestinian narratives are erased or exploited to suit expansionist narratives (Hastings Reference Hastings2016). As a means of self-representation that disrupts state narratives, Beshara Doumani (Reference Doumani2009) proposes that an ‘archive fever’ is spreading among Palestinians. They are interviewing elders and compiling genealogies, collecting textiles and folksongs, and compiling information on old houses and destroyed villages.
Muqata’a engages a similar archive fever. He samples and loops culturally rich sounds of Ramallah, such as the musical cries of Arabic-speaking market vendors. He also samples the classical Arabic music of Umm Kulthum, Fairuz and Marcel Khalife as a response to the state’s control over Palestinian culture. Sound plays a critical role in shaping the tense relations between Israel’s Jewish majority and the Palestinian minority. For instance, Israeli politicians have attempted to impose bans on the use of loudspeakers by mosques to amplify the muezzin call to prayer. One parliamentarian described the prayers as ‘noise pollution’ (Schwarz Reference Schwarz2014: 2034). Additionally, the racist stereotype that Arabs are ‘loud’ is often reinforced by dominant Israeli Jewish discourse. The management of Israel Railways once refused to incorporate Arabic into their station name announcements, claiming that the sound would be a nuisance and would make the train ride noisy (Schwarz Reference Schwarz2014: 2041).
Such examples of the racist silencing of Arab soundscapes makes Muqata’a’s cultural sampling an even more urgent intervention within the aural status quo. Describing his sampling philosophy, Muqata’a states:
When our land is being taken away, our culture is muted. So it’s a way to try and disrupt that – being a glitch in the system is very important. When your heritage is being attacked by the state, you have to find ways of being remembered, so I sample a lot. A lot of the Arabic music or old records in my grandparents’ homes in Jaffa and Safed, for example, were taken when their house was confiscated. So this is a way to bring those sounds back. (Yates Reference Yates2018)
Muqata’a’s track Thakira Jama’iya (2018) exemplifies his counter-archiving practice. While a steady loop of folk percussion sets the rhythm, dense layers of piano synthesiser playing in the traditional Arabic maqam melodic mode engulf the listener. Most strikingly, we hear fragmented and fleeting sampled sounds of a male Arabic singer that at times faintly and almost inaudibly lingers in the background of the track’s dense and chaotic soundscapes. The singer’s voice with an echo effect added then infiltrates the foreground but only for a few seconds, after which it retreats back into silence. I suggest this intricate sonic play using strategic editing and sampling methods conveys a metaphor for the Palestinian people’s desperate struggle to preserve and amplify the remaining fragments of their culture amidst systemic displacement and statelessness.
Like Palestinians, Black American activists also struggle to archive their liberation struggles, especially as they are being silenced and delegitimised by the federal government. Black Lives Matter activists collect video documentation of mass marches and police brutality against protestors using their smart phones and then widely disseminate these videos via social media.
In her book Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Angela Y. Davis (Reference Davis2016) draws similarities between Israel and the United States – their foundational settler colonialism and their systems of segregation. She calls for a transnational solidarity between the ongoing Palestinian liberation movement in the West Bank and Black American activists who, in Ferguson in 2014, were faced with the oppressive presence of militarised police that was comparable to a form of occupation. Taking influence from Davis, I suggest we listen critically to Ramallah and Ferguson in parallel to hear if we can draw links between their respective oppressive soundscapes.
2.3. Listening actively and empathetically to the Ferguson uprising
American audio activist Christopher DeLaurenti’s experimental radio documentary Fit the Description was aired on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) national radio in 2015. DeLaurenti exploited this wide mainstream dissemination platform to amplify the Black voices and soundscapes of the 2014 uprising in Ferguson following the police killing of Michael Brown. This uprising was frequently delegitimised and distorted by mainstream news media. Many news reports were fixated on stories of looting and property damage but rarely did mainstream news feature interviews with Black Lives Matter activists explaining their concerns about racist policing and economic conditions (Adamson Reference Adamson2016; Mills Reference Mills2017).
