listen Transmitted BBC Radio 3, 26 February, 1997. listen
Modern life is full of the noises of warning and alarm. We are continually called to alertness and response by horns, bells, buzzers and sirens. If previous ages may have lived among omens and portents, foreshadowings in the flight of birds, or the movements of the planets, of terrible disasters in the events of nature, our world is full of sonorous summons. The power of sounds to address us, and the sense of sound in general as obscure but insistent address, are evidenced in the omnipresence of alarm. Alarms and sirens are made to be unignorable; they embody the unignorability of sound itself, raised to its highest level. The sound of alarm is the voice of God, an address or admonition which comes from nowhere or everywhere and must be obeyed. The very word `obedience' derives from the Latin `audire', to hear.
The alarm always has a purpose, a message and a meaning; it aims to bring about a specific response, usually of a simple and primary kind: get your gun (to alarm means to `call to arms') come to my aid, evacuate the building. But these learned responses are secondary. What alarms primarily do is to alarm, creating a general agitation, or readiness to act; designers of alarms have the problem of channeling the generalised arousal produced by alarms into specific forms of action. Noise can bring about action more effectively than any other kind of signal, because noise is so powerful a mode of action in itself; noise is a happening. If noise can concentrate our response, it does so because of its power to shatter and diffuse. Noise is the antagonist of identity. The alarm deploys intense noise in order to wrench us from our customary forms of attention and response; but in doing so, it also threatens us with auditory extinction. Hence the modification of alarms to yield the contradictory and often terrifying message `Don't panic'.
We have a word in English which suggests a different relation to the sound of alarm: for our word siren derives from the Odyssey, from the maidens in Homer's Odyssey whose seductive song would lead sailors to their doom. Siren sounds are sounds which cannot be ignored, sounds which promise perilous bliss. Ulysses had his sailors plug their ears with wax, and had himself tied to the mast of the ship, that he might both hear the sound of the sirens and pass by them in safety. Strange that the word we use for a sound that cannot and must not be ignored derives from a myth of a sound that must be resisted.
Strange, but also appropriate, perhaps, since ours is a world that is full of ignored unignorability. We are all tied to the mast of indifference and disregard. The care taken to make sirens unignorable is matched by the slowly and carefully learned capacity of the city-dweller to filter them out. Alarms strive to nullify this auditory anaesthesia. But there is always a cost. Perhaps what is most stressful about a world full of alarms is the generalisation of a readiness to act which does not find adequate discharge in action.
The siren is a lyric voice, a voice without a message; it is the voice as cry, the voice as voice itself. Perhaps this is what determines the association between the cry of alarm or warning and the seductive song. In both, there is the imperious force of utterance, combined with the fascination of the voice itself, its tones and textures, separated from specifiable meaning. We have a capacity to make music of alarm; but as a result our alarms both fall in with, and must resist their mutation into music. For in music, the call to arms heard in alarm is made into an object which can be relished and contemplated. The alarm must resist all attempts to turn it into an object, it must assert itself as pure cry, as pure subjectivity, as pure event. But the pure cry can then becomes the highest, the most sublime form of music - the tenor's high C, the piercing limit of the soprano. The alarm must resist succumbing to the music it makes. But music cannot resist the raucous cry of alarm.
Alarms must insist on nowness: their repetitions aim to abolish successive time. There is a close relation between the alarm that repeats a single pattern over and over again and the continuous alarm: both of them deny the differentiatedness of time, the orderly, calculable succession of instants. Don DeLillo writes that the contemporary world, of signs, signals and representations, has grown a mind. Alarms and sirens are one striking example of how the world of produced sound has grown a voice. Alarms have many voices: our streets teem with automated shrieks, cries and roars of demand and distress.
The mythological voice of the siren is a female voice. Reasons of psycho-acoustics determine that alarms should be pitched high, since the higher the pitch of a sound within the range of humanly-audible frequencies, the more penetrating it will be (no matter how deafening the orchestra, the triangle-player will always be heard). But this psycho-acoustic fact leads to a cultural association between the sound of alarm and the sound of the voices of children and of female humans. Why is the voice of alarm a female or an infantile voice? Is the fact that high- pitched sounds are so much more arousing for human beings (and other animals?) just coincidence? Perhaps it is that the female voice has been associated in so many cultures and at so many different times with what is unearthly. The song of the siren promises a bliss that is not of this world. The voice of the God that is transmitted through his oracles, whether the pythian priestess at Delphi, or the Cumaen sibyl is shattered and estranged by its relay through the female person and her vocal apparatus. The horrifying cries of the Gorgons signified their association with death and childbirth. The female voice is the unearthly itself. Origen and St. John Chrysostomos fantasised that such prophetesses did not even speak through their mouths - that their voices came ventriloquially from their bellies, or even their genitals. The piercing sweetness of the soprano, or, in previous eras, of the castrato, embody the experience of voice as pure, quasi-divine power, transcending the ordinary functions of speech and communication. The siren belongs to the world of shrieks, wails, and lamentations, where the body speaks from a place beyond or before culture, before or behind the human. The cry is the language of the infant, the one who is infans, without speech, not yet human. If language belongs to the human, marks the division between the human and the nonhuman world, the cry, which both is and is not language, embodies the power of sound to shatter such distinctions. When we cry, something else speaks, some power that should not be possessed of a voice.
In thrillers and horror films, we manufacture and multiply these cries for our awed pleasure. But they are also to be heard in our sirens and alarms, which speak to us with these unearthly voices of ecstasy, rapture and lamentation.