FORENSIS

A project by Forensic Architecture, Centre for Research Architecture,

Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London
 Aural Contract: Forensic Listening
and the Reorganization
of the Speaking Subject
Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Fig. 1. “Subject is not In an article titled “Mengele’s Skull,” Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman
sure.” Screenshot from
Layered Voice Analysis suggest that in the mid-eighties international justice entered a new era.
6.50 which examines The authors claim that unlike the seminal 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf
micro fluctuations of
voices to corroborate Eichmann, which was archetypal of an era defined by eyewitness testimony,
what the subject is
saying. Source:
in the mid-eighties international justice became a stage for a different type
www.LVA650.com of narrative; “a second narrative, not the story of the witness but that of
the thing in the context of war crimes investigation and human rights.”1 The
authors claim that what catalyzed this new era into existence was the exhumed
remains of the German SS officer and Nazi physician Joseph Mengele.
One year before the forensic examination of Mengele’s remains, a piece
of legislation was passed in British criminal law which unknowingly also
marked a crucial and forensic shift in the conventions of testimony. The
1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) ordered all police interview
rooms to be equipped with audio recording machines, so that all interroga-
tions from then on would be audio-recorded instead of transcribed into text.
The passing of this law unintentionally catalyzed the birth of a radical form of
listening that would over the next twenty-eight years transform the speaking

Truth 65
subject in the process of law. This legislation fundamentally stretched the
role of the juridical ear from simply hearing words spoken aloud to actively
listening to the process of speaking, as a new form of forensic evidence. This
essay is dedicated to understanding the type of listening that this moment
in 1984 inaugurated; I seek to amplify both its origins and its role in the con-
temporary juridical and political forums, in which we see the fragile balance
of fundamental human and civil rights predicated on listening and the voice,
tipping into an uncertain future which calls into question the very means
through which we can negotiate politics and the law.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Code E of PACE was seen as a solution to claims that the police were falsi-
fying confessions and altering statements made during interviews, as prior
to this point all statements were simply written down “verbatim” by the police
officers and then signed off on by the suspect. Were it not for a handful of
linguists practicing a rare strand of forensic phonetic analysis, PACE would
have remained a simple and transparent article of legal reform. Instead, the
act exponentially increased the use of speaker profiling, voice identification,
and voice prints in order to, among other things, determine regional and
ethnic identity as well as to facilitate so-called voice lineups.
Prior to PACE, if it was suspected that someone’s voice was on an
incriminating recording — for example a bugged telephone conversation in
which there was discussion of an illicit act, or a CCTV surveillance tape of
a masked bank robber shouting “Hand over the money” — that person was
asked to come to the police station and give a voluntary voice sample. After
PACE, doing so was no longer voluntary, and all such recordings were added
to a growing audio archive of cassette tapes. This archive quickly became
accessed by the little known scientific field of forensic linguistics; this unex-
pected convergence thereby added the voice as a new medium through which
to conduct legal investigations. Soon the forensic listener was required not
only to identify voices, but to investigate background sounds in order to
determine where, with what machine, and at what time of day a recording
had been made—thus enabling a wide range of sonic frequencies to testify.
Legislation similar to PACE was adopted by many other countries in
the mid-1980s, resulting in the permanent installation of audio recording
machines in police interview rooms around the world. As in Britain, these
policies resulted in the establishment of independent forensic audio labs, and
today there are even postgraduate university programs devoted to the field.
Cassette recorders placed in all police interviews reorganize the voice
as evidence and therefore PACE, as we will see throughout this essay, is for
my research what Mengele’s skull became for Keenan and Weizman, i.e.,
representative of an epistemic and technological shift that emerged in the
mid-eighties and which gave rise to new forms of testimony based on the

66 Aural Contract
analysis of objects rather than witness accounts. Yet in the case of forensic
listening there is a crucial difference: here there is no clean shift from witness
account to the expert analysis of objects because the witness account and
the object under investigation are the same thing. The voice is at once the
means of testimony and the object of forensic analysis.
JP French Associates, the United Kingdom’s most prominent indepen-
dent forensic audio laboratory, has worked on over 5,000 cases since 1984.
Its founder, Peter French, told me in reference to PACE that “whereas up to
that point […] I had a trickle of work coming in, all of a sudden it was as
though there had been a thunderstorm and it started raining cassette tapes.”2
However, this overnight transformation of the voice as a legal object of
investigation must be seen in the greater context of the role of the voice in
law at large. In other words, would this thunderstorm have happened if
the voice was not already such a central part of legal negotiation and process?
Moreover, it is this very fact of the voice as being central to the formation,
mediation, and practice of the law that makes it such a complex article of
evidence. It is my argument that the PACE legislation formalizes a regime
of listening that was always present within law: that the initiation of audio
recording machines in police interview rooms drew upon, brought to the
surface, and professionalized a way of listening to the voice specific to political
and legal forums.

Just Voices

For the law to acquire its performative might, it must be delegated to the
voice. For the law to come into effect it must be announced and it must be
heard. Writing alone is inadequate to carry out the burden of legislation,
which must first be committed to speech. As a site where speech acts, the
trial allows us to understand how the voice serves to activate certain forms
of governance and control.
In the United States Supreme Court to this day there is a vocal tradition
that I find quite revealing: when the clerk enters the courtroom at the begin-
ning of the day he/she inaugurates the proceedings by striking the gavel onto
the woodblock then waiting for silence, before announcing, “the Honorable,
the Chief Justice, and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the
United States” — and then, for four seconds, he/she interrupts his/her own
speech and sings out “OYEZ OYEZ OYEZ”—before returning to his/her
declaration that the court is now sitting and that God is now blessing the
honorable court. Then with a second strike of the gavel he/she sits down. In
this situation, we see the means by which the law is vocally summoned into
existence. A legal space is endowed with the right to carry out justice only
when certain announcements are made. These announcements, in combina-
tion with other oaths and speech acts, function as a juridical amplifier, the
switch that makes legally inaudible speech audible. These acts operate through

Truth 67
the voice in order to transform words from the normal conditions of
communication to the extraordinary conditions of testimony. And yet
something more than the speaking of words is found in the clerk’s call.
In those four seconds when his annunciation shifts from a prescribed set
of spoken words to the ineffability of nonverbal sounds — “Oyez Oyez
Oyez” — we see that it is not simply language that legislates but also the
extra-linguistic elements of the voice itself.
The legal action habeas corpus offers us some insight into the use of
the voice as both a verbal and a nonverbal instrument. This ancient writ,
which translates to “may you have the body,” stipulates that a person under
arrest must be physically brought before a judge. The judge must see
and hear the suspect live. The voice is a corporeal product that contains
its own excess, with this corporeal excess announcing to the court the
absolute presence of the witness. This bodily excess of the voice resides
not in its linguistic functions, but in its nonverbal effects; such as its pitch,
accent, glottal stops, intonations, inflections, and impediments. As
byproducts of the event of language, these effects reveal other kinds of
evidence, evidence that may evade the written documentation of legal
proceedings but does not escape the ears of the judge and of those listening
to a trial in the space of the courtroom.
These paralinguistic elements of testimony produce a division of the
voice, which in turn establishes two witnesses within one voice: one witness
speaks on behalf of language and the other on behalf of the body. Often the
testimony provided by each of these two witnesses is corroborated by the
other, but they can also betray one another — an internal betrayal between
language and body, between subject and object, fiction and fact, truth and lie.
This betrayal exists in a single human utterance in which the self gives itself
away. This splitting of the voice into two selves, or into two witnesses, can
also be seen as an extension of the well-established legal principle of testis
unis, testis nullus, which translates to “one witness, no witness,” and which
means that testimony provided by any one person in court is to be disregarded
unless corroborated by the testimony of at least one other. The law, it
seems, requires a certain doubling of testimony, and this doubling even
Fig. 2. One of René
extends to the single witness. In the eyes of the law, the testimony of the single Laennec’s original
witness, whether the suspect or the survivor, has to be split into language and stethoscopes. Source:
Science Museum/Science
its bodily conduit for it to be considered testimony at all. & Society Picture Library.
This doubling of testimony marks the terrain which was
occupied by forensic linguists and acousticians within the field
of law after 1984. In the cases of forensic listening that I will
discuss here, we will see how these professional listeners became
the expert witnesses speaking on behalf of the paralinguistic
attributes of a person’s testimony. After 1984 these were the
people called in to corroborate and resolve the inherent divi-
sion of the legal voice, formalizing an acoustic practice inherent
to jurisprudence.

