Collateral Listening at the Limits of Legal Restraints

This workshop will explore sound at the intersection between urban environments and conflict, specifically extracted from a particular case of aerial bombardment that occurred during the 2006 war on Lebanon. To formulate an argument on the long-lasting and traumatic sonic repercussions during military operations; sound studies and architectural environments would coalesce to unearth the unseen, yet extremely sensed assaults during this war. Here, Mhamad Safa will look at Reverberations as the product of both sound and the built surrounding, where it operates as a method to read the subtle, extended yet affective impacts of contemporary military conflict. He will argue that the initial impact’s sound is rather bypassed, and the auditory focus shifted on its tail as a sonic phenomenon that is amplified and channelled by the urban morphology. This research relies on multiple analytical, theoretical, and practical resources spanning from spectrograms to sonic mapping. Those means serve to illustrate the behaviour of sound during conflict in a compressed urban environment. Paired with its cognitive and visceral responses, this method offers greater accounts on the victims that weren’t directly targeted by aerial assaults.

Mhamad Safa is a London-basedsound artist and architect whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalarspatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. His practice addresses the aurallegacies of traditional subcultures, occultism, armed conflicts, shock and theaftermath of violence. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architectureat Goldsmiths University in 2019 and received his PhD in Law from theUniversity of Westminster in 2024. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architectureand Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London.