Similar to Kantako’s and Muqata’a’s construction of radical counter-narratives by way of remixing field recordings, DeLaurenti composes an aural collage of the Ferguson protests to critique corporate news discourse and its criminalisation of Black activists. To create Fit the Description, DeLaurenti compiled audio tracks extracted from multiple video clips on YouTube and Twitter recorded and uploaded by protestors in Ferguson. Unlike his previous projects for which he collected his own recordings of protests on-site, DeLaurenti made the decision not to be physically present in Ferguson as he felt this would grant more agency to the actual people on the ground. He feels that he was one less person from the media occupying space (DeLaurenti Reference DeLaurenti2015b).
Kantako and Muqata’a record and broadcast sounds from the communities within which they live and to which they are personally connected. In contrast, DeLaurenti’s appropriation of other protestors’ recorded material raises ethical questions about white artistic representations of marginalised and racialised communities. I discuss compositional ethics later in the fourth section of this article.
Fit the Description features a polyphony of contradictory lived experiences that are juxtaposed and conflict with each other within the radio listener’s audio stereo field as a metaphor for the chaotic tensions between protestors and authorities. For instance, the documentary’s introductory segment features a recording of Michael Brown’s funeral ceremony during which his close friend reminisces about his life and strong moral character. These eulogy recordings are abruptly interspersed with samples of Ferguson police radio dispatches describing a ‘young Black male leaving the store’. DeLaurenti thus attempts to honour and disseminate through mainstream radio an intimate event such as the funeral that received very little attention in mainstream news cycles. The sound piece critiques the American news media’s de-contextualised and sensationalised sound bites of police cars burning and store windows being smashed. DeLaurenti fosters slow and active listening amongst his audience through empathetic sonic meditations on nuanced personal testimonies. He serves as a ‘telematic earwitness’ (DeLaurenti Reference DeLaurenti2015b) listening through the ears of other field recordists and citizen journalists in Ferguson. DeLaurenti arguably did not compose this piece for the predominantly Black protestors in Ferguson to hear, but rather to push his white audiences to bear witness to Black trauma. Additionally, unlike Kantako and Muqata’a who risk being censored by government agents for disseminating overtly political content, DeLaurenti leverages his power, privilege and access as a respected artist commissioned by a national radio broadcaster. Doing so allows DeLaurenti to convey some of the messages from local Black activists who had been silenced in dominant discourse.
This article has thus far outlined how sonic media activists archive and remix soundscapes of resistance to amplify marginalised voices and perspectives. The following section will investigate the role of audio recording technology itself in facilitating sonic activism as well as subversive methods of re-appropriating oppressive audio technologies deployed by the state.
3. RE-APPROPRIATING RECORDING TECHNOLOGY AND SONIC WEAPONS AS A MEANS OF ASSERTING AGENCY
Being legally blind requires Kantako to use audio counter-surveillance to confront the daily visual surveillance of Black residents by police. Kantako’s microphone is a visible marker of his presence as an active listener and earwitness of police occupation. This marker informs police that he has a legal right to occupy certain physical spaces and that any action they take will be recorded and broadcast on air. This radical act of listening and field recording grants Kantako access to contested spaces that are otherwise unsafe for Black people in the United States.
Soundscape scholars have articulated links between field recording practices and gender dynamics. Sandra Gabriele recounts how during a nighttime soundwalk along Montreal’s Lachine Canal a male cyclist stopped and asked her to turn off her recording device so he could talk to her. She argues that her refusal to stop recording not only caused the man to leave but also allowed her to reclaim the agency she normally feels while recording during the day. Gabriele perceives the microphone as a technological barrier that stands between her, her body and this man, thus marking her body as being off limits (McCartney and Gabriele Reference McCartney and Gabriele2001). Although Kantako’s lived experiences are distinct from those of Gabriele, they both weaponise the microphone as one possible safety buffer that, at least temporarily, protects their bodies from possible danger and violence.
