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ABSTRACT
The LRAD, the brand name of Genasys’ industry-leading acoustic hailing devices (AHDs) product range, has been discussed in the context of the weaponisation of sound. This article contributes a critical science and technology studies perspective by approaching AHDs as security sound technologies: as products within a security and disaster audio industry, that partake in, and are symptomatic of, a broader logic of securitisation. The goal here is neither decrying AHDs as invested in injurious sound nor making distinctions between purportedly violent and benign AHD features and applications, but to inquire into “the concept of an AHD” and, in turn, to understand the logics and workingsthat underlay AHDs’ framing and adoption as 21st-century security sound solutions across the military-civilian, government-corporate continuum. While there are important differences between AHD models, all AHDs produce narrow and directional acoustic beams and broadcast high-intensity, far-reaching “unmistakable” voice commands and piercing deterrent tones. What makes AHDs “sound” and otherwise desirable as “workhorses” for a broad range of security and safety applications? The article examines different capability gaps these devices avowedly “bridge” and define. In particular, it discusses AHDs’ humanitarian violence, disaster communications and relief, crowd control, and perimeter security applications and functions within US contexts.
Acknowledgments
I thank Rebekah Ciribassi, Alejandra Bronfman, and Emily Wilbourne for their useful feedback at different stages of this manuscript. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to Veit Erlmann, the Sound Studies editor, for their valuable comments and generous engagement with this piece.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. On the intersection of sound studies and STS, see Marshall (Citation2014) and Bruyninckx and Supper (Citation2020). A socio-technical perspective is also central to recent sound studies approaches to governance, control, and violence (notably, Akiyama Citation2010; Bijsterveld Citation2023; Cardoso Citation2019) with which this manuscript is in dialogue.
2. The “music tortures” made use of familiar technologies, which were utilised against the grain, even if such usage was programmatic. The loudspeakers utilised were not implemented for such a setting (e.g. a potent loudspeaker stereo kit at maximum volume placed in a tiny cell right next to a detained, forced “auditor”). While disorientation was fundamental to the music program, the engineering and (intended) set-up of stereo speakers is meant to give a sense of relative placement. See Cusick (Citation2008) and Theberge et al. (Citation2015).
3. For over a decade now, properly speaking, “LRAD” has been the brand name of both LRAD Corp./Genasys’ AHDs and mass notification outdoor warning systems. While the latter are not “nonlethal weapons”, they are, much as AHDs, long-range acoustic devices optimised for speech transmission intended for security and safety applications across the military-police, governance-corporate continuum. That is why AHD industry leaders Genasys, HyperSpike, and IML Corp. design and sell both types of sound delivery systems. I address this new generation of voice-enabled “sirens” and show how these have proliferated under the auspices of the “mass notification” ideology in a forthcoming article.
4. The USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers while refuelling in the harbour of Aden, Yemen. The attackers approached the warship in a small motorboat, raising no suspicion among the sailors, and killed 17 sailors and injured 39. The attack would be later attributed to Al-Qaeda and considered to be a precursor of 9/11, roughly a year later.
5. That is also why ATC, the DoD, and the US Department of Justice (DoJ) equated solving the need to avoid another USS Cole tragedy with meeting the murky demands of a “post-9/11 world” in the marketing and deployment rationales of the product.
6. “Best Idea Profile: LRAD Corporation (NASDAQ: LRAD),” Mossberg’s Investor Digest 106 (April 2017), 4.
7. SBIR, “Focused Enhanced Acoustic-Driver Technologies (FEAT) for Long Range Non-Lethal Hail and Warn Capabilities”, https://www.sbir.gov/node/1696649 (published June 2020, accessed June 2023).
8. Risk here includes that of violating the “moral imperative of sparing innocent lives” (US DoD Citation2013, 5). In particular, it is the lives of children, women, or white journalists, those lives that have more valences within a necro-economy (Martin Citation2011; Weizman Citation2013) that AHD industry and military advocates highlighted to show the stakes in the 2000s and early 2010s.
9. This categorisation underlies the AHD concept and it is, too, core to what makes AHDs serviceable as “non-lethal weapons”: it is assumed targets will move away from the denied area before enduring non-reversible forms of quantifiable damage, whether this damage is caused by continued exposure to AHDs’ beams or by other non-lethal as well as lethal capabilities at hand in AHD users’ toolkit.
10. As Mara Mills has shown and theorised, normalised hearing and speech constructs are flawed and respond much more to industrial paradigms than to human “nature” (Citation2011, Citation2020).
11. Both of these imply and harness additional motor and cognitive capacities. This is particularly flawed given that more often than not AHD targets are members of what Jasbir Puar refers to as “debilitated populations”, wherein “the nonnormative” is “a banal feature of quotidian existence” (Citation2017, 16).
12. To date, some police departments use “spotters” to check whether the broadcast indeed is, as AHD data sheets promise, loud and clear in the targeted area. AHDs have, too, spectacularly failed not only at “solving conflict with communication”, failure in which AHD operators and the cultures these are part of are co-responsible, but also at dispersing people. This was the case with the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri, protests. See US DoJ (Citation2015) on LRAD AHDs’ and on their users’ Ferguson failures.
13. Goodman briefly mentions LRADs’ use to repel looters in Katrina, but no source of information is cited (Citation2010, 21). How the LRAD as well as what, at the time, ATC referred to as the three MRADs (medium range acoustic devices) were actually used in New Orleans is not explained in news coverage, scholarship, and government reports on the event and on the LRAD. I am here relying on ATC, LRAD Corp., and Genasys’ promotional materials and white papers, in which Katrina is evoked to simultaneously attest to AHDs’ humanitarian, crowd control, and “between shouting and shooting” services.
