Boryeon Choi - 0.5secondsofsirennetwork

0.5 Seconds of Siren Network

Choi Boryeon

The sound of an ambulance passing on the opposite side instantly engulfs listeners on the street, submerging us into the network of sirens.¹ We are not tuned in with a sense of crisis, but rather with a sense of relief. A feeling of implication vanishes as the siren gradually diminishes, as if mocking the urgency of the affair. A sense of release wafts like a wave. The mundane life that we might have been able to flee from returns as the sound fades. Fortunately, I was not in the midst of the crisis. Because of this, I can speak about the accident of the day, rather than speaking from within it.

Every atmosphere contains a crisis. Lauren Berlant has described "ambient citizenship" as a space of pause and undefinition that occurs when a group of people becomes caught in an ambience—an ambience that dissolves us into an ongoing present.² If that space could be congealed into an obvious political emotion, such as jubilation or outrage, we wouldn't need the term. The ambience, at times, is created by a shared sense of the unspeakable—a citizenship tinged with the hope of not wanting to be drawn in, while secretly feeling relieved that it wasn't us. So what? None of us are merely watching the river from the side; rather, we are all floundering inside it, where the routine submission to mundane life forces us to feel grateful just to stay afloat. This is the epicenter of the sense of crisis, the network of sirens, where we are still required to read the current rather than be immersed in it.

Now, let's return to that moment—before any retrospective eyewitness accounts are written—when heads were just beginning to turn in response to the sound. A sound event occurred, and ears were primed.³ Immediately, heads began to swivel in search of the direction from which the sound emanated. At this moment, as sound waves travel from one ear to the other, a slight temporal delay arises. This microscopic time lag, which varies according to the shape of one’s skull and the position of one’s ears, is essential for accurately pinpointing the source of the sound. A state of affairs is extracted from the background in an instant, and the listener becomes entangled in the sonic event that has just happened.

Not all sounds tune the listener, for not all acoustic grounds have the potency to fully implicate us. This remains true even if one argues that ostensibly meaningless sound might potentially be otherwise—thus, noise does not truly exist.

Ordinary listening experiences are shaped through repeated cycles of being caught up in multiple sound events and then being released, as sounds emerge from various directions. These experiences are in tension with our desire to intervene in sound events at will, as well as our wish to withdraw from them when they are unwelcome. This fundamental fact remains unchanged over time. Yet, our bearing toward this involuntariness of perception—our inability to open and shut our sense of hearing at will—along with the narratives constructed to overcome it, are continuously renegotiated within the evolving relationship between media and sensory experiences, manifesting in strikingly novel ways.

Some pay for the freedom to hear only the sounds they desire while blocking out those they do not. Others, radically speculating on the openness of the senses that renders the cognitive agent indefinitely vulnerable, find a practical impetus for dismantling both ableism and anthropocentrism. Still others strive to restore and expand the traditional notion of freedom, which has become mired in linguistic impasses. As a result, they devote significant time and effort to differentiating between freedom to…, freedom from…, and freedom not to…. Finally, those at the end of their tether seek to redefine the meaning of freedom altogether—if necessary, they are even willing to discard what freedom was once thought to mean. They have come to realize that the meaning of freedom can only be recreated when we fundamentally rethink the moments in which different bodies encounter and inhabit the world’s environments, struggling to find language that articulates the sense of liberation unexpectedly experienced in those moments. Yet, as with many things, this knowledge is of the utmost importance to some, while to others, it is merely superfluous.

It is much the same for the ear—that unique filter shaped by each individual’s experiences, biases, and beliefs. Ears that already accept almost all sounds as alien cannot help but become increasingly alert to every sonic detail. Meanwhile, ears attuned only to sounds directly related to survival instinctively mute or muffle gratuitous sounds. Just as our ancestors released adrenaline at the rustling of a predator in the forest, a similar creatural survival instinct shapes the listening habits of those struggling not to drown in a capitalist mode of survival. To those who take pride in being the descendants of those who successfully endured, anyone attempting to redefine the meaning of freedom appears no different from someone absorbed in something entirely unrelated—or even detrimental—to survival, filled with inexplicable hostility and discontent.

