The above map corresponds to audio recordings made during demonstrations which took place at the MacNamara Terminal of the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport on January 29, 2017. This was one of many airport demonstrations which took place around the United States in protest of Donald Trump's executive order, issued on January 27, which banned all travellers from seven predominantly-muslim countries. Click on the dots above to hear individual clips, or listen to the whole 3 minute recording.

These audio samples have been chosen for two reasons: First, they provide a variety of examples of ways in which the auditory object becomes present. Some of these include as a pattern in time (such as repeating chants), or as a distinct concentration of spectral energy producing a specific tone (such as the sound of the whistle, or the car honking). Through the accompanying spectrograms, this is explored through both audio and visual media: the patterning or emergence that is shown visually can also be discerned in the accompanying audio clip. Additionally, this form of representation begins to describe one of the most elusive, but also most interesting aspects of auditory perception: the ways in which auditory objects become defined by emerging, over time, as distinct from their context. To illustrate this point, the clips above show some interesting moments of transition, specifically in relation to the shifting coherence / incoherence of chanting voices. Similarly to a photographic depth-of-field, discrete sounds can be heard to come into or out of focus along the three minute recording presented here.

The second reason that these audio samples have been chosen is because they describe the auditory aspect of spatial occupation within clearly political conditions. This is heightened by the fact that these protests are taking place at an airport – a location where the individual human body is already at odds with the infrastructural scale of airplanes and their attendant movements; a scale typically celebrated by architectural typologies utilized in airport design. The self-consciously political occupation of this space, then - by individuals, groups, and crowds – has an added significance, given its inherent contradiction of the intended programmatic function of the space of the airport. This surreal quality of scalar disjunction is furthered by the unintentionally amplifying effect of large scale geometry, executed in glass and concrete, on the voices and crowd sounds of the demonstrators.