1. Listening to sound through a constructed filtration routine is not an objective practice.

Deep listener and composer, Pauline Oliveros, responded in an interview, “We cannot turn off our ears – the ears are always taking in sound information – but we can turn off our listening. How you’re listening, is how you develop a culture and how a community of people listens, is what creates their culture.” CEO of ShotSpotter, Ralph Clark responded in an interview “Ambient noise is our enemy, we do everything we possibly can to suppress it” (New 2018). Indeed, ShotSpotter’s mechanical ears only perk up to pops, bangs, and booms, quick and high-intensity sounds that they learn to anticipate (Wasney 2018). In an anonymized statement response to me,¹⁷ I’m told that the filter applied to sound is designed to seek out rupture and violence, and that the method keeps ShotSpotter from bias.

However, I learn from Norman W. Long, a sound artist and composer, while we pace a gusty Marian S. Byrnes Park on a winter morning, that acoustic manipulation is not neutral. Inspired by King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry, who highlighted rhythms or vocals from recorded sessions, fading them in and out with elongated echos, memorials of sounds, Norman identifies the filtration process of sound as a way to redefine space. He pushes back against the idea of objective field recording: just like with visuals,“There’s a photographic syntax. What you’re looking at is filtered through a particular context or process. That’s what I do as a sound artist.” Likewise, this project highlights how the routine one designs to filter sound, determines the truth extolled from the product. In ShotSpotter’s case, the proposed aim of the routine is to be precise. This “precision,” is what Sanjin Ibrahimovic from Lucy Parsons Lab questions: “The suggestion by tech-fetishists and police sympathizers that introducing more technology in policing means we won’t have as concentrated bias in policing and that there is more ‘precision’ is ludicrous, to say the least. Precision in what? Targeting poor people of color and harassing them for petty offenses because our tech told us that they’d be loitering on this street corner?” I’m not suggesting a blanket surveillance system that listens to all sounds, ebullient and dramatic and dull. Nor am I after some kind of subversive project to zoom in to sounds of joy emanating from a place in an attempt to treat that place with more respect. I only identify, in response to ShotSpotter claiming their precision is what keeps them from bias, that choosing to be precise, and the way one goes about developing that precision, is bias. Listening to and stretching out exclusively violent sounds is inevitably going to construct an echo chamber narrative of an environment that is, in reflection, violent, and trigger responses to it as a place of that type of sound only.¹⁸ Generating police beats from these results creates a straight line from that initial moment of intensity, into future paranoid deployments. Sanjin from Lucy Parsons Labs tells me, “ShotSpotter as a technology- abstracted from its actual deployment in our real world- is not a neutral technology. Its entire construction was based on a view of the world that needs safeguarding- one in which we are already subjects to be monitored.” It is worth questioning what is holding our attention, sonically, when we make imaginations of the future. “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting, and deciding on action” -Pauline Oliveros on Quantum Listening, 1999.

2. Prediction based on this subjective listening denies errantry and opacity of one’s future

As famous future-predictor, Octavia Butler, warns, “Some of the most mistaken predictions . . . are of the straight-line variety–that’s the kind that ignores the inevitability of unintended consequences, ignores our often less-than-logical reactions to them and says simply, “In the future, we will have more and more of whatever’s holding our attention right now.” . . . predicting an impossible state of permanent prosperity may well be an act of fear and superstitious hope rather than an act of unimaginative, straight-line thinking” Something I was interested in during this project was the shapes and paths of sounds and their listeners. ShotSpotter’s prize technology is a system of triangulated listening devices that allow the surveiller to locate an object between several microphones as the sounds of the impulse travels through space. This process is known as “directional listening” - if a gunshot can travel in only one unwavering direction, then listening through that straight-lined path along multiple sensors helps to identify the sound as a gunshot as well as locate it in spacetime. This spring, all around me, ancient ferns were unfurling their spiraled fiddleheads, curling themselves outward. Perhaps we can look at ShotSpotter listening in a straight line, but commanding results that curl together a spiral, with each subsequent turning, turning onto and over where it has already been, expanding.¹⁹ Recording is a method of preservation, but it’s not frozen, it’s going to be fermented in and spiraled by that subjective syntax from the filtration and highlighting routines. In this way, a recording both confines a moment or sound, and cascades it forward infinitely, picking up contemporary attitudes and impacts as it goes. Whether the predictions that ShotSpotter’s data enables end up coming to fruition, it is the arrogance of the premonition in the first place that I think is problematic, terrified of surprises, of errantry and deviance, innate human qualities, features of freedom.²⁰ Driven by this fear, predictive policing generates its own outcomes, fulfills its own prophecies. Beating²¹ and anticipating danger, nerve centers and police are trained to respond to sounds, places, and people with physical alertness and expectation, creating a sonic somatics of fear to carry into the future. The life of sound under ShotSpotter’s auspices has no opportunity to die, to be extinguished because it feeds itself. It reminds me of Norman’s community memory practice ledged in guided soundwalks, how his recorder was not necessary on those walks, only the actual forward movement through space and time. Grounding himself while he ambles, he listens “to the closest sounds, and how I am affecting the sounds, whether it’s my footsteps, or what’s going on around me. And then as I’m walking I’m noticing the changes from where I was to where I am and to where I’m going. There’s a sort of order to it.” This is an involved practice, one that builds the future, rooted in both time and space, rather than generating it. Writer, professor, interdisciplinary artist, and DJ, Tao Leigh Goffe, beautifully illustrates one context: “Sonic reverberations form communities through antiphonal registers—the call-and-response of the Black diaspora. Sound bathes and soothes. Sound is elongated until it eventually dies. A visceral experience, our bodies feel the clash of sound, multiple sonic channels in competition, mono or stereo rituals of sound. Our bodies are the filter . . . . Sonic negative space, silence defines through its absence. Far from emptiness as it tends to be read in Western cultures, absence is form. Forgetting, like silence, is necessary for the formation of memory.” (2022) ShotSpotter and HunchLab’s collaboration is using sound to predict and administer the future in one direction only. After ShotSpotter detects a gunshot, the translated shot gets logged in a database used for crime statistics and predictions. This data trail plugs into risk models feedbacking into expanding logics of policing, and then the whole system is integrated into existing abusive power dynamics (Merrill 2017). I told Rob Calhoun, Principal Engineer and Founder of ShotSpotter that I am interested in how using source location via acoustic multilateration, can construct a space, using the patterns of sound to visualize objects and their surroundings. Worried about the architecture determined by prediction (not even because the data is wrought to begin with, but because creativity and collaboration are refused in the process²²), I asked, to no reply²³, “do you see the technology as a mapping tool? What do you make of the ability of something that listens, presumably passively and reactively, to actually demarcate and forge space?” I asked Ginger Ammon, Manager of Incident Review Center, who spends time analyzing sensor patterns to determine directionality, “do you see each pop, as predicting the following pop? What is an example of a pattern you might notice?” I wanted to learn how sounds are isolated or extended, stopped and slowed or lengthened into infinity, how what we hear influences what we think comes next, and how those patterns could be subverted, or left in privacy. To encourage an extra sweet future, the crown of rhubarb can be deprived of sunlight. Forced to grow in the dark, sugars head into the pink stems rather than gigantic leafy roofs.²⁴ Ki has to be harvested by candlelight, where human witnesses hear the rhubarb’s rapid upward growth in crackley stems that rub against each other in near-darkness.²⁵ Our futures should have the right to opacity, to be unknown, to have directions that are enshrouded in darkness. Revolutionary poet and philosopher, Édouard Glissant describes a Western quest for transparency by commenting, “to grasp contains the movement of hands that grab their surroundings and bring them back to themselves. A gesture of enclosure if not appropriation.” If surveillance is a necessarily uncovering tool that challenges opacity in the present, then data collected by this force used in prediction technologies implicates our rights to a mysterious and uncertain future.²⁶