In this harsh reality, bodily movement is sold by the hour within the wage labor system, and we enter this system at the cost of mortgaging our time. This rationalized path of survival—where one barters movement to earn a living and then burns away that life merely to keep moving—gradually captures the impulses and tendencies that once resided in movement itself. In doing so, it obstructs encounters that might synchronize different bodies in ways that could have diverted them from their predetermined trajectories—in other words, it eliminates possibilities for alternative paths. Hence, those struggling to redefine freedom must not assume that those who do not engage in this struggle are simply unaware of alternative possibilities. Alternatives always require a cognitive cost of transition, no less significant than actual economic expense, and today’s capitalist system persists precisely by maintaining its specific politics of time in exchange for relieving us of that cognitive burden. Without rearranging and reconfiguring the very experiences we believe we have saved, the redefinition of freedom remains impossible.

What, then, does it mean to move before thinking—to rotate one’s head while caught up in a moment, to listen while moving, to listen to movement, and to listen within movement? The fact that it takes approximately 0.5 seconds to turn one’s head to gauge the direction of a sound is by no means insignificant from a neural perspective. It is fascinating that this delay parallels the gap between intention and action observed in the famous Libet experiment.

libet’s clock⁴

In Libet’s experiment, participants watched a dot moving rapidly around the perimeter of a circular figure—often referred to as Libet’s clock. At the moment they pressed a button, they noted and reported the dot’s position. The results revealed that just before the physical act of pressing the button, the participants' brains were already producing electrical signals measured in microvolts. This phenomenon was identified as Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential. Within the stimulus-response sequence, the event-related potential detected corresponded to the onset of a gradual rise in the readiness potential’s envelope.⁵ On average, the readiness potential preceded the participant’s conscious decision to act by approximately 0.35 seconds, and it took an additional 0.2 seconds for the intended action to be carried out.

In another set of experiments—where the stimulus-response paradigm was adapted for auditory perception rather than vision—factors such as frequency glides, duration, and scale patterns were introduced as experimental variables.⁶ Instead of numerical divisions on a clock, a sequence of letters was used, with the duration and pattern of that sequence manipulated. Participants were instructed to report Now! at the exact moment they perceived a particular sound pattern. Yet, just as in the visual experiments, a delay of roughly 0.25 seconds or more was required for the moment one sensed 'nowness' to meaningfully coincide with the act of declaring now.

The existence of this profound, unbridgeable gap between sensing the present and holding on to it challenges our intuitive belief that the feeling of now constitutes the present moment. What does it mean that the instant we report now is, in fact, already delayed? Psychologist Daniel Wegner, who—alongside Libet—championed the primacy of neural processes over conscious awareness, argued that free will is merely an epiphenomenon, a byproduct of neural activity. However, he likened the relationship between intention and will to that of a compass and a steerer, suggesting that while free will may not be the force that directly initiates action, it is not entirely meaningless. The compass may not steer the ship, but it still provides the self with a navigational system.

Does the compass steer the ship? In some sense, you could say that it does, because the pilot makes reference to the compass in determining whether adjustments should be made to the ship's course. If it looks as though the ship is headed west into the rocky shore, a calamity can be avoided with a turn north into the harbor. But, of course, the compass does not steer the ship in any physical sense. The needle is just gliding around in the compass housing, doing no actual steering at all. It is thus tempting to relegate the little magnetic pointer to the class of epiphenomena — things that don't really matter in determining where the ship will go.⁷

Libet himself did not entirely wish for his experiment on free will to diverge too radically from the prevailing belief in a consciously driven world—namely, the idea that humans possess free will and act upon it.⁸ Accordingly, he redefined freedom as the freedom not to…. His experiment demonstrated that humans are neurally primed for action approximately 0.35 seconds before forming a conscious intention. Nevertheless, during the additional 0.2-second interval between deciding to act and actually executing the action, they retain what he termed the freedom not to act—in other words, a negative will. If humans truly have the freedom to move as they intend, they must also possess the freedom not to do so.

