Electronic music and sound art are approached here as situated practices,
grounded in specific conditions, irreducible to forms or genres. This project
explores what makes them possible: tools, gestures, ways of working, but also spaces,
scenes, social and political contexts. It documents and archives their processes.
At a time when music circulates endlessly, often detached from the conditions
of its existence, it proposes to slow down and look more closely. Not as an abstract
stream, but as something happening here and now, for someone, in a specific context.
What is at stake is also our relation to time, technologies, modes of attention,
social tensions, and forms of collective organization. Electronic and sonic practices
appear as ways of working with — or against — these conditions.
The project follows the processes: how things are made, circulate, transmitted,
and replayed. Above all, it observes how these practices, through bodies, machines,
and spaces, continue to transform — leaving a critical and living trace
of their histories and stakes.
grounded in specific conditions, irreducible to forms or genres. This project
explores what makes them possible: tools, gestures, ways of working, but also spaces,
scenes, social and political contexts. It documents and archives their processes.
At a time when music circulates endlessly, often detached from the conditions
of its existence, it proposes to slow down and look more closely. Not as an abstract
stream, but as something happening here and now, for someone, in a specific context.
What is at stake is also our relation to time, technologies, modes of attention,
social tensions, and forms of collective organization. Electronic and sonic practices
appear as ways of working with — or against — these conditions.
The project follows the processes: how things are made, circulate, transmitted,
and replayed. Above all, it observes how these practices, through bodies, machines,
and spaces, continue to transform — leaving a critical and living trace
of their histories and stakes.
WHAT THE CITY MAKES US HEAR
SONIC CONTROL, acoustic exclusion and architecture through SOUND
There is an idea that recurs frequently in soundscape studies: to control sound is to control space. In the context of the contemporary city, this has probably never been more accurate and, at the same time, more overlooked. Because today's city is traversed by intentional sounds. Not merely by noise, which dates back at least to the industrialisation of cities. These are sounds that are designed, placed and calibrated to act without being truly perceived — and therein lies all the difference. A car horn tells you something. The music playing in a train station corridor, the high-pitched frequency emitted by a box bolted to a park railing — these sounds tell you nothing; they produce something, directly, bypassing language and consciousness. In this sense, we are dealing with an entirely distinct category of intervention upon bodies.
Classical music in train stations, or the art of making people feel they don't belong
One of the most telling examples of sonic control remains to this day the music broadcast in transitional spaces, thoroughfares and commercial areas. Now perfectly integrated into the habits of everyday life, their inconspicuous appearance makes them a formidably effective tool — precisely because they cloak themselves in the appearance of a benevolence that is, in fact, deceptive.
Classical music played in public spaces has a precise history: the Tyne and Wear Metro introduced it as early as 1997 as a deterrent against so-called antisocial behaviour. A spokesperson explained, without embarrassment, that the measure was introduced not in response to any actual criminal acts, but because young people were deemed likely to engage in suspicious behaviour. Transport for London extended the programme to more than 65 stations from 2003 onwards.
In this context, classical music functions not simply because it is assumed to be unpleasant to those one wishes to drive away, but because it operates as a territorial marker, signalling to whom the space belongs and which type of body is welcome within it. As Lily E. Hirsch analysed in Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, and as work such as Marie Thompson's on the weaponised use of classical music demonstrates, this is not a matter of musical taste but of cultural capital — what Anglophone sociology has termed sonic exclusion.
The Los Angeles Metro deployed Beethoven at the Westlake/MacArthur Park station in 2023 and, in a more trivial example, in 2019 West Palm Beach near Miami played Baby Shark on a loop at night to drive homeless people away from beaches and luxury pavilions. In every configuration, the logic is identical: not to formally prohibit access to spaces, but to render the space unbearable for certain bodies. The problem is not addressed at its source — it is merely displaced.
The Mosquito, or discrimination at a fixed frequency
The Mosquito is arguably the most documented and most straightforwardly brutal example of a coercive sonic system. This device, invented by Howard Stapleton in 2005 and first tested in Barry, Wales, emits a tone at a frequency of approximately 17 to 18 kHz. It remains inaudible to most adults but is perceived without ambiguity by young people. Subjected to this continuous whine, the effect is unpleasant enough to transform public space into hostile territory within a matter of minutes.