68 Aural Contract
 Auscultation

The audio cassette recorders at the center of the PACE policy show how
technology is also inextricably linked to what I claim is a historical audio
event. The phonograph, the first machine to ever record and reproduce
audio, is usually cited as the technology that revolutionized listening and
persists to continually condition the way we listen today. Yet the mode of
listening and audio discourse employed by these forensic analysts of sound,
despite their dependence on technologies for voice recording, owes its origins
more to a piece of technology that predates the phonograph: the stethoscope.
The invention of the stethoscope by René Laennec in 1816 formally
inaugurated the practice of auscultation (listening to the inner sounds of the
body). Laennec’s work to classify the sounds of the body is a major contribu-
tion to medical diagnosis and the image of the stethoscope is now a symbol
of the medical profession at large. As an international symbol of medical
treatment the stethoscope communicates medicine as a terrain of care and
a space where the concerns of the patient can be heard. It symbolizes the
human communication between doctor and patient. Yet its material legacy is
quite different. What the stethoscope actually did was to allow the doctor to
bypass the testimony of patients and instead communicate directly with their
bodies. It was a technology that allowed doctors to no longer depend on the
subjective accounts of their patients’ illnesses. Understanding how to inter-
pret sounds from hearts, stomachs, and lungs meant that the doctor could
communicate with the objective truth of the body, as this emerging acoustic
lexicon was thought of as a collection of voices which, unlike the speech of
the patient, didn’t lie; these were voices which couldn’t dramatize, embellish,
and exaggerate their condition. The stethoscope shifted the medical ear from
listening to the patient’s self-diagnosis to listening to the sounds of the body.
Just like forensic listening, the stethoscope pits the subject against itself
as simultaneous testimonies can be emitted from the body and from the
speaking voice. In auscultation there exists a very literal example of this
doubling of the voice. Egophony is the name given to the process whereby,
while listening to the lungs with a stethoscope, the patient is asked to say the
letter “e.” If the lungs are clear, the doctor listening with the stethoscope will
detect the spoken “e” (“ee”) as sounding like an “ee.” Adversely, if the lungs
contain fluid or a tumor, the patient’s spoken “e” will sound like a phonetic
“a” (“ay”). The “e” sound is transmuted to an “a” sound through the
body. This “e” to “a” transmutation shows us the ways in which the voice
becomes doubled in the medical ear and how one voice can produce multiple
accounts of itself. The example becomes increasingly literal when we examine
the name for this auditory event, egophony. Literally ego — “the self” and
phone — speech sound. Yet this self-identifying speech sound (ego-phony)
could also be understood as ego-phony — the fraudulent self. And when we
combine all these definitions we arrive at a name for a form of listening that
almost perfectly describes the intentions of auscultation, i.e., detecting a

Truth 69
fraudulent (phony) speech sound (phone) which betrays the self (ego).3
The paradox of the stethoscope is that it simultaneously produces
an objective distance from the patient and a deeper proximity to their body.
As a nonelectronic device it simply connects a material path through which
vibrations can be channeled from the inner body of the patient directly to the
eardrums of the doctor. This distanced yet deep material form of human
contact is also characteristic of forensic listening, whereby one listens not to
the semantics of language but to the molecular constitution of individual
phonemes. This shared practice of listening which transmutes subject into
object reveals a direct lineage from auscultation to forensic phonetics.
Auscultation offers the law, as it offered medical practice, the promise of
amplifying the objective aspects of an otherwise deeply subjective account
of an event. Yet in such cases one can adequately listen to only one aspect of
the voice at a time; the qualities of the voice as object mute the subjective
and semantic enunciations or vice versa. The shift from one form of listening
to another can happen insidiously and invisibly and yet, as we will see
throughout this essay, its political impact and effect on the listened to
populace can be radical.
During my 2010 interview with the forensic linguist Peter French he told
me: “Last week, a colleague and I spent three working days listening to one
word from a police interview tape.”4 Statements like this exemplify French’s
radical approach to both listening and the theoretical paradigms that
surround audio culture. Unlike many sound theorists who focus on sound’s
ephemeral and immaterial qualities, French’s approach is markedly material. Fig. 3. Dr. Peter French
The contemporary dominant school of audio culture is heavily influenced by profiling a voice. Photo:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan,
Don Ihde’s 1976 text Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound, which 2009.
puts forward the impossibility of fundamentally grasping
sound.5 The continuing prevalence of this school of thought is
demonstrated in the 2009 book Sounding New Media by Frances
Dyson, who states in the introduction: “As Don Ihde pointed out
decades ago ‘a sound is always multiple, always heterogeneous,
being neither visible or tangible, sound is never quite an object,
never a full guarantor of knowledge.’”6 Yet French’s formulation
renders sound dissectible, replicable, physical, and corporeal in
its object quality. What allows French’s radical approach to sound is the
forensic intensity at which he listens, which allows the audio object to
reveal a large amount of information as to its production and its form: the
space in which it was recorded, the machine that recorded it, geographical
origin of the accent, as well as details of the age, health, and ethnicity of a voice.
Yet as with all cases of legal, social, and ethnic profiling, French walks
a thin ethical line. Ironically, what allows French to maintain his credibility
in a time in which law enforcement increasingly reaches out to forensic
linguistics in odious forms of surveillance and profiling that target huge
swathes of the population, is his ability to listen better. French understands
the limits of what can be detected through the voice and therefore avoids

70 Aural Contract
 exploiting the law’s generally increasing demand for the empty promises
of forensic science and its ignorance regarding their practical capacity.
Forensic listening is now being applied more than ever before.
Its application is primarily on two fronts: speaker profiling of asylum
seekers and developing voice-activated algorithms for the security industry.
Today it is applied on such a scale that law enforcement agencies and
security services cannot often afford the expert listening of people like
Dr. French. Hence, frighteningly, we are entering a time in which there is
both an overcapacity demand for the governance of the voice, and an
inadequacy of authentic means of producing such a governance. In other
words, we have now entered a sorry phase where bad listening (and there-
fore bad evidence) is flooding the forum.

Fig. 4. “Two You.” The

image documents voice-
prints (voice fingerprints) Juris-Diction
of two different voices
saying the word “you.”
The means by which What we will understand as I develop explanations of the most recent and
one can read this image
and make comparisons prolific examples of forensic listening is that it is not simply governance of
between the two different the voice that has been made more pervasive but also the employment
voices is by understand-
ing that the horizontal of these modes of listening in the control of territory and the production
axis is time and the
vertical axis is frequency.
of space. Their use as agents of spatial control is made clear if we take
The contour lines then a closer look at legal terminology and practice, in order to see how forensic
illustrate the amplitude
of a specific frequency
listening becomes a technically instantiated and formalized process of fun-
at a specific time in the damental legal concepts. If we divide the term “jurisdiction,” which connotes
pronunciation of the
word “you.” In the use of a territorial range over which a legal authority extends, we see that “juris”
cartographic techniques refers to a legal authority or right and “diction” refers to speech. “Diction”
to produce voiceprints we
can see clearly the interre- in linguistics is also defined as the manner of enunciating and uttering
lation of the control over sounds and words, indicating not simply speech but the process of enun-
both voice and territory.
Image source: Ira M. ciation and amplification of words. By understanding the etymology of
Freeman, Sound and
Ultrasonics (London:
the term jurisdiction, we see that the law itself operates as a speech space
Random House, 1968). in which those within its range of audibility are subject to its authority.
As a fundamental principle of legal
governance, jurisdiction reveals to us
the power of sound in the construc-
tion of the space and time of the law.
Much like the radio in the workplace,
the audio medium affords the law a
means of controlling space and inter-
polating its subjects while remaining
predominantly out of sight. In the
following example we will see how
the law’s practices of auscultation are
radically remixed and used to amplify
the scope of the legal frontiers of a
given juris-diction.

Truth 71
 By 2003, the United States and the United Kingdom were entrenched
on two fronts in the War on Terror. These wars forced mass migrations that
became the catalyst for immigration authorities around the world to turn
to forensic speech analysis to determine if the accents of asylum seekers
correlated with their claimed national origins — i.e., to see whether people
originated from areas which would mean that they were legitimately entitled
to asylum. On a scale similar to the 1984 PACE act, this produced a huge
proliferation of forensic listening, this time employed to help determine the
validity of asylum claims made by thousands of people without identity
documents, particularly in Australia, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands,
New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
In most of the countries listed above the protocol is as follows: a
telephone interview is organized between the asylum seeker and a private
company run by forensic phoneticians based in Sweden: Sprakab. Using
anonymized analysts (which many claim are actually former refugees with
no linguistic training) the claimant’s voice is elicited, recorded, and analyzed
and subsequently a report is produced and given to the immigration authori-
ties. The confidence in, and the rapidly increasing predominance of, this
kind of investigation within immigration law is troubling, given that its accu-
racy has been called into question by many forensic linguists, phoneticians,
and other practitioners around the world.7 One of the main concerns of this
group of linguists is to advocate for the idea that citizenship is a bureau-
cratic distinction and that the voice is a socially and culturally produced
artifact that cannot be tidily assimilated into the nation-state.
In undertaking extensive research into this politically potent form of
listening I heard many shocking accounts of vocal discrimination and
wrongful deportations—none more so than that of Mohammed, a Palestinian
asylum seeker who, after having the immigration authorities lose his
Palestinian identity card, was forced to undergo an accent analysis to
prove his origins. During his deportation hearing he was told by the asylum
tribunal that he was lying about his identity and the judges paid particular
attention to the way that he pronounced the word for tomato. Instead of
“bandora” he said “banadora.” This tiny “a” syllable is the sound that pro-
vides the UK border agency with the apparent certainty of Mohammed’s
Syrian origin: a country only twenty-two kilometers away from his home-
town of Jenin in Palestine. Therefore, in designating this syllable as a
marker of Syrian nationality, the border agency implies that this vowel,
used in the word tomato, is coterminous with Syria’s borders. The fact that
this syllable designates citizenship above an identity card that contradicts
it forces us to rethink how borders are being made perceptible and how
configurations of vowels and constants are made legally accountable.
Locating this Syrian vowel in the speech of a Palestinian surely proves
nothing more than the displacement of the Palestinians themselves. In other
words, the instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridized phonetic
form, is testament not to someone’s origins but only to an unstable and

