Preemptive Listening

What do warnings for climate change, the pandemic, rising fascism sound like? Does an alarm have to be alarming? How can we address alarm fatigue, both as lived reality and as a metaphor for our current state? 'Preemptive Listening' is a practice-based research project which re-imagines sirens and emergency signals, resulting in a documentary film/exhibition, an audio archive, a symposium, a related issue of the journal Disclaimer, and a co-authored journal article.

The project is both a diagnosis of shifts in emergency signal communication and a series of propositions, speculating new siren sounds. Nested within the crisis of our attention economy, the siren is undergoing a profound transformation, prompted by our ongoing alarm fatigue and noise pollution, as well as the near-obsolescence and inefficiency of public soundsystem broadcasts. Many sirens are relics from WW2 and the cold war, repurposed to communicate the threats of extreme weather, a collective commemorative pause, or resurrected to test disaster preparedness. The siren serves as a worldwide cipher of potential trauma, an emblem of climate catastrophe, a mouthpiece for sonic governance. We are transitioning from loud alarms heard collectively in the public sphere, to vibratory alerts received individually on personal mobile devices. The project is informed by an auraldiverse approach, expanding our understanding of who listens and how. It questions the efficiency of our inherited sirens, and the capaciousness of our conceptual frameworks of emergency - primarily used to signal a singular incident (fire) and an immediate responsive course of action. It will attempt to rewire our listening from the inherited soundscapes associated with the siren, questioning whether our crisis management signalling systems are perhaps part of the crisis. In an age of intersecting political, manmade and ecological disasters - can we envision sounds not only scored to immediacy, but signals set to a longer temporal frame, sounding the alarm for the unimaginable distant future, the thresholds of extinction? A soundtrack of new siren sounds composed by an array of acclaimed experimental musicians will map a speculative future for emergency signals. This will be supplemented by neuroscientific perspectives and insights from activists and cultural historians to open up what we understand as emergencies and how they are communicated, extending physically beyond ear-centred listening and conceptually beyond immediate timeframes.

Bringing together an interdisciplinary range of people, the research project aims to unpack the critical potential of reimagining sirens, and the interview archive will feed into the documentary film, inform the symposium held at the RCA, public events at Kunsternes Hus (Oslo) and the related journal article. These main outcomes will provide a valuable format for increased awareness and better understanding of the changing methods of emergency signal communication, which can feed into enhanced quality of life, and impact public services and policy. The film will extend this urgent discussion by amplifying it beyond the immediate academic and artistic network, further developing links across academia, industry and non-academic audiences. Drawing on the PIs extensive cross-disciplinary practice as an internationally recognised artist working with film and sound, a major goal of this research project is to engage with the enactive power of artistic practice at the intersection of the fields of film, music, sound art, sociology, media studies, and deaf studies, generating an artistic output that is in itself an experiment in listening.

This timely project continuously accrues depth and nuance as our concepts of emergency and crisis management strategies keep shifting, inflected by the asymptomatic, the imperceptible potential disaster that has no warning signs, and does not easily reveal itself as actionable. Emergency signal recalibration is urgent.