From Emergency to Emergence: Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening

Ghosts of the 20th century recur across this year’s Doc Fortnight program. From jazz and Cold War geopolitics in the Congo to testimonies from the Bosnian War that changed international law, the festival’s filmmakers grapple with histories and institutions that continue to shape the present moment.

Aura Satz, a London-based artist whose work spans performance, sound, and moving image, embarks on a similar project in her film Preemptive Listening. Building on enduring interest in sound technologies and forms of listening, Satz’s first feature is a galvanizing meditation on the siren—a piece of civic infrastructure from World War II that transformed into an alarm bell for extreme weather and man-made disasters. Today, we can hear it in the constant chirping alerts of our devices. But what does the siren—an emergency signal—mean today, when the crises facing our planet are ongoing and interconnected? Part essay-film and part sonic experiment, Satz’s film is a passionate proposal for using sound to think differently about our shared future. Ahead of Preemptive Listening’s world premiere on February 23, Satz spoke to me about her process, her collaborators, and the power of reimagining the siren beyond the histories that produced it.
—Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film

Aura Satz at the Siren Cemetery, 2022

I wanted to ask how you got interested in sirens. There’s this phrase I’ve heard you use in relation to the film that seems to sum it up. It’s about what you call “alarm fatigue”: “a constant state of emergency clouding our understanding of what the emergency is.”

Many of my earlier portraits of listening—of musicians such as Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, and Beatriz Ferreyra—or even works I made using sine waves have a resonance with the siren’s glissando. But ultimately, and I’m sure many people can relate, there was a sonic alarm growing to a crescendo inside me, and I was propelled to go deeper. A few years earlier I had worked with readymade sound signals, like the dial tone, trying to address this familiar listening experience from a new compositional angle. This led me to wonder whether a change in the signal could somehow shift something larger. Can the tone of the warning sign set the capacity to cope? This is not such a polemical proposition. One of the advisors on the project, the cognitive psychologist Judy Edworthy, has done a lot of work on designing less stressful medical-equipment alert sounds, because people working in environments such as hospitals are experiencing alarm fatigue—something that mental health nurse and activist Asantewaa Boykin describes in the film.

The film considers the siren in many contexts: from its mythological roots, as a tool of civil defense, as a symptom of climate catastrophe, even as a threat in and of itself. What associations did you have at the onset of the project, and can you share some of the surprises and discoveries along the way?

Preemptive Listening began as a sound piece and, from the outset, it was clear that the siren is a portal through which to unpack how we think about emergency. It also offers an opportunity to question ideas about what is to be saved, who is worthy of warning, as well as about safety and the future. I have been developing a working definition of the siren beyond how it sounds, focusing instead on what it does, and this has served as a score for when I invited people to collaborate at various stages of the project (and also for the viewer to hold in mind while watching/listening to the film).

First, the siren is a call to attention; second, it’s a call to action, because it holds an instruction within it; and lastly, it faces forward, pointing to a possible future. It has been uplifting to think about it in this way, as an opportunity to set the intention for a future we want to salvage, as opposed to the sonic emblem of relentless catastrophes. Khalid Abdalla, one of the first “beacon voices,” as I like to call the interviewees, really set the tone for the film when he spoke about the siren as “a fork in the road” that can show a path to an alternate future.

Still from Preemptive Listening. 2024

Still from Preemptive Listening

Underlying this project is the siren’s present-day connection with technology. The film has this wonderful phrase about the siren being a one-way conversation premised on compliance—a broadcast that tells your body to do something. And the way you’ve put the film together is a real alternative to that: a chorus of voices reimagining the forms a siren can take, what it’s for, how we listen, and what we listen to! Can you describe how you approached the film as a sonic composition, or collage of image and sound?

One of the film’s interviewees, police-sound scholar and activist Daphne Carr, speaks about the siren as a basic herding device or sound weapon that tells people to do something or go somewhere. But she also touches on the idea of a counter-siren, either through its appropriation in music or the idea of a choral siren. The film is conceived of as a polyvocal attempt to reimagine the siren, driven by its soundscape. So many ideas came from collaborators and advisors, especially as I started gathering the sounds before I had the images.

Early on, for example, Laurie Spiegel sent me a few options, the first being the original files of her piece Kepler’s Harmony of the World, which uses the astronomical sounds of planets; the other was a composition drawing on the threat of extinction that includes audio derived from the voices of manatees, cicadas, and a dog. So the perspective, scale, and mood of the sounds often dictated the research, the types of threat I looked into, even the camera movements.