72 Aural Contract
migratory lifestyle, which is of course common among those fleeing from
conflict and seeking asylum, often spending years getting to the target
country and living in diversely populated camps along the way. Moreover,
it should be remembered that in such camps one may want to conceal the
origin of one’s voice because of the continual fear of persecution.
When calling for ways in which to implement better practice in cases
of language analysis for the determination of origin of undocumented and
illegal migrants (LADO), forensic linguist Helen Fraser says that we “need
to clearly separate linguistic data from potentially biasing background on
the applicant’s ‘story.’” 8 Clearly in this expression of objectivity we see how
linguists want to auscultate the accent and go beyond the potentially trau-
matic and pathetic “story” of a person’s flight; preferring to find in their
speech another type of testimony. However, my argument is that for adept
forensic listeners this accent object (linguistic data) should also be heard
as a “story” in itself, one that could reveal an account just as traumatic.
In other words, for listeners who are not content with drawing a border
around a single phonetic article, the accent should be understood as a
biography of migration, as an irregular and itinerant concoction of conta-
giously accumulated voices, rather than an immediately distinguishable
sound that avows its unshakable roots neatly within the confines of a
nation-state. In the clear distinction between biographical data and
linguistic data, we see how this policy is used as a practice which does not
seek to excavate the life of an accent, and ultimately only highlights the
virtual impossibility of locating its place of birth.
Like all practices of auscultation, the forensic analyst’s can be under-
stood as operating in the excess of the speaker’s intentions. Yet due to
issues of mimicry, contagiousness, and survival, the life of an accent is pos-
sessed to a greater or lesser extent by every living person it has ever come
into contact with, especially influenced, of course, by the one voice with
which it is presently in dialogue. Such a cartography of a voice is thus
further complicated by the very presence of the cartographer and his/her
own voice. In the case of Mohammed, his rejected status is owed to an
interviewee whom Mohammed claims was an Iraqi Kurd and whose Ara-
bic dialect was so different to his that he had to shift his way of speaking
simply to be understood and to understand. 9 Listening is never simply
a passive, objective, and receptive process, but rather an act that plays a
fundamental role in the construction and facilitation of the speech of the
interlocutor (whether subject or object). Therefore what becomes amplified
in such investigations is not the true identity of the sonic object under
investigation but the political potency of the listening itself and the agency
of the listener. In other words, the results of this forensic listening tell us
little about Mohammed’s accent but a great deal about the contemporary
political context in which this audio investigation participates.
The form of listening that is presented in the case of Mohammed shows
us that in its attempt to move away from the subjectivity of the speaker and

Truth 73
to objectify their voice, another layer of subjectivity becomes established:
that of the expert listener or interpreter of sounds. The forensic listening
paradox is perfectly performed in this case, whereby in an attempt to hear
objectively, the listener’s own subjectivity emerges and is made distinctly
audible (through the way his listening acts upon and transmutates the sub-
jectivity of the interviewee). This then allows one to ask the question: as an
intersubjective process, can listening ever be objective? Will listening
always be tainted by the subjectivity of that which listens? In attempting
to answer these questions we quickly reach the fundamental paradox and
the empty promise of forensic listening. Perhaps the only way to detach
oneself from any given situation is to listen, as Dr. French does, to a
single syllable for three days, until the sound becomes completely abstracted
from humanity and the culturally preprogrammed prejudice of the ear.

The Right to Silence

In attempting to establish a correlation between voice and citizenship

we encounter another vocal legal paradox. In criminal charges against a
citizen of the United Kingdom, the criminal is afforded the right to pro-
tection from self-incrimination; commonly known as the right to silence
(or in the United States as Miranda rights). This is a fundamental legal
right not to speak if you feel that your speech would in some way incrim-
inate you. When hearing the specific words of the right to silence issued
by the police you know that your voice has been placed in custody and
that your voice has crossed the threshold between normal conversation
and liable speech. However, with speech profiling becoming a more and
more widespread form of investigation, it is not only our words that can
incriminate us but the phonological content of our voices as well. There-
fore, just as our speech is being mutated by the legal system we must
ourselves fight to rephrase the legal diction so that it remains transparent
about the ways in which our voices are placed under custody and inves-
tigated. My proposal for altering the way the law speaks to us entails
changes from the moment of one’s arrest onwards, and therefore entails
amending the right to silence. In the United Kingdom, the revised ver-
sion might read:

You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you
do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on
in court. Anything you do say, including the way you say it, may be given
in evidence against you.

Yet even if these alterations to the right to silence were to be made, we

would still need to understand that this fundamental legal right is only
afforded to the citizen; the asylum seeker, for example, has no recourse

74 Aural Contract
to silence, as the burden of proof lies not with the prosecutor in such cases
but with the claimant themselves: in other words, if they don’t speak they
will be deported. Without the right to silence, the asylum seeker is forced
to speak to the law; they must make themselves audible to the system and
yet they remain without control over the conditions of how they are being
heard. What they do retain, however, is the human right to freedom of
expression and it is my argument that this policy of listening contravenes
this fundamental right.
These forensic speech analyses force us to redefine our right to freedom
of speech, a concept that must now be extended to encompass not only the
words we speak, but also the sonic quality of our speech itself. The voice
has long been understood as the very means by which one can secure and
advocate one’s political and legal interests, but these recent shifts in the law’s
listening affirm that the stakes and conditions of speech have altered in
a nontransparent way. This shift is seemingly minute yet, as we see in the
voice analyses of asylum seekers, can have a dramatic impact on people’s
lives. Therefore, the more radical the practices of listening at the core of
legal investigations become, the more they herald the advent of a moment
to redefine and reshape the political conventions of speech and sound
in society. Now it seems that the battle for free speech is no longer about
fighting to speak freely, but fighting the control over the very conditions
under which one is being heard.

The Whole Truth

The latest development in forensic linguistics, and hence the closing example
of this essay, is the product of the combined labor of mathematicians and
speech scientists to produce computer algorithms that allow users to auto-
matically profile voices for a variety of different applications. The most prom-
inent of these applications is “voice stress analysis,” the premise of which is
that, through a frequency analysis, the physiological conditions of stress are
made audible by the nonverbal elements of a voice. This technology is said
to be able to determine all sorts of psychological verdicts based on jittering
frequencies, glottal tension, and vocal intensity, all regardless of language.
At Delft University in the Netherlands a team of linguists and comput-
er scientists are developing a kind of “trauma-o-meter” application for emer-
gency calls whereby the algorithmic listening software would determine the
priority of a call depending on the level of stress detected in the caller’s voice.
The idea behind this is that the tension of the vocal chords produce “jitter,”
which in linguistics relates to fluctuations in pitch, and that the level of
stress a person is undergoing can be observed in the intensity at which
these minute fluctuations occur. Therefore the scale of the emergency is
legible as affect on the body that witnessed it. Regardless of what is being
said, the first response to the event will then be a response to the body of