3.1. Acoustical agency
It is also helpful to draw on militant sound art collective Ultra-red’s conception of a field recording as a tactical instrument, as it both captures and intervenes in the space being represented aurally (Akiyama Reference Akiyama2015: 268). This suggests that a microphone in the field can be re-appropriated to function as a tool for marginalised people such as Kantako to ‘speak back’ to and interrupt the power dynamics enmeshed within their daily environments. However, noise, when deployed by systemically oppressed groups, can also work as a tool for them to assert their own agency and disrupt dominant soundscapes.
Sound studies scholar Tom Rice proposes the concept of acoustical agency to articulate how prisoners are often active rather than passive listeners to their everyday oppressive soundscapes (e.g., the frequent sound of slamming metal gates and guards shouting). Prisoners actively resist these soundscapes through their own sound-making and noises via boomboxes and cell-to-cell shouting (Rice Reference Rice2016: 6).
Muqata’a’s compositional approach speaks to this concept of acoustical agency. He produces counter-noise against the IDF’s noise. The synthesised sounds and noisy glitches in his music are juxtaposed with and pitted against the abstracted sounds of F16 sonic booms to symbolise a site of sonic warfare. Muqata’a repurposes the state’s ear-shattering sonic weapons and controls them using his own musical tools so as to disarm them and undermine their power. By ripping oppressive soundscapes from their original contexts and appropriating them within a creative sonic medium, Muqata’a produces new counter-hegemonic and subversive meanings that critique the state’s aural violence.
Muqata’a uses soundwalks through Ramallah, field recording and music as modes of carving out his own acoustic territory within sites where the military holds a monopolistic control over the environmental soundscapes. Because he uses a discreet built-in iPhone microphone, his tactical sonic disobedience is one relatively safe means for him to fight back against the state and assert his own acoustical agency.
DeLaurenti also remixes military sonic weapons. The opening sequence of Fit the Description introduces a melodic musical motif with a high-pitched pinging sound. The motif was actually produced by editing recordings of LRAD sound cannons that were frequently deployed by the Ferguson police during the protests. DeLaurenti creatively redeploys a violent and repressive sonic weapon known to cause permanent hearing loss (Volcer Reference Volcer2013). LRADs allow police to coerce, manage and control bodies through sound and listening. These sonic weapons work to erase agency and subjectivity among protestors and ‘render everyone before it mute biology, forcing them to clutch their ears and flee; a biopolitics of frequency and amplitude’ (Parker Reference Parker2019: 79). DeLaurenti’s digital processing of LRAD blasts transforms the police technology into an innocuous musical instrument, with its violent and menacing potentiality temporarily expelled.
While DeLaurenti creates a symbolic attack on LRADs, it is important to note that such forms of direct sonic resistance against police soundscapes can take place on the ground too. Amidst the ongoing anti-racism protests in the United States following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, two audio engineers in New York City built DIY acoustic shields to be used by Black Lives Matter protestors to protect them from the harmful noises of LRADs. The shields can sometimes partially reflect the sonic blasts back at the police (Rose Reference Rose2020), suggesting a literal form of sonic warfare.
The preceding discussion has asserted that microphones can be re-conceptualised as tools of agency and that artistic counter-noise against police and military works as a tactical mode of resistance. The final section of this article investigates ethical questions regarding politically loaded field recordings used by composers. I also address the urgent necessity for us to shift our modes of listening and soundscape research to consider how environmental soundscapes are directly linked to social justice movements.
4. WORKING TOWARDS MORE ETHICAL AND INTERSECTIONAL SOUNDSCAPE RESEARCH METHODS
Because DeLaurenti is a white artist and outsider to Ferguson’s Black community that he depicts in Fit the Description, it is important to examine the possible ethical implications of appropriating field recordings that contain personal and sensitive content.
