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BREAKING NEWS
On sound, repetition and the weaponization of listening
Sound improvisation through sonic manipulation, Malagola (2025)
This sound project is an exploration into how repetition desensitizes, how sound
mediates violence and how the aesthetics of urgency have been absorbed into the rituals of
passive consumption. Rooted in sound ethnography, the work draws from studies in media
semiotics, trauma and propaganda. It references practices of culture jamming, by
manipulating a “breaking news” intro fragment to explore the normalization of atrocity
through media repetition, strategies of desensitisation through emotional fatigue, and the role
of listening as a radical act of resistance.
The instantly recognizable “breaking news” intro, the sonic cue once designed to alert, to
gather the audience, to rupture the mundane, has become part of the mundane. Its meaning
now collapses into background noise, the aural wallpaper of a permanently anxious present.
Overtime, the sound that once demanded attention is stripped of meaning through saturation.
Urgency is performative. Horror is background noise. Violence becomes content.
Repetition becomes a weapon, a strategy to induce learned helplessness.
We are meant to scroll. To be overwhelmed. To move on.
Desensitisation is not accidental, it is systematic. The repetition of catastrophic headlines,
mediated through familiar sonic rituals, is a strategy. Psychological warfare reframed as
media consumption. The constant loop of urgency wears down the nervous system, it
cultivates a numb audience. Through emotional exhaustion, it fractures solidarity and
disables collective action. This saturation of horror trains us not to feel, but to endure. It strips
away the capacity to grieve, to respond, to organise. The body adapts by retreating into
silence, into individualised bubbles, into isolation. The witness becomes dehumanised too.
We become passive observers of atrocity, rendered powerless not by apathy, but by trauma.
This is learned helplessness: a condition designed to ensure compliance through overwhelm.
We are taught to forget.
But listening, too, can be radical. To refuse numbness is to resist.
To listen together is to rewire the ritual away from consumption and toward connection.
When the voice has been co-opted, the ear becomes the site of agency.
A collective ear can become the ground for solidarity.
Breaking News gestures toward the possibility of interruption, rupture, disruption of the loop.