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<Heading Ear, Flowing Steps, Unfolded Accident>: Mobile Application Screen. Developed using MobMuplat—an open-source platform that enables programming and UI design in the graphical audio language PureData (PD) and its dedicated editors. (Photo: Park Jae-hyung)

In 2022, Diana Band created an application that structures sound orientation using binaural sound. For the performance, the app was modified to show the thematic sounds of each area, followed by listening guidelines. The screen features a compass at the top indicating the direction of incoming sounds, central text showing the soundtrack available to the audience at their current location, and a mini compass at the bottom to indicate north. Based on GPS data and bearing values measured by the gyroscope of the user's phone, the application adjusts volume levels to convey whether the user is entering a sound zone. During the soundwalk, audience members move their phones left, right, forward, and backward to localize the incoming direction of the sound. They wander in search of sounds that do not physically exist in that space and cannot be shared with others outside their earphones—all this while their attention is ceaselessly scattered by pedestrians, bicycles, pets, ducks, freshwater fish, herons, vines, and street noise. This way of listening, which involves continually looking around for an invisible sonic target while also keeping track of immediate surroundings, seems neither entirely global nor purely focal.⁹ The mode of listening encouraged by this performance might be better described as ‘dispersed listening.’

About a century ago, when Walter Benjamin was first commissioned to host a regular radio broadcast, the chief of the station is said to have advised him, “Listeners of the radio are almost always individuals. Even if you assume you’re speaking to (a crowd of) thousands, you’re only ever speaking to thousands of individuals,” cautioning him against treating listeners as a crowd.¹⁰ Broadcasting without knowing exactly who is on the receiving end is predicated more on dispersion than on cohesion, centering on individuality rather than collectivity. From this standpoint, we can explore the purpose of soundwalk practices that encourage such a dispersed mode of listening.

A sound always resonates within other sounds, intertwined with different situations each time, and is heard in varying ways before and after the sound captures our attention. Sometimes, beings share a place not merely by coexisting but rather by enduring one another. The target sound—a sound that we are trying to follow—generally remains on the move, and our sonic perception is almost always steeped in "the possibility that something will snap into sense or drift by untapped."¹¹ Therefore, releasing the audience out onto the streets instead of bringing them into a performance hall, proposing a dispersed listening experience, and taking on the risks that accompany such a mode of listening may not be overtly dangerous, but neither can it be deemed entirely safe.

Above the walkway along the river lies an inner ring road that carries people east to west and vice versa, day and night, bearing the weight and speed of countless cars. From early morning until late at night, those cars travel from one place to another, burning fuel just as humans burn their calories to move back and forth. Compared to the speed of a car, a pedestrian underneath, who moves at an average of 6 km/h, is practically standing still.

Walking, in particular drifting, or strolling, is already – within the speed culture of our time – a kind of resistance. Paradoxically it’s also the last private space, safe from the phone or e-mail. But it also happens to be a very immediate method for unfolding stories. It’s an easy, cheap act to perform or to invite others to perform. The walk is simultaneously the material out of which to produce art and the modus operandi of the artistic transaction. And the city always offers the perfect setting for accidents to happen. There is no theory of walking, just a consciousness. But there can be a certain wisdom involved in the act of walking. It’s more an attitude, and it is one that fits me all right. It’s a state where you can be both alert to all that happens in your peripheral vision and hearing, and yet totally lost in your thought process.¹²

When we consider that an unfolding accident is deforming us, what is actually happening is that our own actions are contributing to the event’s development in a certain direction. And even when we think we are pushing the accident to unfold in a certain way, it is less the event than ourselves that are being oriented. At the moment we think we are giving, we are actually receiving, and at the very moment we think we are receiving, we are giving—this process is called feedback. Perhaps the performers wanted to see what would happen when they convey to the listener’s ear the state of mutual feedback between their work of art and daily life. As a technology of sensing that draws attention to everything happening on the periphery of sight and hearing, a soundwalk is carried out not so much 'about' an event, but rather 'within' the event.