The German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health concluded that the device was not entirely safe, particularly for infants and young children who, unlike adults, are unable to move away from the sound source. And yet it has been presented as a security reinforcement solution. No security guard. No visible camera. No verbal warning. A frequency.
What is striking is that it does not target behaviour. It discriminates by age group against all those whose hearing is still sharp enough to detect it — including babies. Since the threshold of tolerance is physiological, so too is the discrimination. In 2010, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe unanimously adopted a recommendation calling on member states to ban the device — though it lacked the power to enforce such a prohibition. In 2016, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child reiterated the call. In 2017, a campaign by the Scottish Youth Parliament persuaded ScotRail to remove its devices — a genuine victory, but a local one. An estimated 3,500 Mosquito units were active in England at the time of the first campaigns. The device remains available for purchase, deliverable within forty-eight hours.
The LRAD, from the Pittsburgh G20 to the streets of Belgrade
This, however, has crossed a qualitative threshold. The LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) has existed since the 1990s in the military domain. It was first used against civilian protesters in the United States during the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009, where a researcher present as an observer — not a participant in the demonstration — suffered permanent hearing damage after being caught in the acoustic beam. The city of Pittsburgh reached a settlement of $72,000, without admitting liability, but committing to regulate future use of the device. Since then, LRADs have been deployed against Occupy, against the Standing Rock defenders in 2016, in dozens of cities during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and in January 2026 in Maple Grove, Minnesota, against protesters demonstrating against ICE operations in the wake of the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. According to the authorities, the LRADs were used there in their amplification mode to announce crowd dispersal orders, rather than as sonic weapons as such.
Then came Belgrade. On 15 March 2025, hundreds of thousands of people had gathered to commemorate the victims of the roof collapse at Novi Sad railway station. During a minute of silence, a sudden panic dispersed the crowd within seconds. Thousands of protesters described experiencing something indescribable: headaches, confusion, nausea, pressure in the ears. Photographs identified what appeared to be an LRAD 450XL, mounted on a police vehicle. Serbian authorities initially denied any presence of the device, before conceding otherwise while insisting it had not been activated.
Earshot, an organisation specialising in acoustic investigation — from European protests to conflict zones — concluded in its June 2025 report that it was highly probable that the protesters had been subjected to a directional acoustic weapon. Of nineteen videos analysed, not one succeeded in capturing the sound. And that is precisely the characteristic of a high-pressure LRAD. A beam so narrow that it is imperceptible to anyone not directly in its path. The invisible weapon, above all others. On 29 April 2025, the European Court of Human Rights issued an interim measure, ordering Serbia to prevent any future use of sonic devices for crowd control purposes, while noting that it was not necessary to rule on whether such a weapon had in fact been used. To date, no one has been charged.
Always the same frequency
This marks the first time within European territory that a state has been formally challenged by the ECHR over the alleged use of a sonic weapon against a peaceful crowd. And it is precisely this that finally makes visible what everything else had already been illustrating beneath the surface: the continuum between the box bolted to a park railing and the directional sound cannon aimed at a crowd in mourning is only a matter of frequency adjustment. The same technology, the same manufacturers, the same logic. Hostile architecture — anti-homeless benches, anti-sleeping spikes — sparked public debate when it first appeared in cities. It was visible. Hostile sonic architecture, by contrast, remains almost entirely invisible: inaudible to those who deploy it, leaving no tangible mark on the cityscape. It operates in the spectrum, in the literal sense.
The question, then, is not whether the music played in train stations is pleasant. Or whether the Mosquito device works efficiently. The questions that matter concern the intentions guiding the decision. The answers sketch, by what is absent, the map of the real city. Not the one drawn up in urban planning documents, but the one defined by which bodies may move through it, stop within it, sit down in it, gather collectively for a cause — without a frequency violently driving them away. To listen to the city as a political act is to refuse to let that map remain invisible.