3. Present listening requires feedback and engagement

To wake up for his studies “at” midnight, King David hung a lyre over his bed (Berakhot 3b)²⁷. The north wind would breeze through at midnight, rattling the properly positioned harp’s strings, and subsequently alerting him to rise with its song (Ibid). This duet of air gust and probably some kind of animal gut, conditioned to a certain time and place, played for David, ephemerally blows into his slumber and alters his physical state as he reaches for exactitude.²⁸ Fostering precise sound can be an act of care. This alertness to vibration and to time is made as part of David’s devotion to study, and also can be seen as a sort of surveillance of wind, as David converts what is inaudible, invisible, into an alarm clock for himself by providing a place for clash, for knowing when it is otherwise impossible to know. A condition to present listening is sonic feedback. “Stuttering, disabled composer, performer, and writer”²⁹ JJJJerome Ellis posits that “For us to perceive [sound], the . . . waves emitting from the source must make our eardrums vibrate . . . We have to be moved by sound to listen to it. One could argue that there is reciprocity in what happens there: a sound is emitted, and police are sent to the source. However, when I think about deep listening, I think it requires presence not just as a ping-pong response, but as a part of an ocean of waves without a beginning or end. For listening to be reciprocal, there needs to be presence even before the impulsive sounds, as well as in between them, in the silences. What I’m trying to do is tie the abolitionist argument that we ought address the roots of suffering in our communities with relational, deep, and present listening. Without this kind of listening, that depends on feedback and engagement, ShotSpotter cannot invest in reimagining the world because they are not in a consenting relationship with it.³⁰

Linearity lacks the reciprocity necessary for relationship building, as it denies the possibility of return.³¹ To ground themselves in space, bats “emit ultrasonic noise and listen for its return (echo) to judge the location of objects” (Szczys 2013). Audio expert, Pat Brown, confirms this, describing that “most of the sound heard by any listener gets there only after many, many interactions with the room’s surfaces. Each reflection modifies the sound a bit, and after several interactions, it looks nothing like what left the loudspeaker in the first place. The room places its own signature on all sounds radiated into it, which can either enhance or corrupt the sound” (Shure, n.d). ShotSpotter attempts to bypass this contextual approach by claiming that the sounds it picks up are objective, ignoring the root causes of suffering even if the sound was uncorrupted.

Returning to rhythmanalysis, I’m curious to learn about how one’s movements through a landscape can be giving, and how that can achieve deep listening. As Norman writes elsewhere, “I think there are certain practices where sound can shape/change a community. These practices are best used to complement other strategies of awareness, direct action, or delivery of services. Soundwalks are helpful in analyzing certain sites and their conditions. Like historic preservation, open space conservation, noise pollution. It can also be used as a self-care technique (Walking Meditation) in community programs dealing with violence, abuse, and PTSD” (Rose 2021). Likewise, continuing to try to explore somatics, I asked Ginger Ammon, “How does predictive and precisioned listening to disruptive sounds plucked out of their contexts impact you with the pops and booms and cracks? What do you make of silence?” I wanted to know how the person listening is impacted by the waves heard.³²

I hope to keep coming across and seeking community listening practices, learning how sound within groups addresses suffering and enabling connection, belonging, and liberation.

This project was completed as part of a SoReMo fellowship within the Illinois Institute of Technology (the University unabashedly works with police and was actually the springboard for a recent failed predictive policing project in Chicago, infamous for the Strategic Subjects List) and I was paid a $3,000 stipend.