Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Private Ear

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an internationally celebrated artist who works with sound and an internationally recognized expert forensic listener. He likes to call himself a Private Ear. Your host visits Lawrence in Beirut to hear more.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Private Ear. The role of the private ear is to expand the threshold of audibility, to try and push people to hear something that wasn't there when they first heard it. Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an internationally celebrated artist who works with sound and an internationally recognized expert forensic listener. He likes to refer to himself as a private ear. Like the private eye, he never knows who will come knocking on his office door looking for help. When I visited him in Beirut last summer, he was working on projects both for museums and human rights organizations.

Amnesty International had enlisted him to help with the gathering of earwitness testimony from one of Assad's secret torture facilities in Syria, the Sayed Naya prison. The backstory is, of course, that there is secret sites of detention used to detain political prisoners and torture them in Syria. They are kept in the dark, they are blindfolded when they're moved around, they never see the guards' faces. When the guards come to the doors, they cover their eyes, otherwise they will be tortured. Sometimes they didn't leave one cell for three years. This kind of silence produces a space of kind of heightened listening and I think they didn't want to become this but they became expert listeners. They have a kind of experience of sound, one that is very important in a kind of human rights investigation because one that does

not rely on its witnesses to be victims and just simply survivors, but to be experts, to be forensic listeners, to be the people through who through which could build an entire prison, an image of a prison based on just what they heard in that place and time. On the website Amnesty built for this project, sydenia.amnesty.org, you can see these images. Architectural renderings of the prison, all constructed from ear witness testimony. So the architecture is really mapped. The images are mapped from the beatings, from the impulses.

For example, one of the witnesses told us that when he was entering the prison and they were being beaten as they entered. And so he was talking about his experience moving through the various sites and he said that a couple of people in front of him were hit. And from the whack of the hit, he knew at that point he was in a large hall because of the reverberation. On the Amnesty website, you can also watch videos of Lawrence working with these expert listeners,

reconstructing space and story through sound. So he's talking about the way the guards used to walk. The guards were not wearing boots. They were actually wearing more like slippers. And this is precisely because of the sound, because if the guard could get to the cell window and see the people not assuming the position, i.e. on their knees, facing the walls, covering their eyes,

they would be subject to tortures. We tried to then recreate the sound of this. We played multiple footsteps. I had the sound effects, the artifacts I had, and none of them were adequate. So we actually had to, in the end, recreate the sound in the space ourselves. I think the kind of reconstruction, very careful reconstruction of exactly this footstep of each guard, of the tiles, the size of the tiles in the cell,

the light conditions, is very important. It's a kind of mapping not of only the most violent things that happen to them and the kind of things that would stand out as human rights violations, but things that are more in this kind of day-to-day banality of the life there and the evil that it was. So the fact that we can't kind of close our ears has this kind of double bind in this context where these prisoners would tell me that sound is the way they survived.

It was also the sort of inability to close their ears that meant they were subject to horrific sounds, sounds of torture. Once I'd read what they'd been through, I thought, why the hell would I go and talk to these people about what a door sounded like, when they've lived through something that's just horrendous. Why should they care? And then when I got to meet them, I realized that that's really exactly what they cared about,

the details of that place, that recreating it for each nook and cranny, each sound very specifically was exactly what they wanted to do, that producing a kind of image and disseminating that image of that place in all of its details was very important for them and was an approach that I think each one of them took very seriously. On a number of occasions, this earw witness testimony forced Lawrence to reconcile both the true and the impossible. So, for example, we were going through with one witness different kinds of door sounds. And I had this vast library of sound effects, different kinds of doors, metal doors.

It was slamming. And he was like, no, no, it's harder than that, it's harder than that. We were getting harder and harder and harder. And then one was huge, it was a huge bang, a huge bang sound, almost like somewhere between a door slamming and a kind of big metallic explosion. And he said, wait, I know what that sound is. That's the sound of when the food truck arrived outside,

behind the walls of their cell, a food truck had arrived to the outside and was dropping boxes of food on the ground. So the laws of physics, of course, tells us that that's impossible. The sound where a microphone is maybe like two feet away from a door slamming is the same sound as through a wall a box landing on the ground. The laws of physics tell us it's impossible, but of course we're not in the realm of physics, we're in the realm of memory. And what that tells you about, what that is the most voracious testimony to, is the state of hunger that those people were kept in. The fact that they hadn't

eaten for so long that the sound of a metal door slamming, extremely loud, could be the sound of food arriving on the ground. This ability to reconcile the true and the impossible is one of the reasons Lawrence Abu Hamdan is such an effective private ear. And it's an ability he credits to his artistic practice. What I came to realize was that the tricks and the distortions in memory spoke about other kinds of truths. And I think rather than kind of denying them as things which are physically impossible, things which cannot have happened,

it's the distortions in memory which actually we should insist on. And that's why I think my role and my background as an artist is particularly important here in this kind of investigation, that things which perhaps other forensic investigators would shun as kind of unscientific actually should be insisted upon as other forms, other ways of unlocking testimony about the kind of conditions and experiences of those people who lived through the crimes that they lived through. Another project Lawrence was working on when I visited him last summer was a piece for the Liverpool Biennial, something called the Hummingbird Clock. We talked about it as we walked around Beirut. This piece is also online now at hummingbirdclock.info.