DeLaurenti is indeed conscious of such ethical concerns and he therefore uses a self-reflexive compositional method. Fit the Description explicitly subverts notions of transparent editing and professional audio fidelity that are generally standardised within mainstream radio. DeLaurenti uses what he calls ‘aggressive editing’, which includes abrupt stops, dead silence and frenetic intercutting (DeLaurenti Reference DeLaurenti2005: 6). This editing technique serves as a radiophonic analogue to Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, reminding the listener of the piece’s artificial and poetic construction (DeLaurenti Reference DeLaurenti2015b) as opposed to an ‘objective’ documentation of the Ferguson uprising. DeLaurenti is transparent about how he is only articulating his subjective interpretation and intervention with the recorded soundscapes. We may consider this as one possible ethical methodology for creating political sound art that re-contextualises the personal and emotionally triggering soundscapes of a community.
DeLaurenti sifts through and reweaves stories that are not his own, so his compositional philosophy can be situated within ongoing debates about cultural appropriation and whether white artists, including novelists, painters and filmmakers, should be creating works that depict the multifaceted lived experiences and traumas of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) communities. Unfortunately, there exists a very limited body of sound studies scholarship addressing cultural appropriation, ownership and composers’ ethical responsibilities in soundscape composition and electroacoustic music (Blackburn Reference Blackburn2011; Wynne Reference Wynne, Schneider and Wright2011; Andean Reference Andean2014; Naylor Reference Naylor2014; Rennie Reference Rennie2015).
Listening to Fit the Description raises questions around power imbalances and who is granted a louder voice in the public sphere and mainstream media and whose voices are marginalised. In discussing his own compositional work that incorporates field recordings of protests, Tullis Rennie suggests that ‘articulating composer intention and position is the most difficult task when combining politically charged sound with idiosyncratic original composition’ (Rennie Reference Rennie2015: 19). DeLaurenti states that because he is a white male, Fit the Description will undoubtedly be louder and more present in certain contexts (DeLaurenti Reference DeLaurenti2015b) with predominantly white listeners. Therefore, DeLaurenti uses his privileged position as one means of pushing the voices of Black protestors in Ferguson from the margins over to the centre.
Evidently, DeLaurenti still ‘curates’ the voices and soundscapes recorded by protestors that he sources from social media. Further research would need to be conducted in order to understand whether DeLaurenti took into account the issue of consent and whether or not the Black residents featured in Fit the Description had any control over how they were represented.
The representational politics and ethical questions that run through DeLaurenti’s work imply that soundscape studies could benefit from a greater focus on the politics of listening. Sound scholar Mitchell Akiyama underlines the representation issues and sometimes colonial undertones of soundscape studies in its early years. In particular, he analyses the World Soundscape Project’s (WSP) program Soundscapes of Canada, produced for Canadian national radio (CBC) in 1974 using field recordings collected by WSP members throughout Canada. This was a pioneering early work in the field of soundscape composition. However, Akiyama states that the WSP’s sonic portrait of Canada failed to include First Nations people and non-European immigrant communities. All interviewees heard in the programme are presumably white Canadians (Akiyama Reference Akiyama2015: 69) despite the fact that Canada was becoming increasingly racially diverse in the 1970s. Akiyama argues that the programme exclusively represented the soundmarks of Canada’s colonial past, such as church bells and train whistles. For First Nations listeners who have historically been subjected to colonial dominance and religious residential schools, the bells featured in the piece might have rung sinister (Akiyama Reference Akiyama2015: 220). Akiyama’s critique of the WSP demonstrates the possible harmful consequences of soundscape studies methods that do not incorporate critical race and decolonised analytical perspectives.
