DISCUSSION: The History of Sonic Surveillance

At a time when AI-powered systems are entering the intimate spaces of our lives, listening to our habits and simulating human voices, the line between audio technologies and tracking tools is starting to blur. During the panel, Marsha Courney and Toby Heys, authors of Listening In: How Audio Surveillance Became Artificial Intelligence, will talk to cultural theorist Paul Rekret about how the world of sound became a major training ground for automated surveillance. Rather than portray these changes as a sudden technological leap, they will show that the infrastructure of today's machine intelligence was built through decades of classifying, recording and analyzing speech and acoustic environments. The starting point will be historical eavesdropping tools, such as the Lev Termen bug of 1945, as well as state mass surveillance and modern smart devices. The conversation will cover the political stakes of sound capture, the impact of background interfaces on human expression, and the question of how contemporary underground music and sound practices can undermine, disrupt, or listen to these systems in response.