TheSoundofFear2
every listener is perhaps primarily and above all a spy Peter Szendy
The Ear of Dionysus is an artificial cave located in Syracuse, on the island of Sicily According to Jesuit father Athanasius Kircher, this may be the first example of an ecotectonic, or echo architecture, used for auditory surveillance purposes.
The cave was a latomy, a cave of imprisonment, and it is believed that Dionysus used it to listen from privileged points, unseen, to the secrets of his prisoners. Unlike the Ear of Dionysus, the panopticon proposed by Bentham seeks to make the prisoner feel heard, even when no one is lending an ear. Bentham’s proposal is like a panacousticon1 composed of a series of tubes routed to the cells from a central booth, with which the inspectors can give instructions and listen to each prisoner separately
“Hearing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act […] but listening cannot be defined only by its object or, one might say, by its goal.”
In his essay “Listening,” Barthes proposes three kinds of listening.2 The first is the act of hearing, which he compares to a wolf listening for its potential prey or a hare for its potential predator, and which he synthesizes as alert. The second is the deciphering of something, the translation of signs (when we speak the same language, for example): “Here, no doubt, begins the human,” Barthes says (really?). Finally, there is the third
1 The design of thepanacousticonwas published in 1673 by Father Kircher in his controversial work Phonurgianovasiveconiugiummechanicophysicumartisetnaturaeparanymphaphonosophia concinnatum Whoever faced this engineering marvel could hear the powerful voices originating at the other end of the system, but could not see those who uttered them, in a clearly divine experience [Editor’s note ]
2 In Roland Barthes, TheResponsibilityofForms(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). The following references to Barthes come from this source.
listening, which is an inter-subjective space in which I am listening; it also means listen to me, where what matters is not necessarily what is said but rather who says it.3
For the purposes of this text, we will leave aside Barthes’s third form of listening and concentrate on the second and first, which allow us to talk about sonic weaponry and spies.
Since time immemorial, listening has been the most powerful sonic weapon of all.
The Battle of Jericho
Then Joshua son of Nun secretly sent two spies from Shittim. “Go, look over the land,” he said, “especially Jericho.” So they went and entered the house of a prostitute named Rahab and stayed there. The king of Jericho was told, “Look, some of the Israelites have come here tonight to spy out the land.”4
According to the Bible, around 1400 B.C., Jericho was the first city attacked by the Israelites after crossing the Jordan River and entering Canaan. Jehovah said to Joshua, “See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men.”5 The Ark of the Covenant encircled the walls of Jericho for a week. On the seventh day,
3 Barthes’s forms of listening have not been the only ones: Theodor Adorno, Pierre Schaeffer, Michel Chion, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Szendy, among others that escape me, have also proposed interesting forms of listening that are worth digging into I suggest doing just that
4 Joshua 2:1-2, New International Version
5 Joshua 6:2.
Joshua commanded his people to blow the trumpets made of rams’ horns and to shout against the walls until they finally fell. Rahab and those close to her were saved for having helped the spies “and she lives among the Israelites to this day,” reads Joshua 6:25.
Peter Szendy points out that even though the most common way of talking about Jericho is to highlight the supernatural power of its trumpets, when we broaden our panorama this episode unveils a sonic weapon hidden in the shadows: an action that seeks to pass for inaction—that is, listening. And he reminds us that, according to Keith Melton, espionage is the world’s second oldest profession. Szendy even ventures to postulate that listening was born as espionage and indeed points to Genesis, to that first Edenic listening, when Adam and Eve hid from Yahweh after tasting the forbidden fruit.6
Finally, he shows us that in the 19th-century Larousse French dictionary, apart from the popular definition, other uses for the word escouter (“to listen”) are mentioned: “A closed place in a convent, from which one can follow the service without seeing or being seen… Small mineshaft from which one can hear if the enemy miner is working or advancing. // Guards placed in these tunnels to follow the progress of the enemy’s work.”7 These uses, added to the common meaning of “listening,” seem inevitably to link that word to stalking and defense. The listener hides in order not to be noticed, in order to have access to what does not belong to them: the beloved’s secret, the enemy’s plans, the forbidden fruit of Eden.
“A listening which circulates, which permutates, which disaggregates…,” says Barthes.
Before Radar
Before the invention of radar, sound pickups that amplified listening were used during World War I to locate enemy ships. There were different kinds of locators, but the most common were the so-called war tubes: trumpets that received sound, to be listened to via headphones. Others were acoustic mirrors, which can still be found in rural areas of
6 Peter Szendy, AllEars:TheAestheticsofEspionage(New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 10
7 Ibid.,11.
the UK, and with which distant sounds are reflected and amplified. Both devices helped to detect where the aircraft were traveling and provided information for estimating their size.
Noise is a fantasy of espionage.
It is obvious that with new technologies locators and acoustic mirrors have become obsolete. Nevertheless, one espionage activity that at first glance would seem rudimentary, but has been in use since the Cold War, is radio.
Number stations are shortwave radio stations of unknown origin that transmit encrypted messages by means of voices reading sequences of numbers, words, letters, or even Morse code and musical sequences. They are believed to have appeared during the Cold War as a form of communication between intelligence agencies and their spies. Although the argument sounds quite convincing, the reality is that to this day no agency has acknowledged using number stations, so the topic is only of interest to conspiracy theorists. And the fact is that nowadays (even with all these communication technologies) mysterious transmissions of this type are still heard, coming from different parts of the world. Here a recording from 2022:
[Soundcloud]
Several musicians and artists have been attracted to the sonority of these transmissions, which they use in their music. Perhaps one of the most comprehensive attempts to preserve these sounds is The Conet Project, an archival project of number stations consisting of five albums, complied by Akin Fernandez, founder of Irdial-Discs.
In summary, we can say that this sonic armament operates at different levels of perception and significance, launching attacks using sonic power for the first kind of listening, using messages and sounds with specific connotations for the second kind of listening, and using symbolic or cultural sounds for the third kind of listening—all in order to instill fear in the adversary or to exert control over them.
According to the myth of Ulysses and the Sirens, Ulysses ordered all the men on his ship to cover their ears with wax in order not to hear the sirens’ song, and also ordered them to tie him to the mast with his ears uncovered, so as not to fall under the spell of the sirens’ marvelous sounds. Even though at present another Ulysses is improbable—since there is no (known) sonic weapon that attacks its adversary via enchantment—in the near future there will no doubt be jewelry or fashion accessories (such as those already known to help escape facial recognition) that will protect us from sonic weaponry, just as with the sailors of Ulysses.
I hope that these words of Barthes will resonate even more in posterity:
“Freedom of listening is as necessary as freedom of speech […] Listening speaks.”