The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

In early August, I joined a six-day sound workshop in Beirut led by two sound artists, one Lebanese, the other Palestinian-Chilean. The workshop was to have been held near Burj el-Shemali, a Palestinian camp in south Lebanon, but was relocated after the Israeli assassinations of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s senior commander, and Ismail Hanniyeh, the political leader of Hamas.

Participants from the southern camps of Burj el-Shemali, Rashidiyye, and Mieh Mieh made the journey north. Several were music producers and filmmakers with experience of working in sound, but for others—a beekeeper, a florist, a player of nai (a type of reed flute)—the themes and methods were new. The aim was to explore sound as a medium of expression at a time when images of genocidal violence have come to dominate our perception of Palestinian life. But we also wanted to reflect on sound’s broader relationship to space and politics—its potential, perhaps, as an acoustic counterpoint to the visuality of empire. As we gathered in a basement library in West Beirut, I wondered what our collective listening would make audible. What would grief, fear, and anger sound like?

We began by listening to the room tone, replicating what we heard (a fan, breathing, bodies, distant street sounds, a generator, static from lights overhead), with each person adding their own vibration. Were we hearing sound, or creating it? We recorded on a small device balanced on a garbage can in the center of the room, then recorded a second time inside the can. The collective hum gathered force, rising and falling like a swarm, heightening awareness of our surroundings and subtle shifts in our collective attention. Our listening bodies became instruments of communication and community, held together in state of suspended vibration.

One of the distinctive characteristics of listening is that there is no detachment. Ears cannot blink, hearing is involuntary and one is thrust into the midst of things. If one blocks one’s ears, the skull echoes the sound of oneself––the heart pumping blood, the mouth breathing.

The filmmaker Deborah Stratman captures this haptic quality of hearing when she compared it to “touch at a distance” (2024, 6). Listening back, we discovered many things detected by the microphone but missed by us. It amplified the difference between listening inside one’s head and through a machine on a trash can, and revealed the dynamism of the sounded space we had created together. What, after all, is fidelity, we wondered?

The experience of listening to our listening was both immersive and liberating. The musician and composer Pauline Oliveros called these acts of simultaneous listening (to more than one reality, by more than one person) “quantum listening.” Her ‘Sonic Meditations for Wartime’ seeks precisely to expand human attention and consciousness through communal listening exercises that might bring “an end to violence” (Oliveras 2022, 21).

Outside, Israeli fighter jets were breaking the sound barrier over Beirut, just as they have over Saida, Sur, and other towns across the south for many months. The point of these sonic booms is to instill psychic terror, through shock waves that can shatter windows and cause physical damage to people and things. The incessant whir of Israeli drones and sonic booms are now a fact of life in south Lebanon, as they have been for many years in Gaza, producing post-traumatic stress, deafness and other kinds of injury. If the booms’ irregular schedule––very early in the morning, at dinnertime, during Hassan Nasrallah’s broadcasts––grows predictable, they still induce intense, involuntary fear and panic. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the sound theorist and founder of Earshot, a not-for-profit that conducts audio analysis of human rights abuses, calls them “acoustic reminders that [Israel] can turn Lebanon into Gaza at any point” (Nashed 2024). Sonic booms bring back the memories of the Israeli invasions of 1978, 1982, and 2006, but also promise future violence.

Sary, one of the workshop facilitators, explained that the two booms one hears––at the nose and tail of the jet, sonic markers of entry and exit––confirm it is not a bomb. Similarly, people learned, during the 1982 invasion, that hearing a rocket’s whistle meant it had passed over and one was safe. In wartime, thinking in and with sound can save you. The careful auditor learns to identify and navigate unseen dangers, as well as to detect signs of life amidst the rubble. Living under siege refines one attunement to the soundscapes of confinement, just as those on the outside will listen closely to a loved one’s voice for indications of their well-being, underneath or behind the banalities of small talk— as on the phone, when separated by unimaginable circumstances not really describable in words.

A microphone is essentially a transducer that works by converting acoustic energy into electrical energy. Heard this way, the sonic booms ripping through Lebanese airspace are transductions of the Israeli state’s drive to expel or exterminate. The lamentations of grieving parents in Gaza might equally be understood as the agony of death turned into song. In mourning death, they celebrate life. Both are indexical signs. If sound is a weapon of terror and subjugation, it also a medium of resilience, resistance and resurgence. Music and song move and mobilize us.

On August 2, the second day of the workshop, synchronized demonstrations were held in Palestinian camps across Lebanon to mourn Hanniyeh’s killing. As patriotic sentiment and unity have been worn thin by factional divisions, protestors were told to sing revolutionary songs from 1970s and carry only Palestinian flags. These chants, well known––even to generations born after the PLO’s departure from Lebanon––are inscribed in people; an echo of resistance that won’t fall silent.

Over the course of the week there was little discussion of the events unfolding in Gaza, elsewhere in historic Palestine, or in the south. It was as if collective listening had briefly released us from the grip of catastrophic news cycles, attuning us to each other, to the sound works we created and shared. On the last day, I asked Ahmad and Hamada––the florist and the beekeeper––about what these events might mean for Palestinians in Lebanon. Our conversation circled around the limits of repair. What happens when it is not possible to make something whole again?

Speaking to this dilemma, Palestinian artists Ruanne Abourahme and Basel Abbas ask, “What does it mean to sit with loss that is not defeat?” The enormity of genocide is not easily contained, and yet words are needed, even inadequate ones. We speak and write into and against the silence.

On the way to the airport the friend driving me spoke optimistically about the global protest movement and the student encampments. As a Palestinian he feels the pain of genocidal bloodshed, but is comforted by these shows of solidarity and their loud rejection of Israel’s crimes. “Despite our dire loss, we’ve gained a lot. I see it as a victory, like the uprising of 1936,” he tells me, as I get out of the car. I wonder at his hopefulness and am humbled by it.

Listening again to the recording of our collective sounding that first day, I am struck anew by its alien force, by the synchrony that held us together, and by the sense of alchemical possibility it produced for a kind of collective knowing and action. Everyone knew instinctively when to stop. It brings to mind Oliveros’s injunction to listen focally and globally, through one’s palms and the soles of one’s feet, so as to expand the sonic field from self to world, and in that gesture feel the force of sonic relation.

How might sound release us from the grip of genocidal war and colonial capture? The call of Palestinian life reclaims the space of protest and demands our response. This song of longing grows louder, even when it would seem there is no breath left to sustain it. As the ground trembles, we hear the resonance of a resurgent world.

Postscript

Shortly after this piece was submitted Israel dramatically escalated its aerial offensive, leveling entire buildings and neighborhoods across Lebanon and in Beirut. The ongoing assault has resulted in community destruction, mass casualties and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. The whirr of drones is now ubiquitous, and Israeli warplanes continue to break the sound barrier.