Truth 75
its witness. In building a hierarchy of trauma
this machine also produces a chain of
command that situates the paralinguistic
aspects of the voice as an authority over
the words that the caller wishes to relay.
The stress the body undergoes here is
considered the objective truth of the event;
yet in my next example these same physio-
logical attributes are taken to reveal the
opposite — a lie.
A piece of software called Layered
Voice Analysis 6.50 (LVA 6.50), developed
by Israeli company Nemeysesco Ltd, is
the major application of this new form of
forensic voice profiling: it is currently em-
ployed as a lie detection method by the Los Angeles Police Department, Fig. 5. Screenshot from
Layered Voice Analysis
Russian and Israeli governments, and insurance companies all over the 6.50 which examines
world. In the United Kingdom, Harrow council and many others are us- micro fluctuations of
voices in order to corrob-
ing it to measure the veracity of benefit claims made by disabled citizens. orate what the subject
Harrow council claims they have saved roughly £330,000 of benefit pay- is saying. Source: www
.LVA650.com.
outs in the first seven months of using this software.10 Lynn Robbins, direc-
tor of the company Voice Analysis Technologies LLC, the main retailer of
the software, told me in an interview that based on analysis of the body as
it resonates through the voice, LVA 6.50 can not only determine whether a
person is lying, but is able to deliver a whole series of verdicts — detecting,
for example, embarrassment, overemphasis, inaccuracy, voice manipula-
tion, anxiety, and whether or not the interviewee is attempting to outsmart
his/her interlocutor; in the future, I was told, it will even be able to hear
sex-offending tendencies. 11
Commander Sid Hale is piloting the software for the Los Angeles
Police Department and explains: “Unlike the polygraph we don’t need
to cooperate with the suspect, we don’t need to wire them up with skin
responses or respirators, it does it in real time.” 12 This idea of being able to
access the body of the person who is the object of one’s interest without
touching it is very attractive to law enforcement agencies, just as it was to
doctors who first used the stethoscope at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. Reports from that time say that one of the benefits of the stetho-
scope was that it meant doctors no longer needed to press an ear to the
patient’s body, and hence it provided them with a hygienic distance from
the potentially diseased patient. In LVA 6.50 we see how this technology
produces and appropriates this hygienic, physical, and objective distance.
One key, politically sensitive effect of the fact that LVA 6.50 can operate
without physical interaction — the voice analysis might be conducted
during a telephone conversation, or using a prerecorded sample — is that
testing can be undertaken without the consent or knowledge of the subject.

76 Aural Contract
 In the context of borders and prisons, this hygienic distance allows the
authorities to access the emotional and bodily content of the noncitizen
(e.g., the prisoner or refugee) without needing them to formally enter the
society of citizenship. At the border this test can be performed before a person
formally enters the country, or even before they leave their country of
origin — meaning that LVA 6.50, in making use of the hygienic distance of
audibility, enables the extension of the border itself. This software simultane-
ously extends the range of the law’s juris-diction while also designating those
who must remain beyond its range of responsibility/audibility, differen-
tiating between those to be afforded the rights of a citizen and those to be
denied those rights, and the possibility of claiming refugee status.
Although in the legal context there has never been a need for an ear
to be pressed against the suspect’s body, the principle of habeas corpus, as
discussed above, requires that the subject be brought physically before the
law (e.g., in an interrogation room or courtroom) in order to have a legal
hearing. Yet we could easily imagine how LVA 6.50 would eradicate the
necessity for the physical presence of the suspect, as it requires only a voice
to access the corpus. In this sense, LVA 6.50 short circuits the process of
habeas corpus, using an algorithm and a visual interface to give the law
access to what a person’s body is “really” saying as they speak, even if that
body is thousands of miles away.
This distance-producing (voice stress analysis) machine is not only
designed to distance the user from the subject of analysis; it also works
to remove or minimize the presence and role of the user (the interrogator,
insurance broker, border guard, etc.). In an interview situation, the visual
interface flashes up its verdicts as the interviewee speaks. This machine thus
promises to listen on behalf of its operator, reducing or putting into question
their interpretative and intuitive capacities. In this sense this technology
not only mutes the words of the speaker, but also deafens the listener. And
although a direct lineage can be traced from the stethoscope to voice stress
analysis technologies, the removal of the necessity for the operator to listen
articulates the fundamental break with auscultation as a practice. Ausculta-
tion shifted a mode of listening from the speech to the body yet it still
required listening at its very core and in fact inaugurated a new epistemology
of listening that is still taught to millions in the medical profession today.
Though it practices auscultation, LVA 6.50 does not teach new ways of
listening; in the microscopic analysis of the frequencies of the human voice it
can hear beyond the range of human audibility and therefore it excludes the
possibility of building new auditory skills. Unlike the work of forensic listen-
ers like Dr. French, its means of listening does not hold the potential to
increase, fine-tune, and augment human auditory experience.
Not only does LVA 6.50 listen on behalf of its user, but in its regis-
tration of emotional content (anxiety, aggression, fear) this software
feels on behalf of its user as well. Using this software the interviewer no
longer needs to be sensitive to the psychological condition of his subject.

Truth 77
Figs. 6–11. Screenshots from Layered Voice Analysis 6.50 which examines micro-fluctuations of voices in order to corroborate
what the subject is saying. Source: www.LVA650.com.

78 Aural Contract
Truth 79
The machine thus produces apathetic operators who listen to neither
words nor tone of voice, and therefore minimizes the extent to which the
interviewer dirties themselves with the subjectivity of the interviewee. This
machine is so attractive to law enforcers because it recognizes the funda-
mental flaw of previous modes of forensic listening: that in objectifying
the voice the one who causes its objectification becomes amplified in the
process — i.e., that the subjectivity of the speaker is replaced by that of the
listener/interpreter/aural investigator. In order to produce the laboratory
conditions for justice and a completely objectified realm of listening, law
enforcement recognizes that listening must be relegated to the machine. Yet
in voice stress analysis there still remains the glitch of the subject contami-
nating the legal laboratory, as these algorithms first have to be programmed
by people who could have bigoted ears and economic agendas. To produce
a verdict the algorithm needs to learn the logics of those verdicts—e.g., in
order for it to profile the voice of a sex offender it first needs someone
to teach it the vocal attributes of a sex offender.
In response to the astounding claims of LVA 6.50’s highly sensitive and
microscopic listening, a group of speech scientists and mathematicians in the
department of phonetics at the University of Stockholm closely examined
the product’s technical patent and reverse engineered the software in order
to test its scientific credibility. The idea that the machine would work
“regardless of language” 13 was taken seriously by the group, who tested the
software using only vowel speech sounds and single phonemes. Interested
to see how the machine produced its wide range of judgments the group used
the pure object of speech; de-subjectified voices speaking only vowels
Fig. 12. “This is what the
truth looks like.” Andreas
Takanen at the depart-
ment of phonetics at the
university of Stockholm
shows the inner algorith-
mic/horoscopic workings
of LVA 6.50. Photo:
Lawrence Abu Hamdan,
2009.

80 Aural Contract
 without thought or semantics. After months of testing the machine and
collecting large amounts of data they understood that the software was
operating on a very basic level of amplitude and found that it simply had to
do with a person’s capacity to hold a steady pitch and volume. They also
claim that the distinctions between the various verdicts (e.g., between embar-
rassment and attempt to outsmart or excitement and inaccuracy) are arbi-
trarily placed along this scale. According to their investigation, the claim that
the technology functions as a lie detector is bogus; one of the mathemati-
cians working on the reverse-engineering project told me that its logic was
akin to “a horoscope or a prophecy” in its pseudoscientific nature.14
Though the mathematician was using an analogy of the horoscope as a
means to scientifically discredit the software, for me the term horoscope
resonated differently. I found the analogy of the horoscope useful because of
the ways in which in introduces “fate” into the above discourses of legal,
ethnic, and social profiling to which forensic listening dedicates its ears. Just
as the horoscope removes the agency of people and insists that their fate
rests on the alignment of the stars, LVA 6.50 removes the agency of the
listener and the speaker and allows a machine with apparently very little
interpretative potential to forecast our place within a predetermined cosmos.
What we can learn from the horoscope analogy is that the human actor
is not required here; if simply speaking individual vowels, phonemes,
or babble can reveal our true intentions then our actions are irrelevant.
Without even acting the software reveals the script that is within us.
LVA 6.50 amplifies the dark phrenology of the voice which is operative
today. Regardless of whether they scientifically work or not, pieces of soft-
ware which use the voice as biometric tool deeply confuse its role as a con-
duit for language and negotiation. Simply by virtue of the fact that insurance
companies, government councils, and police departments use these forms of
listening offered by LVA 6.50, the software
is weaponized, regardless of its credibility
amongst the scientific community.
In the sites where speech acts it is our
speech which is under attack. The promise
(empty or not) of LVA 6.50 or of LADO
(the accent analysis of asylum seekers) to re-
orient the speaking subjects contained within
any given juris-diction is already underway.
In this essay I have intended to relay a cer-
tain history of legal listening that begins with
listening to words and accounts, moves to a
type of listening that doubles the speaking
subject into two parts (words and speech
Fig. 13. Promotional im- sound), and culminates, through increasingly degraded forms of listening,
age for a voice biometrics
software. Source: http:// in the total eradication of the speaking subject. We arrive at an uncertain
easyvoicebiometrics.com. future of the voice and a moment to question its very legitimacy as both

Truth 81
an object of legal investigation and the means through which the law
becomes enacted. Assuming an increasing proliferation of these emergent
and mutated strands of forensic listening forces us to ask more general ques-
tions about the role of the voice as a central legal infrastructure: will it still
be a fair and just hearing when nobody is listening?

