- 3 I Fashion a Nest Between Spines & Stories
- 4 Sonic Beirut, Displaced
- 5 The Translation Institute
- 6 Air as Commodity, Image as Spectacle
- 7 Auditory Escape
essays
2 Between City and Self
Massachusetts Institute of Technology * Fall 2022
Sonic Beirut, Displaced:
Stitching Transboundary Soundscapes
Stitching Transboundary Soundscapes
Independent Paper
Advised by Professors Caroline Jones and Stefan Helmreich
Presented at the 57th Middle Eastern Studies Assosciation (MESA) Annual Conference in Montreal (2023)
Abstract
A city of textured sonic character, Beirut resonates with distinctly common sounds of persistent honking, generators whirring, fan coil units leaking, car tires screeching, and choleric cursing. Accompanying this cacophony are the unanticipated sounds that interrupt the sonic landscape of the dense city, creating fractures that elicit fear and evoke past trauma in the everyday – the rumble of overhead warplanes and drones, the metallic shower of bullets, the deep thunder of a bellowing blast. Responding to thanatosonics (extreme wartime phenomena) in a complex aural environment, unearthing its effects on modes of listening and archiving sonic memories of war are this project’s central interests.
Exploring the spatial and temporal limits of this sonic experience, my research involves the collection of testimonies from Beirut inhabitants recalling their memories of sound in times of war, armed violence, and political unrest. In their descriptions of sonic events that mark personal – and evidently collective – traumas, the auditors resort to verbal and onomatopoeic recreations of the remembered events. Stirring potentially dormant acoustic memories, the witnesses share memories of events ranging from the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) to the more recent 2020 Port Explosion. Alongside the collection of these oral testimonies, I explore the transnational nature of the city’s soundscape by recording sounds that evoke these descriptions and their concomitant psychoacoustic responses in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts through recorded soundwalks and various manipulated materials.
This experiment aims to construct a dialogue between sonic warfare and its residual effects. I communicate with the reproduced or reinterpreted memories of sonic Beirut through an alternate setting, where I can speak back to home transnationally and trans-sonically. I then weave the sounds of Cambridge with the testimonies from Beirut into three audio tracks that played in 5.1 multichannel installation. In this paper, I explore this sound installation and break down the collected testimonies, documenting Beirut’s resonant echoes in Cambridge, while positing the migration, universality, and transferability of sonic memories between spaces. Such ephemeral sounds in flux carve the social construction of spaces that are materially destroyed, arguably stimulating a confrontation with past violence and the reconstruction of memory.
A city of textured sonic character, Beirut resonates with distinctly common sounds of persistent honking, generators whirring, fan coil units leaking, car tires screeching, and choleric cursing. Accompanying this cacophony are the unanticipated sounds that interrupt the sonic landscape of the dense city, creating fractures that elicit fear and evoke past trauma in the everyday – the rumble of overhead warplanes and drones, the metallic shower of bullets, the deep thunder of a bellowing blast. Responding to thanatosonics (extreme wartime phenomena) in a complex aural environment, unearthing its effects on modes of listening and archiving sonic memories of war are this project’s central interests.
Exploring the spatial and temporal limits of this sonic experience, my research involves the collection of testimonies from Beirut inhabitants recalling their memories of sound in times of war, armed violence, and political unrest. In their descriptions of sonic events that mark personal – and evidently collective – traumas, the auditors resort to verbal and onomatopoeic recreations of the remembered events. Stirring potentially dormant acoustic memories, the witnesses share memories of events ranging from the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) to the more recent 2020 Port Explosion. Alongside the collection of these oral testimonies, I explore the transnational nature of the city’s soundscape by recording sounds that evoke these descriptions and their concomitant psychoacoustic responses in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts through recorded soundwalks and various manipulated materials.
This experiment aims to construct a dialogue between sonic warfare and its residual effects. I communicate with the reproduced or reinterpreted memories of sonic Beirut through an alternate setting, where I can speak back to home transnationally and trans-sonically. I then weave the sounds of Cambridge with the testimonies from Beirut into three audio tracks that played in 5.1 multichannel installation. In this paper, I explore this sound installation and break down the collected testimonies, documenting Beirut’s resonant echoes in Cambridge, while positing the migration, universality, and transferability of sonic memories between spaces. Such ephemeral sounds in flux carve the social construction of spaces that are materially destroyed, arguably stimulating a confrontation with past violence and the reconstruction of memory.
* Paper available upon request *