In Humulus Radio by Lim Hee-ju, the artist streamed live electronic performances, as well as readings from a book on synthetic listening, interspersed with a self-produced radio theme song, while also taking and sharing real-time updates on the progress of each soundwalk session, sometimes reporting on the whereabouts of lost audience members. All these elements went around once and then returned—not exactly to the starting point, but somewhere else—and repeated in a new order different from the previous one. The concept of a radio has likely come from the project's aim of listening within an environment, which led to imagining what it might be like to become the environment itself. However, Lim Hee-ju said she envisioned her radio as a sort of 'sound flyer' that just keeps going on in the background, something that can be skipped as needed or whenever she feels like it.¹³ The choice is left entirely to the listener. Given that environmental sound is not something one can simply turn off or ignore, two desires overlap here: the desire to become an environment that is not operable, and simultaneously, the desire to become an environment that is operatable.

An Minok’s Ultimate Ear–NoNo presents a contrasting style. This piece is based on a workshop of the same title, where participants were encouraged to craft their own listening devices from objects that are accessible in everyday life. The listening device called NoNo, assembled by modifying items such as horn-shaped shells, flexible pipes, and noise-canceling headsets, enables those wearing it to capture and amplify sounds coming from a particular direction. Among other sections of the performance, where one must generally rely on earphones or headsets, NoNo was the only analog apparatus that suggested the audience listen to the sounds directly with their raw ears. Owing to its bulky size, even a slight turn of the head causes NoNo to swing in a wide radius, starkly revealing which direction the wearer is paying attention to and how they are listening. As much as NoNo enables the wearer to listen better, it also shows off the listener doing their listening job—indeed, it is a device that makes the act of listening visible.

Yet the wearer of NoNo cannot visually locate the source of a sound at the same time, because once they turn their head toward the assumed direction of the sound, the field of focused listening has already shifted to either side of the head. While enhancing hearing, NoNo also disrupts the synchronization of hearing and sight, reminding us that more than one sense is involved when we orient ourselves toward the unfolding event. Jakob von Uexküll described the process by which a path becomes familiar as follows: if one traverses a certain distance repeatedly, a kind of propulsive leap, also known as an 'impulse', becomes encoded in one’s footsteps like a directional sign. As a result, later on, even without attending to visual cues, one may unwittingly stop at the same spot.¹⁴ While going in and out of a place multiple times until it becomes familiar, we come to locate ourselves not so much by visual cues as by the alignment of our steps. Even if our attention is scattered and our gaze misses a minute of it, the steps will nonetheless cover the distance assigned to them.

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Just as thousands of listeners are scattered across their own respective locations, each and single listener’s attention is also dispersed within itself. Because we don't have time, because our energy is depleted, because we forget, because our attention is hijacked by something else, because we simply cannot think anymore, and because of the unpaid domestic labor expected to be followed up all at once regardless of its disparate nature, 99% of everyday listening experiences, like water rushing into a sewer, trickle away down a slope of time and are then exhausted. But this haphazard practice of paying attention to whatever draws near runs counter to a system that demands the complete selection of and sound focus on a single 'target.' Selection and concentration are virtually the only survival tools allowed to those of us fighting to keep from drowning. The sense of crisis that compels us to believe we ought to survive only through selection and concentration forms the 'ambience of citizenship.'

One way to break this impasse is to envision, in as concrete a manner as possible, the situational conditions that allow a single act to take shape.