1 Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, “Mengele’s Skull,” 7 See Diana Eades, “Applied Linguistics and Language
Cabinet, no. 43 (Fall 2011): 61–67, at 62. Analyses in Asylum Seeker Cases,” Applied Linguistics,
2 Audio recorded interview with Dr. Peter French, vol. 26, no. 4 (2005): 503–26.
York, 2010. 8 Helen Fraser, “The role of linguistics and native speakers
3 Etymologically speaking the word “egophony” seems in language analysis for the determination of speaker
to have been subject to its own “ee” to “ae” transmutation, origin. A response to Tina Cambier-Langeveld,”
as medical dictionaries suggest egophony is a compression The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law,
of the original aegophony and that the aego derives from vol. 18, no. 1 (2011): 121–30, at 123.
the Greek for goat (aix/aig-), which in turn is derived 9 Interview included in Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The Freedom
from the goatlike sound made by the phoneme whilst of Speech Itself (2012), audio documentary.
it is being auscultated by the doctor. While perhaps not 10 “Using Nemesysco LVA technology in the Department
literal this bestial etymology is also somewhat revealing for Work and Pension, UK-ITN news clip,” uploaded
of the intentions behind auscultation, as it is an effort to February 2, 2010, http://youtu.be/QwJadf V0c00.
avoid all the disorientating subjective embellishments that 11 Audio recorded interview with Lynn Robbins,
language provides as it reduces speech to a prelinguistic London 2012.
state; an animal binary where in which the voice is used to 12 “Nemesysco’s Investigation Focus Tool Video,” National
express only pleasure or pain. Geographic, uploaded August 28, 2012, http://www
4 Ibid. .youtube.com/watch?v=6nvXHQuUoOQ&list
5 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound =PL8C31084C75D27F3C.
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976). 13 See the LVA website, http://www.lva650.com/faq.html,
6 Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and last accessed September 2013.
Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University 14 Audio recorded interview with Andreas Takanen,
of California Press, 2009), 5. Stockholm, 2012.

82 Aural Contract
 Uneasy Listening
Susan Schuppli

Fig. 1. Photo: Win

McNamee/Getty Images,
June 22, 2010.

These drones hover over our heads constantly and one can always hear
the buzzing, mosquito-like sound they make.

The constant noise from drones has driven many villagers to insanity.
When I hear a loud noise now, I am very frightened that a drone strike
is happening and I live in this constant fear.

— Survivors of a drone strike in Datta Khel, FATA Pakistan,

March 17, 2011 1

Secrets 381
The origin of the term “drone,” as used to describe unmanned aerial vehi-
cles (UAVs), refers not to the buzzing insect-like sound emitted by their
whirring propellers while airborne, as is commonly
assumed, but rather to their mimetic resemblance to
the male honeybee, a stingless insect possessing dark
tail striping. During World War II, radio-controlled
aircraft were used as air targets for training anti-aircraft
gun crews as well as for collecting data on scientific
missions. These early pilotless planes were painted with
black markings along their fuselage, hence their visual
designation as drones.
The widespread misinterpretation of the contempo-
rary drone’s etymological origins as derivative of the high-pitched noise Fig. 2. “Planes without
Pilots.” Three radio-
of a bee in flight is today still further removed from the creature’s scientific controlled B-17G-90-DL
classification within the Apoidea family of the Insecta class; a change in Flying Fortress drone
aircraft in flight, probably
function that the image caption to the right also prophetically invokes. out of Eglin Field, Florida,
While the drone bee is a stingless flying organism whose main role is to United States, August 6,
1946. The image caption
assist in species reproduction, contemporary remote-controlled drones have reads: “They’ve [drones]
been clay pigeons in gun-
become increasingly lethal and thus are surely no longer conceptually de- nery practice, bombed
scendant from the harmless Apoidea line, but rather from the predatory Jap and German targets,
and brought back data
species of the Reduviid family — that of assassin bugs. from the heart of Bikini’s
As US strategies around the War on Terror shifted from the use of cloud. Uncle Sam’s
radio-controlled planes
secret prisons and detention camps to targeted assassination under the have missions in mind
Obama administration in 2009, Predator and Reaper drones have come to never remotely guessed
at by Jules Verne.”
saturate the airspace over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) Source: Air Trails (Febru-
of Northwest Pakistan. 2 These armed drones troll the topographies of ary 1952). Collection of
Bob Harmon.
FATA in search of targets whose names are provided by the weekly Kill
List (or what Obama rebranded a “disposition matrix” in 2011) compiled
on infamous “Terror Tuesdays” at the White House. 3 Their ubiquitous
presence, signaled by high-frequency emissions, has become a permanent
feature of the skies along the Afghan border. Although various organiza-
tions, most notably the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in the
UK, try to maintain comprehensive datasets of reported casualties (fatali-
ties and injuries) from drone strikes in Pakistan, these numbers do not
begin to represent the injurious nature of what it means to live under the
constant sonic menace of drones.
In the absence of data documenting the actual numbers of drone mis-
sions flown over Pakistan it is useful to extrapolate from similar data collect-
Fig. 3. Assassin bug.
ed in Afghanistan to get a sense of the general ratio between sorties and Source: Fir0002/Flagstaf-
fotos/ Creative Com-
strikes; this calculation indicates that for every thirty armed drone sorties mons.
flown only one actual strike results. If the ratio of sorties to strikes in FATA
Fig. 4. MQ-9 Reaper in
is roughly equivalent, the number of drone sorties conducted over FATA flight. Photo: U.S. Air
during the Obama years from January 2009 to June 2013 may have already Force photo/Staff Sgt.
Brian Ferguson/
reached around 9,500. 4 This staggering figure is further underscored by the USAF Photographic
fact that these flights are not short missions that traverse sovereign Pakistani Archives, 2007.

382 Uneasy Listening

airspace in search of targets and then head directly back to their Kandahar
airbase in southern Afghanistan. On the contrary, these are extended sor-
ties that track moving vehicles, loiter over villages and towns, and target
adversaries for up to two days at a time without returning to refuel. The
current generation of armed Reaper drones carry nearly two tons of fuel in
addition to an equal payload of equipment, allowing them to stay airborne
for around forty-two hours, or fourteen hours when fully loaded. This puts
the figure of Obama-era drone hours flown over FATA, a geographical
region of 27,220 km 2, at between 133,000 and 399,000 hours, if flight pat-
terns are somewhat analogous to those in Afghanistan. Plans are currently
underway to increase these capacities dramatically, so that in the future
non-hydrocarbon-reliant drones may well be able to scour inaccessible
regions of the globe for months on end without refueling. 5 The density of
armed drone surveillance is also much higher in the towns of Miranshah and
Mir Ali, where virtually around-the-clock drone surveillance is being reported.
An altogether different dimension of the War on Terror and its impacts
upon civilian life on the ground would emerge if flight logs documenting the
hours that drones spend cruising the skies of FATA were made public. A
survivor of a drone strike interviewed by Forensic Architecture recalled the
near-continuous presence of drones in Mir Ali: “I have actually heard drones
fly day and night and during the day have also seen them. At night, they
were very loud, a kind of roar, as they flew much lower than during the day.
Sometimes there were breaks of one hour, but then they came back.” 6
Although extremely difficult to confirm definitively in many areas
of the world where they occur (most notably in Pakistan, Afghanistan,
Yemen, Gaza, and Somalia), statistics reporting deaths caused by drone
strikes do enable a certain degree of quantitative insight — even when exact
numbers are at times inconsistent between accounts. 7 For example, it was
reported that upwards of forty people were killed in a drone strike on
a Tribal Jirga held March 17, 2011, in the village of Datta Khel, North
Waziristan. While the estimated figure ranged from forty-two to fifty-
three killed and fourteen injured, there is no doubt that a large number of
people died from the Hellfire missiles fired by a drone that day. 8 However,
far greater numbers of people are psychologically affected by the relentless
coverage of US drone surveillance in this area, a military presence that is
primarily experienced as a sonic threat in which invisible sound frequencies
are converted into states of anxiety, depression, and fear. This daily lived
terror — the fear of an imminent deadly attack by a remote-controlled killing
machine that one cannot so much see as hear — is difficult to measure,
making it extremely challenging to represent in graphs and statistics; where-
as a body that is killed or injured is unequivocally real. “They are like a mos-
quito. Even when you don’t see them, you can hear them, you know they are
there.” 9 The absence of a comprehensive analysis of drone sonics within
the public record is notable, especially given its chronic, albeit not directly
fatal, impact upon civilian populations in regions such as FATA. The slow

