Watching international coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 7 October is a case in point.
Nearly every background sound in a news broadcast is a drone. Unlike jets, propeller-driven aircraft are easy to pick out.
Their noise has a nasal quality that sticks in your head due to their tendency to linger at low altitudes over their targets.
I’m particularly primed to listen for such things, having Holocaust survivors in my family and having been raised on Vietnam war films.
Train and helicopter sounds are how I learned to inventory history and why I look for aural signifiers to identify wars.
I usually don’t observe Holocaust memorial events – neither the international version, held on 27 January, nor Israel’s Yom Ha Shoah, in April/May.
There’s so much to mourn these days that I find it increasingly difficult to single out a particular event to commemorate.
But, the last fifteen months of war in the Middle East put me in a different frame of mind, and I began preparing in November.
The subject matter of the two recordings featured in this edition of Hearing Aid bears this out.
Standing on the platform at the Malpensa-area train station of Gallarate, I was overwhelmed by the sound of an old locomotive.
Passing through the station at reduced speed, the sound was so violent that I thought back to my French family deported to Auschwitz.
Two relatives escaped from the train and joined up with the resistance. I distinctly remember being told how loud their journey was.
This first recording is as vérité, as they say, as it gets. It may not sound exactly the same, but it’s how I hear their trauma.
The second recording is more complex. Made at Milano’s Rho Fiera station, the train is newer, and its sonic signature is more detailed.
Featuring both high-pitched percussive sounds and more low-end everything else, the track is divided by station announcements.
The most recurrent noise, akin to a wind instrument, imbues the mix with a coldness alien to the Southern European setting.
Still, there’s some relief. The Italian and English messaging reminds you where you are and the distance to the past.
Gaza is enough of a burden already, at least to this Jew and his partner, waiting for the train to Torino.
– Joel Schalit
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Photo and recordings courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