Rather than an action driven by high moral standards or a sense of social responsibility, maybe it’s more fitting to say you simply couldn’t pretend not to see and got drawn in. At the same time, there’s a certain relief in the fact that this is ‘limited to that particular situation.’ If something is defined by an agreement or a contract, one is required to carry it out. But if it’s ‘limited to that situation,’ then depending on the circumstances, you could just ‘pretend you didn’t see’ and be off the hook. Should you get involved, or not?¹⁵

Murase Takao suggests another approach in dealing with dementia patients who repeatedly wander off from care facilities and get lost in the streets: Instead of confining the patients indoors, the facility becomes a kind of base station, and nearby residents’ homes within a 200-meter radius act as relay stations. The facility has educated local residents to call them whenever they see 'wanderers' wandering about. Yet Murase stresses that this kind of action does not rely on people’s goodwill or moral awareness. When one encounters a lost person, what prevents them from ignoring and compels them to get involved is not benevolence but rather a kind of impulse. What precisely that impulse may be, or whether it is right or wrong to have it, veers away from the main topic. In most cases, attributing one's instinctive attention to someone in danger as having come from a so-called good influence or a moral imperative is likely a retrospective fiction.

Rather than being about right or wrong, ethics has more to do with how our sociality breaks open when we are cheered on to act in a certain way.¹⁶ This is because our response to an event taking place here and now arises first at a neural level, before it ever reaches our conscious mind. In the split second before we decide whether to act or not to act, the footsteps are already primed (pre-cognized) ahead of our will. That impulse, which moves us toward a place even before we register it as intentional action, is the precondition for an expanded network of incident-witnesses. It is not the finger pointing at the state of affairs that becomes stirred up, but rather the footsteps, already gauging the distance between the witness and the state, poised to leap into it.

This orientation driven by impulse offers an important clue regarding the relationship between listening and navigation. Like a compass that does not directly move the user but helps them interpret their own movement in accordance with their intention as if to say, 'I am heading toward the direction.' As I walk toward the end of the needle, where the sound is coming from, counting how many steps are left until reaching the target, my footsteps become an inherent measurement for the sounding of the world. This measurement, which cannot be standardized and varies every time it is initiated, enables us to sense ourselves in the world without abstraction or assumption. In that sense, "I am you" applies less in an existential sense than in a practical one.¹⁷

Rather than inventing something nonexistent, the soundwalk—which proposes an epistemological shift regarding objects and situations that already exist—can only ever be defined heuristically. It not only breaks away from the logic of efficiency that involves producing or listening to sounds that mediate exchange value, but also defies the belief system of 'every man for himself (各自圖生),' which upholds that logic as the sole mode of viability. Such a heuristic epistemology opens up room for impulsive involvement in a script that was on the verge of unfolding as written. This is because the occurrence of an event sets an ambience of crisis in which a sense of “us” can take shape. This is because that sense is not the outcome of our deliberate choice, but is unconsciously primed as an accidental consequence of being entangled and drawn in. Even at the very moment we choose not to engage with what has happened, this unity remains for a while, holding the fact hostage that our nerves were already presaged as a preparatory frontline—hence making any exemption from the incident impossible. Hence, in this ambience of crisis, in this 0.5-second “siren network” where we opt not to act, we remain present for some time.

— Footnotes —

1. This phrase is taken from the meeting record at September 19, 2024 on of the soundwalk project ≪향하는 귀, 흐르는 걸음, 벌어진 사고 (The Heading Ear, The Flowing Step, The Unfolded Accidents)≫. “When heavy rainfall came, the mallards came out, and so did crabs. As the water level rose, a siren sounded. Going down [to the river] felt frightening. In moments like that, a meeting point comes about. There are emergencies or situations that get overturned—this siren network. Even when you’re still, you hear the sound of an ambulance passing by. It’s a short sequence of sounds like that...”

2. "As sound, ambience provides atmospheres and spaces in which movement happens through persons: listeners dissolve into an ongoing present whose ongoingness is neither necessarily comfortable nor uncomfortable, avant-garde nor Muzak, but, most formally, a space of abeyance. As an atmosphere induced by sonic diffusion it is a habitation without edges, a soft impasse. As movement, as ambit, it is akin to ambition (whose original sense was to go around soliciting for votes), but even then it's a gathering modality." Original test from Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant. 2011. Duke University Press. p.230 (Translated by 윤조원, 박미선. 『잔인한 낙관』. 후마니타스. 2024. pp. 415–17.)