Secrets 383
violence of this facet of drone surveillance and its related lethal operations
raises a significant challenge to statisticians who are today increasingly
faced with the task of accounting for the collateral effects of conflict as they
bear not only upon issues of food production, water supply, and treatment,
and other aspects of infrastructure damage linked to mortality, but also
upon vulnerabilities related to mental health. “The sound alone gives us
psychological grief,” said Kaleemullah Mehsud, a man in his thirties from
Waziristan, who spoke to Agence France-Presse in Peshawar. 10
I began this discussion with a brief clarification that the use of the
term “drone” came about as the result of a visual schema rather than by
acoustic filiation, as is most often presumed. 11 However, this etymological
confusion involves a reordering of vision and sound that is, I argue, folded
into the very political reorganization of drone warfare taking place today,
with its attendant claims regarding the minimal impact of unmanned aerial
violence upon civilian life. Drone vision is arguably precise, but drone
sonics are vague and diffused, producing a difference in both degree and
kind of injury. While the targeting accuracy of Predator and Reaper drones
is conjoined to their ability to send almost instantaneous information back
to operators who observe terrestrial life in FATA on screens sometimes
thousands of kilometers away, their sonic impact is dispersed across village
populations, and ranges in volume from debilitating to benign levels,
depending upon the aerial proximity of the drone and the varying acoustic
properties and contours of the ground, which affect the manner in which
sound waves are absorbed and bounced around. 12 The high-pitched
frequencies of a drone sortie register independently of an actual decision
to strike, creating a blanket of continuous noise whose harm reorganizes
the corporeal field of perception. When a strike does occur, the deafening
blast and kinetic impact of a Hellfire missile has been known to cause per-
manent hearing damage and loss. In the words of one witness: “I also suffer
from a hearing problem because the sound when the missile landed was
so loud. … I will never forget the sound the missile made when it was fired
on the building where we were meeting. It was a very loud and severe
sound.” 13 The objective of drone surveillance is directed towards a vertical
event — a laser-guided missile strike — whereas the by-product of such
drone vision manifests itself as a horizontal distribution of acoustic emis-
sions at varying intensities of amplification, resulting in psychological
distress, more so than physical injury.
Omnipresent drone surveillance in towns such as Miranshah and
Mir Ali has created a background stratum of buzzing sound, which is now
a permanent feature of these environments. When a Hellfire missile attack
suddenly emerges out of this atmospheric “drone,” it temporarily reorganizes
both sound and vision, as the impact is converted into a penetrating acoustic
singularity and the visual field redistributed through the violent disarticula-
tion of bodies and buildings that begin to merge with ground. From the
drone operator’s point of view, this reorganization is made all the more

384 Uneasy Listening

chillingly explicit when the target — a human body — slowly “bleeds out on
screen.” After an attack, the thermal image of the drone operator’s televisual
interface fuses figure and ground in an indistinguishable monochromatic field
of pixels, as hot blood cools to the temperature of the terrain, thus trans-
forming discrete visual data into a kind of amorphous background noise.
“The guy that was running forward, he’s missing his right leg. And I watch
this guy bleed out and, I mean, the blood is hot. As the man died his body
grew cold, and his thermal image changed until he became the same color as
the ground. I can see every little pixel, if I just close my eyes.” 14 The planar
field of drone vision captured by surveillance sensors is thus converted, at
the transition between life and death, into a diffused horizontal data-stream
reminiscent, in that moment, of the spatial dispersion of acoustic data.
Primarily at stake in this discussion is an examination of the sonic dimen-
sion of such remote-controlled warfare, which has received only scant mention
in comparison to the many contemporary theorizations of the lethal vision of
drone technology. This deficit persists in spite of the fact that accounts of the
sonic menace of drone sorties feature as a consistent component of witness
testimony. It is perhaps ironic that current acoustic research into reducing the
noise footprint of unmanned aerial vehicles, in order to increase their covert
capacities as they engage in low altitude surveillance and military missions,
might well contribute to an overall reduction in noise generation by drones.
This is not to say that their impact upon civilian life will necessarily be dimin-
ished, but, rather, that the role of sound as source of anxiety and fear may
lessen. 15 Controlling the acoustic signature of a drone has become part of a
growing specialist field of aeroacoustics that tries to identify, measure, and
classify the acoustic signal propagation characteristics of propeller aircraft
in real time using digital-signal-processing hardware and advanced computa-
tional algorithms. 16 Efforts to control and reduce the sound emissions gener-
ated by engine exhaust and spinning propellers has primarily been directed
towards increasing the stealth capacities of drones, although it is also
intended to prevent accidents. In the increasingly congested airspace over the
Afghan/Pakistan border region, collisions with other aircraft have been inevi-
table, in spite of advanced detection systems. In August 2012 a drone collided
with a C-130 cargo plane, forcing an emergency landing. 17 Silencing a UAV’s
acoustic signature would safeguard against its own operational noise being
fed back into its acoustic sensors, thus enhancing its ability to differentiate
between externally generated sounds and itself. Currently, drones use infrared
and radar sensors to avoid detection. Improving the acoustic sensor arrays
of UAVs would aid in situational awareness and “perimeter defense” against
other small low-flying aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles.
Drones are engineered into highly integrated technological systems,
which makes it extremely difficult to separate and classify the various
noise-producing components that comprise their sonic signature. Atmo-
spheric and meteorological conditions can also actively modify the sonic
signature of a UAV. As sound waves radiate outwards from the drone they

Secrets 385
interact with natural phenomena in the air, producing new “mixed” fre-
quencies and further complicate the task of assigning a definitive acoustic
signature to a given drone model, since the identification and classification
of sound is done by detection devices/microphones external to the machine.
Because a significant aspect of a drone’s surveillance operations is to
monitor ground noise using its on-board sensors, reducing a UAV’s acoustic
identity would help to ensure that its own sounds don’t interfere with the
task of monitoring sounds originating from the ground. As research and
development in aeroacoustics progresses to silence the drone, will a reduc-
tion in noise lessen the anxiety and fear that populations in FATA now
experience living under drones, or will the prospect of an omnipresent
and lethal payload that one can neither see nor hear induce an even greater
degree of fear and trauma?
The relative disregard paid to the damaging effects of living under
the soundscape of drone surveillance is understandable given the limited
resources and restricted access of human rights investigators and legal
practitioners into a region such as FATA who rightly focus on the lethal
outcomes of actual drone strikes. However, one significant attempt to
address this neglect is represented by the coauthored 2012 Stanford &
NYU report, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians
from US Drone Practices in Pakistan,” which collected numerous firsthand
accounts of the debilitating effects of living with the constant sound of
drones buzzing overhead, from the impact on mental health to the effect
on social community activities.

One man described the reaction to the sound of the drones as “a wave
of terror” coming over the community. “Children, grown-up people,
women, they are terrified. … They scream in terror.” Interviewees
described the experience of living under constant surveillance as
harrowing. In the words of one interviewee: “God knows whether they’ll
strike us again or not. But they’re always surveying us, they’re always
over us, and you never know when they’re going to strike and attack.” 18

Though they narrate a distressing tale of life under drones, these observa-
tions are anecdotal and have yet to make their way into the legal analysis
of US drone strike practices in Pakistan. Until a comprehensive study is
undertaken to chart this acoustic phenomenon it is unlikely that the impli-
cations of chronic drone sonics will be integrated into the legal framework
of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as it bears upon the principles
of distinction, proportionality, and precautions. Acoustics are undoubtedly
part of the arsenal of military operations and have been used for centuries
to obtain advantage in warfare. Applying the principles of IHL to drone
surveillance in FATA would necessitate applying all feasible measures to
limit the harm done to civilians, and prohibiting such operations where the
harm is excessive in relation to the military advantage that the operation

386 Uneasy Listening

could be expected to achieve. Lawyers at Reprieve, a legal rights organi-
zation in the United Kingdom that advocates on behalf of drone strike
victims, have informed me that work is slowly being undertaken to map the
increased use of antidepressants in FATA. This information will be helpful
in registering the psychological dimension of drone warfare, even if direct
causal links between drone emissions and depression will be difficult to
establish, and thus argue legally.
For a period of five weeks following the abduction of Corporal Gilad
Shalit on June 26, 2006, Israeli Air Force jets flew repeated low-altitude
sorties over the Gaza Strip at night, generating a series of intimidating
sonic booms. When questioned as to the use of sonic booms to generate
an atmosphere of fear and anxiety, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert replied
that “thousands of residents in southern Israel live in fear and discomfort,
so I gave instructions that nobody will sleep at night in the meantime in
Gaza.” 19 According to lawyers at B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center
for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:

The use of sonic booms flagrantly breaches a number of provisions of

International Humanitarian Law. The most significant provision is the
prohibition on collective punishment. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which is intended to protect civilians in time of war,
categorically states that “Collective penalties and likewise all measures
of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” The Article also states
that, “Reprisals against protected persons and their property are
prohibited.” Air Force supersonic sorties also breach the principle of
distinction, a central pillar of humanitarian law, which forbids the warring
sides to direct their attacks against civilians. 20