Still from Preemptive Listening

It also worked the other way around. When we identified the site of the decommissioned coal-fired power station Fiddler’s Ferry in the UK, I wanted an organ sound to resonate with the monolithic structure of the cooling towers, to evoke deep time warnings. For this segment, with Sarah Davachi, we talked about grief as an affective register; she was interested in working with the motif of a descending minor second, which has been associated with laments, weeping, and sighing since the 16th century. Likewise, Elaine Mitchener’s voice-and-whistles piece immediately conjured an ethereal sound world faraway at sea, somewhere between the mythical sirens and migrants on boats pleading for help. What is powerful about all these new sirens is that they operate between prompt, signal, and music, so they can take you somewhere emotional. But they can also invoke a different kind of listening, where you intuit the call to attention and the instruction within it, so it activates the imagination in a kind of a call and response, potentially across species and timeframes. As much as a sonic composition, it’s an experiment in listening forward.

Production still from film shoot inside the cooling tower of Fiddler’s Ferry, a decommissioned coal-fired power station, 2021

Your film is a documentary about sirens, but it also proposes a strategy for producing and imagining new sirens, and is a collection of sirens. Where did this leap come from?

I think of the film as an open invitation to rethink and keep rethinking the siren, and the many associated concepts around attention, value, immediate and deep future timescales, ongoing and emergent catastrophes, and so forth. In the seven years I have been working on it, these concepts are alive and ever-changing, inflected by the rise of fascism, the pandemic, and extreme weather. Even during the shoot, we kept having to postpone because of the floods in Auckland and the activity of the Villarrica volcano in Chile.

Still from Preemptive Listening

Collaboration is embodied so deeply in this work. I know you’re thinking of time and geological elements being active participants, too, where the sound of the Earth’s core is one of the sirens. Can you say more about your collaborative process?

It’s telling that so many of the musicians who contributed new sirens to the film used field recordings. FUJI||||||||||TA recorded over 30 insect sounds; Debit worked with the Schumann resonance (also known as the Earth’s electromagnetic heartbeat); B. J. Nilsen recorded the wind and sea near the storm surge barrier we filmed in the Netherlands; Laurie Spiegel worked with manatee cries as a wordplay on the Latin name of that animal’s biological order, Sirenia. I am drawn to the idea that, in attuning to the nonhuman or more-than-human, we might learn to decode those signs as sirens. Another “beacon voice,” the Māori legal scholar and activist Erin Matariki Carr, talks about how the siren is essentially designed for humans, to warn about threats to human life or property. What would it mean to design a siren that protects beyond this anthropocentric worldview, that addresses the ways in which humans and nature are interconnected?

One of the layers at play in Preemptive Listening is a look at the history of the siren: how the wars of the 20th century led to their presence in the fabric of our cities and environment, and how later these sonic networks were repurposed and expanded. How was this history a jumping off point for what you call a “diagnosis” of how we think of emergency and preparedness in the present moment?

As I looked into the history and mythology of the siren, it quickly became apparent that we need a more forward-facing way of thinking about this topic. We no longer listen in public the way we did 50 years ago. Today, any loud signal has to compete with the cacophonous world that we have learned to shut out, using noise-canceling headphones, for example. We are more attentive to our vibrating phones than to loud noises.

So this project is an attempt to expand what we mean by listening and also to think about the afterlives of the siren. The deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie brought a wonderful perspective to the project by imagining her percussive sirens as being transmitted to our limbs through the vibration of mobile phones: “They come gently into our systems so we can calmly plan our response.” It seemed only natural to connect her haptic sound qualities to footage of a volcano and the idea of seismic listening to the Earth’s vibrations.

The siren invites a constant revision of history, because it always builds on previous trauma, ostensibly learns from it, and provides a gap before that past can repeat. It flashes both backward and forward in time, invoking the past and warning the future. If you think of nuclear warnings, they are informed by the tragic precedents of Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and yet the risks keep changing. We map the risks to the best of our abilities using simulation technologies, but there is a deeper epistemological problem in the way we engage with uncertain futures, and how we warn for them.

I think of this project as an imaginative sonic exercise that tries to go beyond outmoded historical frameworks and conceive instead of a just or good siren, one that is not oppressive, militarized, or a form of top-down sonic governance. It is asking whether it’s possible to recalibrate the siren away from the sound of trauma, and toward a future that is not mired in catastrophe.

Preemptive Listening screens on Friday, February 23, as part of our Doc Fortnight 2024 festival.