3. In psychology, priming refers to the phenomenon by which exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus without conscious guidance or intention. Perception, association, repetition, affirmation, negation, emotions, meanings, or concepts that follow the initial stimulus can all be affected. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

4. Lau HC, Rogers RD, Passingham RE. “Manipulating the experienced onset of intention after action execution.” J Cogn Neurosci. 2007 Jan;19(1):81–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2007.19.1.81

5. An event-related potential (ERP) is defined as a voltage difference detected in the brain in response to some sensory or cognitive stimulus or motor event. In the Libet experiment, the change in brain waves about 0.5 seconds before the participant decided—by their own reckoning—to move their finger corresponds to this phenomenon.

6. Muth FV, Wirth R, Kunde W. “Temporal binding past the Libet clock: testing design factors for an auditory timer.” Behav Res Methods. 2021 Jun;53(3):1322–1341. doi: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01474-5

7. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Daniel M. Wegner. MIT Press, 2003, pp. 301–2. Re-cited from https://informationphilosopher.com/freedom/libet_experiments.html

8. For a discussion of this topic, see: 『신경과학철학(Philosophy of Neuroscience)』. 이영의(Lee Young-eui). 아카넷(Acanet). 2021. p. 362

9. The concepts of global listening and focal listening follow the distinction proposed by Pauline Oliveros in Quantum Listening (Ignota Books, 2022). Global listening is the practice of attempting to hear all sounds that reach us without establishing a hierarchy of priorities, thus existing in a constant state of waiting for whatever might happen. Composer William Osborne has commented that global listening, in reality, comprises a vast collection of focal listenings. For further discussion, see: http://www.osborne-conant.org/listening.htm

10. Original text from “Auf die Minut” in. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. IV/2, Frankfurt a. M., 1972-1922, pp. 761-3. (Translation by 고지현, published at 현실문화, 2021)

11. Original text from “Moving Target” in. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, p.93 (Translation by 신해경, published at 밤의책, 2022)

12. Francis Alÿs: The Politics of Rehearsal. Russell Ferguson. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2007, p. 63. Originally cited from https://improvisedlife.com/2019/02/22/francis-alys-magnetic-shoes-walking-drifting-strolling-kind-resistance/

13. From the meeting record from September 29, 2024.

14. Original text from “The Familiar Path” in. Jakob von Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2010. p.98~. (Translated by 정지은, publishd at 도서출판b, 2012)

15. Care, Synchronization, Freedom. Murase Takao. Translated by Kim Young-hyun. Dada Books, 2024, pp. 204–5.

16. “The ethical value of an action is what it brings out in the situation, for its transformation, how it breaks sociality open.” Original text from “Navigating movements” in. Brian Massumi’s Politics of Affect. 2015. Polity. p.11 (Translated by 조성훈, published at 갈무리, 2018)

17. From the working notes of Diana Band’s I Am You(2022).

— About the performers —

Diana band

Dianaband is an inter-disciplinary artist duo established in 2010 and currently based in Seoul. They explore in the fields of object design and media art, in order to find the imaginary moment and situation of everyday life. They believe “Sensible Objects” makes narrative environments or events and invites people to find common sense and universal language.

For more information on artist: https://dianaband.info/

For more information on the project: https://ururu.cloud/

An-Minok

An-Minok is conducting a sound project exploring relationships with other beings through the various sounds captured in her surroundings. Recently, she has been showcasing works that draw on the experiences and small stories of local residents, focusing on the concrete aspects of life in the region.

For more information: https://minokan.org/

Lim-Heeju (aka. Vegetable Wife)

Heeju is interested in sound. She tries to say anything with sound. She longs for abjective beings that run away from ethics and morality and make noise. She has been making music, making sounding objects, creating worlds with game engines, and most recently released the 1st album <Inscrutable Sap>(2024).

For more info: https://meek-as-a-lamb.github.io/imheeju/1.html

— About the reviewer —

Choi Boryeon is artist and wage employee, currently devoted in the matter of listening and sound.

For more info: https://www.boryeon.site/