And when you go there, you'll see a clock and you'll hear this sound. That's a real-time recording of the British mains. This buzz has very small fluctuations. So we hear it as a kind of static buzz, but actually it's making tiny fluctuations every second, even in between the seconds. It's dancing all the time. That mains hum is a very useful surveillance tool for the British government because the national grid makes sure this electricity is evenly distributed, which means that the nation is under one buzz.

And basically what's been happening in the UK since the early 2000s is that the UK government have been, or the UK police forces, have been recording the sound of the mains hum, the buzzing sound of the electricity as it kind of comes into our homes and neon lights. Anytime where you hear the electricity buzzing, they've been recording that and archiving it. Most recordings invariably have mains hum on them because unless you're really far away from kind of infrastructure, that interference of the buzz, no matter how subtle, can be extracted and will leave a kind of trace on any given recording, which means that you can then take the relevant frequency out of that recording and match it with a database of the last 10 years of electricity buzz to tell you exactly when that recording happened.

Unlike the policeman's archive, the hummingbird clock is public and open. It's an interactive timepiece. Anyone in the UK can submit a claim and learn the exact time and date of their digital recordings. I think that's a kind of clear example of this kind of turning back the gaze of surveillance, turning back these kind of radical practices of listening where one refuses the idea that something like noise exists and wants to in fact say that everything is signal,

everything is speaking to you if you only know how to listen to it. And you kind of turn that back around and you also listen to the listeners. So these kind of counter surveillance practices are also things that I'm interested in. Lawrence Abu Hamdan's private ear practice is rooted in the forensic architecture program at Goldsmiths College, London. It was here in 2010 when Lawrence interviewed a man named Peter French, one of Britain's foremost forensic listeners. This changed everything for him. This interview completely blew my mind because up until that point

I'd felt that a lot of the discourse on sound was very much, you know, essentializing sound, saying that sound was this kind of natural, ephemeral, intangible phenomenon, and how different it was to vision and all the rest of it. But there was this guy called Peter French who treated sound like every other kind of object. He showed me that you could kind of slice it open, you could see what it was made of, its constitution.

And so it struck me that there was all this radical listening happening, that this guy would describe what he does as spending three working days listening to one phoneme on a police interview tape, for example. So there's really radical types of listening that I felt was even kind of pushing the boundaries of listening way beyond stuff like what was happening in New York in the 70s or other kinds of things. It was a new kind of radical approach to sound that I thought was being wasted on the British police. All the forensic listeners that Lawrence interviewed and studied work in some capacity for the state, the police. Lawrence is determined to use his ears for different ends.

My one kind of prerequisite would be that I would never work for states, that I would work as a kind of counter-state actor, much like a kind of private investigator works, making sure that there's a kind of balanced playing field in which there is more of this kind of listening out there. It's important to note, though, Lawrence is not an artist heroically donating his talent to good causes.

The time he spends testifying on, say, accent software in courtrooms or working on human rights cases is absolutely crucial to his artistic practice. The videos that you would see of my work being mobilized by human rights organizations is extremely different to the way you would see it relayed in the kind of gallery space, but I can only really have made the work that I want to make as an artist, having lived through and having gone full way and compromised myself in the form of these other forums and these other spaces.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan just might be the most active listener I've ever met. And perhaps that's the best definition for private ear. Active listener. I want to participate in the forms of truth production that exist. One has to do that if you want to do the kind of work I do. The techniques I've learned, the sort of aesthetics techniques of using audio to produce an argument through kind of my art projects have led me to understand that the construction of evidence

is something which is happening all around us every day and we need to somehow be a part of that and take that back and not simply to critique and show the fallacies of other people's constructed evidence but actually to make it ourselves. So let me give you a little tour of this one room. Well, what you'll notice is that it's a vaulted ceiling. So you might even notice it the way my voice is echoing in the space. That means you're basically inside a kind of dome structure, dome ceiling. The most interesting project Lawrence was working on when I visited

was a mosque that was being built in a village called Moktara in the mountainous Shuf region of Lebanon. This project has an incredible backstory. It was commissioned by Walid Jumblat. He's one of the leaders of the Druze community in Lebanon, but he's probably more famous as the chairman of the Progressive Socialist Party, the political and cultural left. For example, he's in favor of legalizing cannabis in Lebanon. The mosque and the Jumblat family palace are both located just off the main square in Mukhtara. There was a lot going on the day we visited.