To continue reading :
Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, MIT Press, 2010.
Lily E. Hirsch, Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, University of Michigan Press, 2012.
Gordan Savičić & Selena Savić (dir.), Unpleasant Design, G.L.O.R.I.A., 2013.
Juliette Volcler, Le son comme arme. Les usages policiers et militaires du son, La Découverte, 2011.
Marie Thompson, "Sounding Out the Mosquito: Towards a Politics of Acoustic Exclusion", Social & Cultural Geography, 2017.
“Sonic Attack on a Silent Vigil”, Earshot, june 2025.
DIGGING IN EXCESS
BETWEEN DIGITAL ABUNDANCE, PARALLEL ECONOMIES, AND LISTENING FATIGUE
Not really a platform in the traditional sense. Rather an underground network, a parallel market where files circulate freely, without rules, without mandatory payment, without real traceability. What passes through it is not only rare music, it is also a form of value detached from any official economy. Artists receive nothing. Yet for many DJs, it is an indispensable tool. There one finds records lost for a long time, obscure rips, entire catalogs vanished from conventional circuits. It is at once a treasure and a moral dead end. Everyone knows well that this zone sits outside any formal economy, but the access it represents is too precious to give up. Here, digging gains in depth as the links with the real conditions of musical production wither away.
What "knowing how to search" means now
This shift from scarcity to abundance transforms the very nature of the skill. Research on the various electronic music scenes, notably the work of Gábor Vályi, shows that today, value lies less in the possession of rare objects than in the ability to move with discernment through considerable masses of sound. Digging becomes a practice of filtering, a practice where accurate listening spots singularities within otherwise homogeneous musical flows.
Vinyl, the gesture, and the conformism that comes with it
In this context, the return of vinyl in certain electronic scenes resembles an attempt to reintroduce friction into a system that has become too fluid. Attending a DJ set where only records are played is anything but trivial. The act is visible, the handling tangible, the physical stakes seem real. There is a presence, a risk, a direct relationship to sound and its temporality that the digital medium does not engage in the same way. But this valorization of the vinyl record also holds its share of ambiguity. In certain scenes, it is no longer a choice but indeed the tacit norm. And as always, when a practice becomes normative, it generates, in series, its own codes. Formats converge, structures align and the margins of surprise shrink. What once distinguished now homogenizes.
The money question everyone carefully avoids
Then there is the concrete and brutal factor of cost. Producing vinyl today is expensive. Pressing plants are saturated, raw materials more costly and production timelines longer. A reality documented by the IFPI as well as Music Business Worldwide. Distribution prices bear witness to this. On secondary markets like Discogs, certain records reach sums well beyond their original value and their practical usefulness. The record becomes a dual object: a working tool and a speculative asset. Vinyl record digging, often imagined as a pure and disinterested practice that would take place in small record shops haloed with an aura of authenticity, is inevitably caught in the trap of these speculative economic logics.
Two hundred listens for nothing
This hybrid context: digital abundance, informal circulation, material scarcity, amplifies the tensions within digging. There is always more to discover, abundance has not disappeared, it has intensified. But it does not give itself up easily. It demands time, concentration, a form of endurance that can be exhausting. Listening to hundreds of tracks to keep only two or three, and sometimes even none at all. Coming back, trying again, doubting. A fatigue sets in, alongside a sensory overload. And yet, DJs must continue to build something coherent and personal. Finding a throughline without repeating oneself or dissolving into the noise. A delicate balance.
And yet, despite the fatigue, despite the contradictions, digging remains deeply gratifying. For many, it is even a sort of anchor thrown into the sea that serves as a landmark. One learns enormously. Slowly, almost imperceptibly. The ear grows sharper, memory grows richer and patterns emerge. This shapes a relationship to music, quite fortunately, but also to time, to attention and to subjectivity. A demanding practice, if not an ungrateful one, but rarely entirely devoid of meaning.
The tools are coming. Now what?