In response to these nightly operations, Physicians for Human Rights and

the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme filed a petition in the
Israeli High Court, claiming that deploying sonic booms as an intimidation
tactic was in violation of IHL and therefore constituted an illegal act. Their
petition ultimately turned on the question of whether sonic booms consti-
tuted an attack as defined in the IHL rules governing the conduct of hostili-
ties, with military lawyers arguing that the petitioners’ claims were unfound-
ed since sonic booms do not constitute an “attack,” and that, consequently,
their use was not accountable within the framework of IHL governing the
conduct of hostilities. “As mentioned, the prohibitions and limitations of
the laws of warfare, in classified operations refer to ‘Attack’. What is meant
by the term ‘attack’ refers to acts of violence involving weapons used for
or against another target.” Establishing the illegality of sonic booms as an
instrument of collective punishment required a redefinition of sound as a
weaponized technology, a reclassification that did not convince the court,
which dismissed the case in October 2008, as effectively being theoretical
because the Israeli military had abandoned the practice of generating sonic

Secrets 387
booms over Gaza by July 2006. Moreover, the defense argued that “super-
sonic booms do not cause ‘unnecessary suffering’ of enemy fighters,” and
that the petitioners’ claims as to the illegality of sonic booms were based on
the assumption that their use in Gaza was intentionally directed against its
civilian population for the express purposes of intimidation and collective
punishment. “This premise regarding the purpose of making supersonic
booms is erroneous. And therefore any legal argument based on it is
wrong.” 21 An earlier legal reference to sonic booms can indeed be found in a
Nicaraguan case put before the International Court of Justice (IJC): Military
and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua. 22 In this case the ICJ
did not find that the American use of sonic booms constituted a violation
of the prohibition on the use of force against another state. Israeli military
lawyers relied upon this ruling to defend their own use of sonic booms over
Gaza. Yet both the rejection of sound as constituting a form of assault, and
the assertion that sonic booms are harmless, were flagrantly contradicted in
the initial public statement made by the prime minister.
This case raises a series of very pertinent questions that may also come
to play a significant role in the legal claims being brought by drone strike
survivors on behalf of victims and their families in Pakistan. (1) How are
we to understand the legal difference between the use of sound as an
instrument of policing and control, versus sound that is used as a weapon?
(2) If sound waves, due to their radiating nature, are unable to differentiate
between a target (militant) and a community of civilians, does the argu-
ment around intentionality still hold legally when the continued deploy-
ment of a given weapon has known effects that supersede the technology’s
intended use? (3) At what point is a sound-event that is the by-product of
a specific military technology deemed to be sufficiently harmful to count
as collateral damage? (4) If these side effects are known, does continued
use of the technology constitute a form of legal liability? (5) Does the
constant sonic presence of drone sorties (irrespective of strikes) violate the
IHL principles of distinction, proportionality, and precautions, or might
it even be considered a form of collective punishment as defined by Article
33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, even if intent to punish a civilian
population would arguably be difficult to prove in relation to drone
deployment in Pakistan? While sonic warfare has a long history, legal argu-
ments will need to be made that the sound effects (psychological and phys-
ical) of drone warfare cannot be dismissed as an incidental feature of drone
propellers and engine noise, but are well known to health care professionals
and are being systematically documented. 23
It is worth noting that aircraft noise already has a quasi-legal status,
and has been argued to be an agent of warfare even though the legal peti-
tion (HCJ 10265/05 Physicians for Human Rights v. The Minister of Defense)
that brought forward the claim against sonic booms in Gaza was ultimately
dismissed by the Court. 24 Municipalities with airports are already
subject to by-laws that regulate the flight corridors of low-flying aircraft

388 Uneasy Listening

to minimize sound pollution. This entails controlling the effective per-
ceived noise decibels (EPNdBs) resulting from air traffic as well as the
aerodynamic noise produced by airplane propulsion systems. Legal
requests have also been made to the European Court of Human Rights
to ban the use of the “Mosquito,” an anti-loitering device, which emits
painful high-frequency pulses audible only to children and youths. (The
technical term for repetitive drone surveillance over one area is also called
“loitering.”) The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has “called
on all governments to reconsider the Mosquito devices, insofar as they may
violate the rights of children.” While the Home Office and the EU com-
mission rejected this appeal on the grounds that there was “insufficient
information to establish guidelines for safe exposure to high frequencies,”
the Mosquito was not endorsed by the Association of Police Officers
(UK), who argued that, equally, there is no evidence to suggest that short-
term exposure to its emissions has no health implications. 25 Whether local
constabularies choose to use the Mosquito is, however, up to them. 26
Uncertainties and negative evidence as to what constitutes safe exposure
times and acceptable sound levels before injury is inflicted shape this
debate. Thus recommendations and regulations governing the use and extent
of sound-producing technologies are already legally entangled, even if the
use of such sonic instruments is not necessarily enforceable under law.

“Depression is really high in Waziristan,” said Doctor Muktar

ul-Haq, head of the psychiatry department at the government-run
Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, the largest city in the northwest.
“There is uncertainty generally in Pakistan but particularly in this
area. They are always apprehensive about the drones, about their lives,”
he said. While drone attacks do bring patients “episodically” for treat-
ment, he says, residents in Waziristan complain of living in constant
fear of drones that patrol in the skies above and the buzzing sound
they say they emit. 27

The high-resolution optical sensors carried by drones, which, in principle,

permit laser-guided, pinpoint accuracy, underscore military and political
claims that the use of armed drones dramatically lowers civilian casualties,
in comparison to conventional weapons such as cluster bombs — or even,
according to some, such as John Brennan in 2011, eliminates civilian ca-
sualties altogether, transforming UAVs in effect into “moral predators.” 28
However, the acoustic seepage from drone sorties is far from contained,
and thus radically expands their zone of impact upon the human ecologies
of FATA, with varying consequences for individual mental health as well
as for the social dynamics of communities. “Drones have been circling
over Manzar Khel for two or three years now. They are all my children can
think about and they cannot concentrate on their studies or play carefree
like children should.” 29 The sonic bleed of a circling drone that one cannot

Secrets 389
necessarily see but hears is a constant reminder that a deadly strike may
come at any time, quite literally out of the blue. Unremitting drone
surveillance has created a widespread culture of fearful apprehension, to
the extent that the sound of loitering drones triggers mental and bodily
responses—indicative of post-traumatic stress disorder— in advance of a
drone strike having actually taken place. “Anxiety is best conceptualized
as a future-oriented cognitive-affective-somatic state, the prominent feature
being a sense of uncontrollability focused on possible future threat,
danger, or other upcoming, potentially negative events.” 30
A drone strike that lurks in the future, but whose effects are experi-
enced in the present, finds its disconcerting inversion in the US policy of
targeted killing, which is designed to eliminate potential terrorist threats
before they become actualized at some future date. Jeremy Scahill, in his
documentary film Dirty Wars (2013) goes so far as to suggest that the
assassination of the teenage son of radicalized cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in
Yemen in 2011 (both father and son were born in the United States) was
carried out not because of the terrorist the boy was, but rather because
of the terrorist he might one day become. 31 When questioned about the
drone strike that killed sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, Robert
Gibbs, former White House Press Secretary and senior adviser to Presi-
dent Obama’s re-election campaign, replied that the boy should have had
“a more responsible father.” The spatial dispersion of drone sonics brings
the future into the present as a felt effect, whereas drone vision is directed
towards staving off a future event through targeted assassination. Together
they conjoin to produce a state of continuous violence for civilian life
under drones, one that categorically overturns President Obama’s most
recent assertion that drone warfare is “a war waged proportionally, in last
resort, and in self-defence.” 32

Postscript

During a CNBC interview in 2009, a determined fly kept buzzing around

the President. “Get out of here,” warned Obama in irritation, yet the insect
brazenly persisted. When it finally landed on his forearm, he struck, killing
it instantly. “That was pretty impressive wasn’t it? I got the sucker.” 33

Fig. 5. Photo: Win

McNamee/ Getty Images,
June 22, 2010. Detail.