So right now, today, he's actually in the palace. He's receiving people, so we have a lot of traffic coming in and out of the main square. The Druze are a sect of Islam. Their sacred religious texts include the Koran, the Old Testament, and Plato's writings. And the Druze don't actually worship in mosques. But Jumblat wanted this mosque to emphasize the ties between the Druze and other branches of Islam, and he wanted it to promote religious tolerance.

I think we're now living in a moment where the divisions within of Islam are greater than ever. It's a time where the Shia and Sunni divisions are becoming increasingly great, and a time where we really see identity as more toxic than ever for the region. So I think in this gesture of a socialist building a kind of worship space, which in any context is a kind of contradiction in terms, is a gesture towards accommodation. And I hope the sound that I made is continuous with the architect's vision of the place and Wali Jumblat's idea for building this mosque. Jumblat commissioned the architect Makrim El-Kadi

and gave him free reign to design a mosque like no other mosque that's ever been built. And El-Kadi brought Lawrence onto the project to design the call to prayer. Just like churches, you cannot really think of mosques as simply visual structures. They are very sonic in their domination of space and the kind of way in which they produce a kind of jurisdiction around them.

And the most clear way that that manifests itself in a mosque usually is the kind of call to prayer. But we were not able to actually broadcast the call to prayer out. And that's because it's in an area where people are not used to hearing the call to prayer. In an area like this, which is very quiet and mountainous, something like a call to prayer would be a very kind of extreme invasion into the kind of sonic landscape of this area because this voice would just echo for miles around.

So it really wasn't a possibility to have a call to prayer. And there's been other cases where mosques have opened in this area and actually, you know, have had a very hostile reaction to their call to prayer, which has meant that sometimes the loudspeakers were shot off with shotguns. And the hostility was the exact opposite of what this project ever wanted to conjure up. The hostility was the exact opposite intention of this project. Lawrence told me that as soon as he started working on this project, he knew there was no way he could take an existing call to prayer, say one that's broadcast outdoors in Jerusalem or Cairo, and simply move it indoors.

He wanted to rethink the very idea of what an internal voice is. We wanted to create a voice that sounded almost like a head voice that almost felt like you were listening to someone's voice as it was vibrating through their skull in fact so it was really also kind of always looking to go you know into this kind of intimate relationship and to really take the necessity to internalize this voice and to push it even further. Can we hear it? Yeah, we can hear it. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

Allahu Akbar Allahu Akbar The way that we've recorded the voice Is a kind of much more kind of full bodied voice That actually holds those words. And I wanted the listener to constantly move between the kind of voice of the muezzin, the person who speaks the call to prayer, and the actual words itself, and to really have them in this kind of interesting equal space.

And so to really kind of create almost a space inside this kind of small cross-vaulted room where you really feel you're almost next to one person. It's not a thrown voice. It's not thrown out, but actually spoken directly to one person, almost for kind of one listener. Although the space can contain many people, the way we've constructed the loudspeaker

arrangement is really always that you have a very intimate relationship to that voice. You even have a remnant of the heartbeat on the recording because of where we put the mic on the throat. If we want to go further into kind of trying to grasp at understanding this divine listening as it was spoken about in the Hadith, the way that God listens, what we can start to think about is also the fact that Bilal, the first person who sung the call to prayer, the one that the Prophet wanted to sing the call to prayer, was an Ethiopian guy.

And he actually had a problem with the sibilance, with the S. When he said S, he said a shh sound. He made a shh, with the S. When he said S, he said a sh sound. He made a sh instead of a S. So he had this kind of speech impediment or kind of inability to say this letter S. And the letter S is, of course, the first word in Arabic, the first letter in the Arabic word for prayer. So the other council of Muhammad told him that he shouldn't be singing the call to prayer because he has a problem saying the words. And Muhammad's response to that was that when God hears his call to prayer, he hears it as it is correctly spoken. I.e. God does not hear the shh mistake. God hears intention. God listens to another kind of voice.

God is not listening to what comes out of the mouth, but the kind of intention that goes into the utterance. So before it's even uttered, that's what God hears. And I think that kind of state of listening is what we were trying to achieve. Once the mosque opened, there were some who deemed Lawrence's call to prayer too avant-garde, and it was replaced with a more standard sung recording. So it's only here, dear listener, where we can listen to Lawrence's intimate original recording together. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Private Ear. This episode was produced by myself with help from Andrew Calloway.

Special thanks to Lawrence Abu Hamdan for his patience and for letting me shadow him around in Beirut, even though he was on deadline for like 10 projects. You can find a link to his work at toe.prx.org. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from the Public Radio Exchange, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can subscribe to them all at radiotopia.fm.

Special thanks to our launch sponsor, the Knight Foundation, and as always to Roman Mars, who made this whole thing real. Radiotopia. From PRX.