Be Heard: Acoustic Hailers as Technologies of Not Listening
Acoustic hailing devices (AHDs) are high-intensity directional sound systems that produce narrow sound beams with very loud, high sound pressure levels that can be aimed at particular locations: that is, directed to target specific auditors. They are optimized to project intelligible voice messages as well as impactful, attention-commanding warning and deterrent tones at distances in excess of 500 meters. The most powerful models can reach over five kilometers.
AHDs are usually framed as high-tech, twenty-first-century counterparts to bullhorns. Because of the character of their sound projections and their most publicized usage, they are also known as “sound cannons.” For a written description of the video and audio click here.
In music and sound studies, as well as in public discourse on state violence, discussions of these devices often take place within the sound-as-weapon framework, since their beams can and do cause hearing damage as well as other forms of physiological and psychic trauma. From Santiago de Chile to Tbilisi, law enforcement agencies have infamously deployed LRADs, the product name of the AHDs manufactured by the company Genasys, as non-lethal weapons against protesters. In the United States, for instance, LRADs were utilized against Standing Rock water protectors and are utilized against Black Lives Matter protesters. Because they can be, as William Cheng puts it, “earsplitting,” they are contested as policing tools. Here, I am going to sidestep the sound-as-weapon avenue of inquiry to, in the spirit of Sounding Objects, instead approach AHDs briefly and “materially,” as cultural artifacts and technical objects: they are media, they are technologies, and they are products. What are the assumptions and investments, the logics and contexts, underlying such a thing as an AHD? What forms of communication and of power, what modalities of listening and of hailing do these forward or otherwise disallow?
Initially conceived as military “solutions” and on the market since 2003, the AHD family of devices and industry—hence, too, the set of hailing practices these advance—has expanded and diversified. AHDs can be handheld and portable, large and fixed, remote-controlled and vehicle-mounted (e.g., drones, cars, armored vehicles) or integrated with surveillance networks. They are marketed for a plethora of civil and defense, public and private security applications alike.
Manufacturers such as HyperSpike or Genasys present their AHD products as responses to the challenges of a world haunted by crises: that is, as problem-solvers—they are directional sound solutions for today’s “escalated threat environment,” to use Genasys’s formulation. Yet, as with all media, AHDs are neither neutral nor transparent vis-à-vis the intentions of their use. They target and recruit auditors as both risks and at risk, as problems to manage. They advance an ambivalence, a sensibility toward the formulation of problems. These drives, in part, are ingrained in technologies that shoot far-reaching, bio-acoustically compelling voice commands and warnings; they are also central to the cluster of security and safety practices of which AHDs are a part. As tends to be the case with other security solutions, sonic and otherwise, AHDs galvanize the problems for which they are needed.
AHDs are not just loud; they are designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of the human auditory system, to boost output and directivity over the range where it is most sensitive. The ear’s vulnerabilities are further recruited in built-in tones designed to engage the auditory system “in a very effective manner.” In MP3, Jonathan Sterne suggests that sound technologies contain a “model or script for hearing and an imagined, ideal auditor.” In the case of AHDs, the auditor is conceived as vulnerable and unskilled by virtue of having an eardrum; it is conceived as a target within earshot, within hailing distance. AHD broadcasts are designed to hit a raw nerve and for speech to be intelligible both in the short and long range and under noisy conditions—to further land the message, these can be connected to a Phraselator. To borrow a couple of HyperSpike slogans, they offer “sound that moves” and “intelligible solutions when the message matters.”
The New York Police Department displays an LRAD on the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention. By Mike Hudack (CC BY-NC 2.0).
What I’ve called ambivalence was central to the New York Police Department’s first purchase of LRAD AHDs in anticipation of the 2004 Republican National Convention. The LRADs could help officers in “directing crowds to safety” after “a calamity” and “reminding protesters where they’re allowed to march.” In this example, protesters were thus preempted and then framed both as a risk and as being at risk. They were understood as a threat to civil order and as potentially under threat, because calamities can happen anytime and anywhere, but particularly in “high-risk” metropoles—the same rationale animating the Department of Homeland Security grants used to purchase AHDs in the United States to date. In either scenario, the LRAD would allow police to gain attention and compliance to clear, authoritative commands; it would be an authority-endowing tool for—in this case—police to manage the targeted crowd in an emergency.