390 Uneasy Listening

1 “17.03.2011 Jirga Drone Strike,” in Witness Declarations, 8 The Bureau, “Obama Pakistan 2011 strikes,” Bureau of
ed. Usama Khilji (Islamabad: Reprieve and Foundation for Investigative Journalism, August 10, 2011, http://www.the
Fundamental Rights, 2012). bureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/obama-2011-strikes/.
2 President Obama signed three executive orders on January 9 Interview with Mohammad Kausar (anonymized name), in
22, 2009, directing the CIA to shut what remained of its Islamabad, Pakistan, February 26, 2012. James Cavallaro,
network of secret torture prisons, and ordered the closing Stephan Sonnenberg, and Sarah Knuckey, Living Under
of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year. Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone
3 “You know, due process to most of us is a court of law, Practices in Pakistan (Stanford, CA: International Human
it’s a trial by a jury. And right now, their process is him Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, Stanford Law
[Obama] looking at some flash cards and a power point School; New York: NYU School of Law, Global Justice
presentation on ‘Terror Tuesdays’ in the White House. For Clinic, 2012), 84.
a lot of us, that’s not really due process.” Senator Rand Paul 10 Guillaume Lavallee, “Drones take toll on mental health,”
on Obama’s May 23, 2013, foreign policy address at the China Daily, April 8, 2013.
National Defense University, Washington DC, in which he 11 It is by no means a conceptual vagary that the drone
addressed the legal use of drones. maintains a filial link with the Insecta class of organisms, as
4 Chris Woods, Project Leader of “Covert Drone Wars” at a new generation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) based on
the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) provided me the morphologies of insects are being developed, whose
with this estimate. The figures for drone strikes in Afghan- sensors will enable them to find, track, and target adversaries
istan, representing a ratio of approximately 30:1, can be while operating in even less perceptible/detectable ways
found on the BIJ website in Chris Woods, “Revealed: US than the current generation of armed drones. See “Lethal
and Britain launched 1,200 drone strikes in recent wars,” Buzz: US Air Force Developing Insect-size Drones,” Russia
December 4, 2012, http://www.thebureauinvestigates Today, February 20, 2013, http://rt.com/news/air-force
.com/blog/2012/12/04/revealed-us-and-britain-launched- -tiny-drones-190/.
1200-drone-strikes-in-recent-wars/. Using the same ratio 12 Data is gathered by the drone’s various sensors (including
to estimate the number of sorties in FATA over recent electro-optical and infrared cameras as well as synthetic
years, we arrive at the following figures: aperture radar) and is relayed back to an operator in Nevada
2009: 53 strikes = ca. 1,500 sorties through a system of secure data links with only a 1.2 second
2010: 128 strikes = ca. 3,800 sorties delay in transmission. 5,000–25,000 feet is the altitude
2011: 75 strikes = ca. 2,250 sorties ceiling of a typical US Predator drone.
2012: 48 strikes = ca. 1,500 sorties 13 “17.03.2011 Jirga Drone Strike.”
2013 (up to June): 14 strikes = ca. 420 sorties 14 Nick Wing, “Brandon Bryant, Former Drone Operator,
5 “The blueprints for the new drones, which have been Recalls What It’s Like to Watch Target ‘Bleed Out’
developed by Sandia National Laboratories — the US on Screen,” Huffington Post, June 6, 2013.
government’s principal nuclear research and development 15 See Georgia Research Tech Institute, “The Silent
agency — and defence contractor Northrop Grumman, Treatment: Aeroacoustics Research on UAVs Could Lead
were designed to increase flying time ‘from days to to Stealthier Surveillance,” http://www.gtri.gatech.edu
months.’ The highly sensitive research into what is termed /casestudy/silent-treatment-aeroacoustics-research-uavs,
‘ultra-persistence technologies’ set out to solve three prob- accessed July 9, 2013.
lems associated with drones: insufficient ‘hang time’ over 16 See M. Gurubasavaraj, S. Ravi Sekar, and S. Sadasivan,
a potential target; lack of power for running sophisticated “Acoustic Signature of an Unmanned Air Vehicle -
surveillance and weapons systems; and lack of communi- Exploitation for Aircraft Localisation and Parameter
cations capacity. The Sandia-Northrop Grumman team Estimation,” Aeronautical Development Establishment
looked at numerous different power systems for large- and Bangalore, vol. 51, no. 3 (2001): 279–83. See also
medium-sized drones before settling on a nuclear solution. P. Marmaroli, X. Falourd, and H. Lissek, “A UAV
Northrop Grumman is known to have patented a drone motor denoising technique to improve localization
equipped with a helium-cooled nuclear reactor as long ago of surrounding noisy aircrafts: proof of concept for
as 1986, and has previously worked on nuclear projects anti-collision systems” (Lausanne: Ecole Polytechnique
with the US air force research laboratory. Designs for Fédérale, 2012). See also William L. Wilshire and David
nuclear-powered aircraft are known to go back as far as Chesnut, “Joint Acoustic Propagation Experiment
the 1950s.” Nick Fielding, “US draws up plans for nuclear (JAPE-91),” workshop proceedings sponsored by NASA
drones,” Guardian, April 2, 2012. and the University of Mississippi, Oxford, held in
6 Survivor of a drone strike in Mir Ali, FATA Pakistan Hampton, Virgina, April 28, 1993.
(anon.), “4.10.2010 Mir Ali Drone Strike,” in Witness 17 For a discussion of the technical failures of drone
Declaration, ed. Andreas Schüller (Berlin: ECCHR, 2013), 1. technology see Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by
7 Given the near-complete absence of communications tech- Remote Control (London: Verso, 2013), 23–24.
nologies in FATA, survivors of drones strikes may testify 18 Living Under Drones, 81.
only long after the fact, when interviewed by lawyers or 19 B’Tselem, “The Sonic Booms in the Sky over Gaza,”
journalists outside of the region. Female deaths also often January 1, 2013, http://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip
go unreported due to tribal customs that shy away from /super sonic_booms.
publicly naming deceased wives and sisters. 20 Ibid.

Secrets 391
21 The details of the defense are as follows: “(1) The use of 26 For example, “London 2012: Army to use ‘sonic weapon’
sonic booms by the IDF has an intended military purpose on Thames during Olympics,” Guardian, May 12, 2012:
that is operationally significant, which is disrupting the “The Ministry of Defence has confirmed that a device that
capabilities of terrorists, deterrence and reducing the can be used as a ‘sonic weapon’ will be deployed in London
opportunities to continue to harm the State of Israel during the Olympics. The American-built, long-range
and its citizens, among others, by launching rockets, acoustic device (LRAD), which has been used by the US
creating sense of confusion, Disinformation, danger and army to control crowds in Iraq, can emit an ear-piercing
surveillance. Making supersonic booms is designed to beam of sound. A MoD spokesman said the device, which
achieve a purpose that is legal and permitted (principle can also be used as a loudspeaker, was among a ‘broad
of military necessity); (2) The use of sonic booms is not range of assets’ being used by the armed forces to provide
directed towards targeting civilians but against legitimate security during the Games.”
targets — those who engage in terrorism against Israel 27 Lavallee, “Drones take toll on mental health.”
and its citizens. Consciousness and psychological effects, 28 Jack Serle and Chris Woods, “Secret US documents show
expressed feelings of anxiety and fear among the civilian Brennan’s ‘no civilian drone deaths’ claim was false,”
population, as those caused during the execution of sonic Bureau of Investigative Journalism, April 11, 2013, http://
booms (and this has not been proven), are considered www.thebureauinvestigates.com/blog/2013/04/11
minor and incidental results for which the booms are made, /secret-us-documents-show-brennans-no-civilian-drone
and legitimate under the law of war. This is typical of the -deaths-claim-was-false/. See also Bradley Jay Strawser,
effects of the many means and realities of combat (the “Moral Predators: The Duty to Employ Uninhabited Aerial
principle of distinction); (3) Even if there is damage caused Vehicles,” Journal of Military Ethics 9, no. 4 (2010): 342–68.
to the civilian population and property (and even this has 29 Witness to a drone strike in Datta Khel, FATA Pakistan,
not been proven), this is incidental, very minor, which March 17, 2011.
is entirely disproportionate to the military advantage that 30 D. H. Barlow, B. F. Chorpita, and J. Turovsky, “Fear, Panic,
outperforms these booms (principle of proportionality); Anxiety, and Disorders of Emotion,” Nebraska Symp.
(4) supersonic booms do not cause ‘unnecessary suffering’ Motiv. 43 (1996), cited in Phyllis Chua et al., “A Functional
of enemy fighters (the principle of humanity).” Response Anatomy of Anticipatory Anxiety,” NeuroImage 9 (1999):
submitted to the Israeli High Court of Justice by the State 563–71, at 563.
in HCJ 10265/05 Physicians for Human Rights v. the Secretary 31 Rick Rowley, dir., Dirty Wars (USA, 2013), documentary,
of Defense. Original in Hebrew. 87 min.
22 Nicaragua v. United States of America, ICJ Rep. 1986, 32 “Barack Obama defends ‘just war’ using drones,” BBC,
http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/70/6503.pdf. May 24, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us
23 See Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the -canada-22638533.
Ecology of Fear. Technologies of Lived Abstraction (Cambridge, 33 “Barack Obama swats fly mid-interview,” BBC, June 17,
MA: MIT Press, 2010). 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8104495.stm.
24 Thank you to Eitan Diamond, Legal Adviser to the Dele-
gation of the International Committee of the Red Cross,
for bringing this legal petition to my attention.
25 Amelia Hill, “Mosquito Youth Dispersal Alarms Face
Ban,” Guardian, June 24, 2010.

392 Uneasy Listening