14. AHDs’ service in military police’ spotlighting disordered behaviour could be considered a symptom of, and a contribution to, the larger redressing of attention and resources, of personnel and gear towards the “maintenance of order” rather than towards helping people and, in particular, racialised people. This characterised Katrina and it is, too, pervasive to securitisation logics and practices (see, e.g. Grewal Citation2017; Martin Citation2011; Masco Citation2014) and to disaster capitalism (Klein Citation2007).
15. Probably, hopefully, this is something either LRAD Corp. commercials discussed or law enforcement managers asked about during their hybrid instructional-promotional meetings.
16. AHDs are usually framed as superseding megaphones.
17. In the US, an example of this more insidious work of racism is the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) program, which is one of the most important sources of federal funding for localities to acquire AHDs. Predicated on the necessity of pre-empting and preparing for terrorism, this equates “high-threat” with dense urban areas, effectively gearing up law enforcement agencies in big US metropoles.
18. Parks has challenged claims to so-called ubiquitous security systems by highlighting their uneven mobilisation, suggesting that “racism and racialisation” are their own “kind of ‘terror from the air’” (Citation2018, 197). While neither of them are specifically discussing securitisation, Jennifer Stoever’s work on the spatialised racialisations of siren coverage (Citation2022) and Mack Hagood’s challenge of racially-neutral audio technologies and, in particular, connection of the rise of noise-cancelling headphones with neoliberalism and the threat of terrorism (Citation2019) have arguably done that work. Notably, Stoever and Hagood focus not on what/who is being “attacked” but on what/who is and is not being protected.
19. Albeit this takes different forms in different cultures and contexts, the threat of racial difference and of poverty and, in turn, the protection of racial dominance and wealth, permeate and are fundamental to securitisation and to the distribution of insecurities this upholds and forwards. Starting with the USS Cole and with their premiere in the “war on terror”, AHDs have arguably been tools at the service of what Jasbir Puar calls the “racialising biopolitical logic of security” (Citation2017, x). Quite explicitly, AHDs were introduced to further speculate with gradations between killing, letting live, and not letting members of racialised populations die on behalf of US “life”. AHDs’ promise to work anywhere and on anybody is part and parcel of what these devices are about: discriminating, displacing and preventing access, securing some lives and assets at the expense of others, assigning and gambling with risk. How these discrete tasks function is, though, something that requires attentive analysis.
20. These are often indistinguishable from each other. AHD industry representatives assist government agencies in preparing grant requests to purchase their products; they provide them with “technology-specific narratives” and help them in framing AHDs as a “solution to a local problem”.
21. This does not mean that authorities’ responses to different collectives and claims are equal. Rather the contrary, it renders racial profiling and political violence deniable and, hence, rampant. Depolitisation fosters spectacular and dull violences while, and in part by, refusing to address systemic socio-material insecurities core to the very “life” that is being securitised. See, e.g. Terranova (Citation2007, 135–36), Massumi (Citation2011), Masco (Citation2014, 2), and Graham (Citation2011).
22. ATC engineers devised an application of “parametric sound reproduction” “in hailing and warning at relatively large distances”, wherein it would be possible to simultaneously expose “a listener” to a tone and a voice signal, in which one of them would be the demodulated signal, the predicted audible distortion of the other (Croft, Wensen Liu, and Elwood Citation2006). I have not been able to corroborate whether this particular combination of parametric and high-powered diaphragmatic sound reproduction is incorporated in (what) LRAD AHD models, since Genasys is protective of its proprietary technology. This, though, was explicitly intended for LRAD AHDs and the “advantages”/characteristics the patent details correspond with implementations of new generation LRADs and also with how targets/forced auditors of AHDs’ emissions describe experiencing them – as if these sounded in their heads, which corresponds with the “parametric effect”. For the purposes of this study, this attests to the plastic intimacies of how speech/language and tone are conceived and imagined in AHD design.
23. Genasys used the corporate-philanthropic approach to promote its products during the COVID-19 lockdown. Genasys donated the car-mounted version of the LRAD 450XL to the Leganes police (a Spanish city within the Madrid metro area), and then used Leganes as an example in its COVID-19 brochure. “Because [this] device can be heard inside of houses, [police] can inform older residents with mobility issues that municipal resources are available through [the phone service] 010” (Genasys Citation[2020] 2021, 4). It was also used to remind everyone of the strict shelter-in-place order, thus conflating the performance of care and surveillance/control. Genasys paints a dreadful situation wherein authorities’ ability to reach and impart messages among the population is vital: “The COVID-19 threat seems to intensify each day. The seriousness and uncertainty of the situation creates fear and confusion. This leads the public to search for information on how to stay healthy or counteract the virus”. Then details a number of relevant Genasys products (e.g. cell phone geo-targeting); the only “real-life” example the brochure provides is, though, that of Leganes.
24. In the case of border-crossing migrants, it is highly unclear whether AHDs’ already flawed claims to polyglottism and intelligibility apply, whether these along with users’ predictions in terms of the linguistic profiling of targets extend to, can possibly get it “right” with, the multifarious spoken languages that target bodies’ might “host”.
25. See Hagood (Citation2019) on air travel.
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María Edurne Zuazu
María Edurne Zuazu works on music, sound, and media studies, and her research focuses on the intersections of auditory and material cultures in relation to questions of cultural memory, social and environmental justice, and the production of knowledge (and of ignorance) in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. María has published articles and essays on telenovela, music and historical memory, music videos, online concerts’ liveness, weaponised sound, and audio surveillance. She received her PhD in Music from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, where she also completed the Film Studies Certificate Program. María has been the recipient of Fulbright and Fundación La Caixa fellowships, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities.