Group items tagged

"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."

The artist-investigator tunes his work to the undocumented, the surveilled, immigrants and prisoners; those fleeing the talons of the state

As there are no images of Saydnaya, we were dependent on the memories of survivors to recreate what happened inside. Using architectural and acoustic modelling, we helped witnesses reconstruct the architecture of the prison and their experiences of detention.

"This article seeks to explore the manifold ways in which carceral violence and acoustics intermingle, as manifested in the case of the military prison of Saydnaya-an infamous, state-run torture jail in Syria. As revealed by survivors' ear-testimonies and by the recent digital reconstruction of the prison's interior (available on the Amnesty International website), sound seems integral to the dynamics of power at play in the Syrian prison. A great part of the violence committed there is acoustic, one that is meticulously based on defining properties of the aural experience. "

"In the arid hills outside Damascus, Syria, there is a military prison called Saydnaya, a low-slung concrete building where prisoners are forbidden to make any noise. Because of Saydnaya's eerie quiet-and because the prison is kept dark and prisoners are frequently blindfolded-inmates develop a particularly keen sense of sound."

"Stonehenge was the ultimate venue for ceremonies and rituals when it was built more than 4000 years ago. But what did they sound like? Now a 1:12 scale model of the site, with the stones in their original positions, reveals the surprising acoustic qualities of the monument."