Some scholars have highlighted how social movements use sonic agitation as a powerful tool to disrupt the status quo. Michael Nardone for instance hears sonic-spatial acts of disobedience in the Idle No More movement. Indigenous activists from this movement performed traditional ceremonial round dances as a way to disrupt the soundscapes of commerce in North American shopping malls during the holiday season of 2012. Nardone comments: ‘The sounds of the singers and the drummers mask the mall’s ambient Muzak, canceling it out. The architecture shakes. Impossible to ignore or avoid, the music’s vibrations affectively claim the space, sonically consume it’ (Nardone Reference Nardone2016: 93).
Acoustic ecology and soundscape studies methods predicated on using audio recordings to preserve intact soundscapes of mostly natural origin risk turning a deaf ear to the social and political aspects of the acoustic world (Fiebig Reference Fiebig2015: 16). Therefore, it is critical for contemporary soundscape composers and researchers to avoid colour-blind or ‘post-racial’ approaches to hearing environments. We must study the racial, class, sexual, gender, dis/ability and intersectional politicsFootnote 3 embedded within everyday environmental soundscapes.
Ethnomusicologist Allie Martin insists on a soundscape studies approach that considers the lived experiences of BIPOC communities and how they are excluded from certain environments. She employs soundwalking as a Black feminist research methodology and a way of sounding out the sonorities of race hidden in public spaces. Dominant soundscape discourse often centres white normative and settler-colonial (see Robinson Reference Robinson2020) perspectives when critically listening to environments. In contract, Martin states, ‘I utilize soundwalks to humanize myself in a soundscape that would otherwise disregard my sonic perceptions in favour of white hearing as the default standard of sound’ (Martin Reference Martin2019). She is aware of how her intersectional identity as a Black woman informs her soundwalks through increasingly policed and gentrified urban American spaces. The exclusionary features of the everyday soundscapes Martin navigates are exemplified by the sexist catcalls and racist slurs she sometimes encounters while walking.
Andra McCartney’s concept of ‘ecotonal listening’ is helpful here in working towards a new politics of listening, one that considers how the soundscapes of resistance produced by marginalised groups aim to reclaim acoustic space within the same sites as dominant hegemonic soundscapes. McCartney critiques orthodox interpretations of acoustic ecology that are based on dichotomous listening notions such as clear ‘hi-fi’ versus noisy ‘lo-fi’ environmental soundscapes, or rural silence versus urban noise. Rather than banishing sounds that rub up against each other in tension, she proposes ecotonal listening as a means of paying attention to how sounds overlap in any context (McCartney Reference McCartney2010). The studio contexts Kantako, Muqata’a and DeLaurenti operate in perhaps permit them to create metaphorical ecotonal sites in which militant roots reggae and Black oral testimonies ‘speak back’ to police soundscapes, electronic musical noises confront F16 sonic booms, and protest chants such as ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!’ compete with LRAD blasts. Such complex, chaotic and noisy aural environmental conflicts must not be reduced to ‘lo-fi’ status in contrast with a supposedly healthier and ‘ecologically balanced’ environment. Instead, a decolonised and intersectional acoustic ecology praxis should think through how such overlapping sounds reveal contextual meanings related to social justice struggles unfolding in the streets of America and the West Bank. The noisy ecotonal soundscapes of protest conveyed through the case studies of this article symbolise the attempted construction of healthier democracies.
5. CONCLUSION
Through this article, I have built upon the intersectional soundscape studies methods of Allie Martin and other scholarship about sonic agitation tactics employed by social movements such as Idle No More and Black Lives Matter. Kantako, Muqata’a and DeLaurenti use field recording and sound creation in ways that permit aural counterpublic noise and voices to critique and resist everyday oppressive soundscapes. The article has demonstrated how media activists and composers articulate how the meanings communities extract from their everyday soundscapes may vary based on racial, class and dis/ability differences, among others. The manners in which marginalised communities both navigate and resist the oppressive soundscapes of police occupation and systemic racism deeply affect their lived experiences. I have therefore attempted to bridge existing acoustic ecology and soundscape research with ongoing social justice work to underline how environmental soundscapes themselves are sites of political struggle.
