IN THE EAR OF THE BEHOLDER
In 1984, the British Parliament passed the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act, which formalized officers’ powers to arrest, detain, and interrogate suspicious individuals. Artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan is specifically interested in Part V, section 60 of the PACE Act, which mandates that police tape interviews with suspects. The Act “gave birth to a new era of investigation,” Abu Hamdan explained in his 2015 keynote lecture at the New School’s “The Politics of Listening” symposium in New York City. The practice of recording interviews introduced a new aspect to evidence analysis: the study of nonverbal information—accents, cadence, behavioral cues—conveyed in the voice. “From that point on the whole voice was captured in the interview,” Abu Hamdan noted in his presentation. “The ‘what’ you said, and also the ‘how’ you said it.”
For the past decade, Abu Hamdan has explored what he terms “forensic listening”—methodologies of hearing, soliciting, and utilizing audio evidence—as well as the ways in which sound serves as an index of power. Through audiovisual installations, films, performances, and objects, the self-styled “private ear” has uncovered the weaponization of silence in a Syrian prison, and the sonic camouflaging of gunshots fired at unarmed protesters by rogue Israeli soldiers. As technologies of listening and communication evolve, the power dynamics implicit in who has the right to speak or remain silent, to record or be recorded, demand urgent and thorough consideration.
Before embarking on his sonic investigations as an artist, Abu Hamdan was an avid musician. Born in 1985 in Amman and raised in Beirut—where he is now based—the artist and his brother often played music together. In our conversation, he noted that a foundational experience was moving to Leeds, where he “received an education from the DIY music scene.” There, he said, independent venues “organized a lot of concerts that changed the way I thought about what music could be and, by virtue of that, what sound could be. They also had strict politics about operating outside the music industry, which was inspiring.”
When asked how he ended up in the art world, he replied, “To be honest, it was quite random. I never studied art.” He graduated in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in Sonic Arts at