It is in this tension between constraint and a certain pleasure (sometimes subversive, as we have seen) that digging persists. It is not entirely defeated by digital abundance, nor completely frozen by vinyl fetishism. It mutates. New forms are already emerging as technologies evolve: AI-assisted exploration, algorithmic analysis, vast sound databases to exploit. But these tools will not replace the act of searching in practice, they will simply shift its contours. Tomorrow's digging will probably be more hybrid, probably more assisted, it must be admitted, but it will always rest on one central skill: finding as much as making sense of continuous and overflowing musical flows.
Thus, far from being on the verge of disappearing, digging changes form, adapts, absorbs its contradictions which it brings back out positively into practice. And this is perhaps where one of its essential characteristics resides: an activity that never quite settles, that continues to find meaning and to establish subjective hierarchies where everything seems chaotic, already given and yet overflowing with hidden treasures.
To continue reading :
Gábor Vályi, Digging in the Crates. Practices of Identity and Belonging in a Translocal Record Collecting Scene, Doctoral thesis PhD in Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2010.
IFPI Global Music Report, 2025
IVANA DAMA
The Politics of Breath
There is something symptomatic in the way artists from conflict zones are presented: the question of trauma can occupy a central place, and rightly so, told and retold until the work itself stands as testimony. Or, conversely, it is carefully kept at a distance. Ivana Dama does neither. She was born and raised in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her early childhood during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. The memories of her childhood, time spent in air-raid shelters, the sounds and vibrations of warning sirens, helped shape her interest in air and sound as her main mediums. These are not incidental biographical details; they are raw material she works with coldly, without staging them.
What led her to focus on sound was the moment she first heard archival recordings made during the bombing, including the sounds of air-raid sirens. Until then, she had not realized how deeply those sonic memories remained embedded within her. Images of the events had never affected her in the same way, but hearing those sound recordings produced an immediate physical response.The image documents. Sound reactivates. This is not a hierarchy but
a difference in register. And it is that register she has been exploring ever since, often using low frequencies and analog electronics to restore sound's full materiality and reveal its almost tactile dimension. She creates connections between the corporeal, the physiological, and the political.
Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Her most recent work embodies this logic. Breathing Alarms (2026), currently on view at the Wende Museum in Culver City, is an installation set within the museum's East German guardhouse. The piece centers on surveillance, atmosphere, and the politics of breath. The choice of location is not incidental: the Wende Museum is dedicated to the history of the Cold War, its collections gathering artifacts, archives, and everyday objects from the former Soviet bloc. Grafting such a piece inside a former East German guardhouse is a way of short-circuiting the regime of representation. We are no longer confronted with something that evokes control, we are entirely inside it.
What makes Ivana Dama's work so singular is precisely that it does not negotiate between the intimate and the political, nor between devices and their field of action. We feel her works before we can fully grasp their stakes. This is where the physicality of her sonic installations resides. And through that physicality, we also better understand the central question running through much of her research: understanding cannot be separated from a form of experience. Some things may be more relevant and more powerful when felt rather than explained.
detail, Wende Museum, Culver City
The title itself says something precise. An alarm that breathes. Or a breath
that alarms. Air as a simultaneous vector of life and imminent threat.
This parameter is a constant in Ivana Dama's practice. Her current research explores the development of a tool capable of signaling the urgency of both social and ecological crises, foregrounding the inextricable connections between the two, given that they most often occur simultaneously and likely arise from the same root causes (as intersectional theories suggest). The air raid siren of her Belgrade childhood and contemporary ecological collapse thus share a common structure: thresholds crossed, bodies exposed, warnings
that arrive but are rarely heeded.
Wende Museum, Culver City
To continue :
Shoutout LA — Meet Ivana Dama
https://shoutoutla.com/meet-ivana-dama-sound-artist-and-researcher/
Wende Museum — Ivana Dama: The Air Belongs to the Children https://wendemuseum.org/event/frameworks-ivana-dama-the-air-belongs-to-the-children/
Wende Museum — Breathing Alarms
https://wendemuseum.org/exhibition/ivana-dama-breathing-alarms/
Artist’s website : https://www.ivanadama.com
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