Weaponizing Quietness: Sound Bombs and the Racialization of Noise

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of design and material practices on the weaponization of quietness through the deployment of sound bombs by the Military Police of São Paulo, Brazil. Probing the contradiction of using a device that produces loudness to enforce silence laws, I offer an account of how designed artifacts and techniques can be instrumentalized by the State for the policing of racialized bodies and their sonic and musical practices. These artifacts and techniques create and reproduce mechanisms that produce both physical and social distance between bodies perceived to be “loud” and their silence-enforcing counterpart (i.e. the police). This extends the reach and scope of the segregation of (auditory) space with techniques besides architecture and urban planning alone. I begin with an analysis of a few, violent strategies employed by the Military Police to enforce silence laws in lower-class neighborhoods in the city, as depicted in a filmed raid edited and posted on their own social media channels. I then read these practices through the history of the so-called “stun grenade,” or sound bomb, and its use in both military and civilian contexts. Lastly, I examine a semi-fictional proposition found in Adirley Queirós’ 2015 film Branco Sai, Preto Fica (White Out, Black In) for disrupting the enforcement of silence, which in turn proposes a decolonizing shift in the perception of loudness and noise vis-à-vis racialized bodies.