Bang Bang That Awful Sound

What happens when we listen closely to the soundscape of war?

- Srishti Walia

WHAT happens when we attempt to hear war, become aural witnesses rather than engage, again and again, in the act of seeing wide-scale devastation? Following a catastrophic event, powerful images and visuals from war-torn regions often become our primary means of constructing a lexicon of war. Most of us are attuned to prioritising our faculty of sight over others, but a shift towards sonic territories allows us a different register to make sense of the happenings of war. Is not the aural landscape merely noise, one might enquire?

Loud, chaotic, ambiguous, and indecipherable. It is, still it is more. The pandemonium of war remains heavy with the silence of suffering and pain, and when its end is nowhere in sight—the murmurs of everyday chores, giggles of children, whispers of prayers and cries, the clanking of ladles against vessels, and the artist's splashing of paint on the canvas become part of war's monotony. By shifting our perspective to the living, we bear witness to the ghosts of voices surviving amidst unfathomable grief.

Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles (Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, 2022), a short film documenting the lives of a group of sculptors in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, begins with a hymn sung by a church choir as the camera pans across the ruins near Lviv. While the operatic psalm continues, the soundscape materialises intricately—we hear the footsteps of a soldier patrolling and alongside him, the rapacious breathing of a military dog, the siren of an ambulance nearby, the tyres of a few cars speedily hum on the road, and finally, inside the artists's workshop, a radio informs of the lack of resources for those defending Mariupol.