From civil unrest and perimeter security breaches to the aftermath of disasters, AHD brochures often entertain instantiations of the “threat environment” in which they can come in handy, galvanizing fears for the purposes of selling the product. Birds are a major threat in the AHD portfolio; AHDs target these non-human animals with either tones or prerecorded predator calls.
HyperSpike Showcase AHD used for bird deterrence. Wildlife management is one of the main markets of the AHD industry. In this demonstration, an operator uses the HyperSpike HS-14 to shoo away geese in an open field, in the surroundings of an unidentified airport. For a written description of the video and audio click here.
While telling, the bird-deterrent product showcase is not illustrative of the preferred and unmanned embodiment of AHDs for wildlife control and preservation—birds, too, are a risk and at risk: wildlife causes costly disruptions, harming wildlife penalties and bad press. Thus, the model is that of an AHD-enabled, remote-controlled virtual acoustic fence. The identical assembly is pitched as a solution to border-crossing migrants, as a cheaper and “smarter” alternative to, say, a border wall, which is otherwise fed by the same phobias and entrepreneurial sense of opportunity.
Ever since this demonstration is for show and sell, the operator and the AHD are not actually solving the problem of invasive Canadian Geese. In a way, they’re defining the problem, as well as explaining it. HyperSpike advertises the product in a way that is attractive to their customers and translatable to other human, human-wildlife, and life-infrastructure conflicts. It is also symptomatic of how, in proposing their penetrative, unmistakable commands and tones as solutions, in translating them as “communication” problems, the purveyors of AHDs formulate conflicts among unevenly powered humans in ways that amplify and naturalize the broader ecologies and cultures of violence they enter and whitewash. That, which I’ve called a sensibility, among many other things, is limited.
AHDs’ far-reaching polyglottal and visceral intelligibility has many applications. Because of the versatility and modularity their makers celebrate, for us to figure out what AHDs are it might be advantageous to consider their mis- and off-applications. What aren’t these sound communication technologies meant for? For example, The Ears Between Worlds Are Always Speaking is a two-channel hyper-directional opera by the arts collective Postcommodity, staged at Aristotle’s Lyceum, Athens, as part of documenta 14 (2017). In this work, the LRAD was utilized against the device’s grain (apologies for the cliché). In an attempt “to make [the LRAD] into an instrument of beauty,” Postcommodity subversively used the “clearest, long distance [on-the-air] transmitter of the human voice” as a mover of songs and stories of migration. Mounted over buildings overlooking the Lyceum, the LRADs projected “sound and music at a very low volume.” To hear, visitors had to walk toward the beams, resulting in “a short, circuitous pilgrimage to hear the stories of those who have been forced to take longer ones.” In The Ears, LRADs did not transmit unmistakable sounds and messages to targets; they solicited time and willingness—to walk, to listen—from auditors. The penetrative characteristics of the directional beams, in turn, made the music very present, as it “turns the body into a resonator.” In discussing their LRAD use in The Ears, Postcommodity has emphasized AHDs’ destructive force and service in the silencing of dissent. These artists’ critique and deviant usage, too, intimates a more insidious form of violence that is core to AHDs as cultural artifacts: It makes conspicuous the radical disinterest in whatever targeted auditors have to say that underlies AHDs and their applications. This is most apparent in the case of AHD-enabled virtual-fence solutions, but such radical disinterest is core to all AHD hailings. It manifests in terms of hardware outfitting: while AHDs are equipped with long-range cameras and search-lights for enhanced tracking and targeting, they do not include, nor do manufacturers sell as an accessory, long-range microphones; the only microphones are for playback. AHDs are sound technologies in which customer and user are distinctly not the listener—indeed, freeing operators and non-targets from the target auditors’ experience is, explicitly, a fundamental selling point for AHDs. They are, too, technologies of not listening.
