Hearing is Believing: Reflections on the Sonic and the Spiritual

Hyper-mediated life has normalised the existence of invisible worlds. Wireless signals slip through walls, cities, bodies, and homes becoming perceptible only when translated by the right device. WiFi’s arrival in 1992 and Bluetooth’s arrival two years later are amongst the many articulations of a world changed by the unseen. I often like to apply this common terrain to technical imagination and religious thought – both begin from the proposition that the world is more than what befalls the retina.1

Unlike images, sound is irreducibly temporal. It arrives and shortly vanishes, living on only through the brain’s echoic memory which briefly holds auditory information for around three to four seconds – longer than iconic (visual) memory, because sound decays faster than the image and can only be understood as it unfolds through time.2 Hearing and believing share this common attunement to realities that precede our conscious awareness, suggesting that some of the most consequential forces shaping our lives are those we cannot immediately see. 

Sound and faith have continually inhabited new technological ecologies. The adhan began as the unamplified human voice of Bilal Ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian man in Mecca and Islam’s first muezzin (the official who proclaims the call to prayer). Since then, it has been broadcast from minarets, loudspeakers, radios, cassette tapes, satellite television, smartphone prayer apps, and alarm clocks.3 A 1400-year-old call has migrated from the public to the private sphere, shrinking to the size of our phones and the intimacy of our pockets. In Joe Namy’s Cosmic Breath (2026) – a sound installation composed of recordings of the adhan from different times and places – it returns to a shared space: Ibraaz’s musalla. Around a month ago, I wandered into the musalla to spend time with the work and ended up staying long enough to catch dhuhr (the second prayer of the day) and pray in that same space.

Studying neuroscience taught me that memory is what bridges the biology of hearing and the cognitively and spiritually sophisticated act of listening that faith requires. The adhan I heard in Syria during my childhood is embedded in my auditory cortex through which I process all sound, including the sound from the ten speakers of Cosmic Breath – although I cannot reconstruct the phonemes, pitch, or cadence of the muezzin’s voice, its resonance is tied to its emotional imprint. This is the logic of our sonic encounters, which profile the emotions associated with auditory stimuli and communicate with neural systems involved in affective processing, including the amygdala.4

Hearing depends on the cochlea converting vibration into neural activity, while intricate auditory circuits work tirelessly to identify sonic patterns, locate a sound’s origin in space, filter competing signals, and make sense of an impossibly crowded acoustic world. We do all this in near real-time. But desire, memory, pain, and belief all complicate the biological process of listening, turning it into a singular, interpretative act.

Further shaping this process of listening is what legal and sound scholar James Parker calls ‘acoustic jurisprudence’: the legal regimes that politically structure sonic environments.5 In 2004, during the American assault on Fallujah – one of the deadliest battles (on both sides) of the Iraq War – US forces deployed Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADS), broadcasting sound at approximately 145 decibels (more than double the amount considered to cause permanent hearing damage) as a weapon of sensory warfare, designed to overwhelm the human sensorium and produce psychological incapacitation.6 

My family shared an anecdote with me about this event. Faced with such a technology, locals responded in one of the few ways available to them: they broadcast Quranic recitation through local masjid loudspeakers. The US military and media described these Arabic-language broadcasts as ‘intimidating’ and ‘eerie’ calls for jihad and incitement against American forces.7 I’ll always remain curious as to whether the calls emanating from the Fallujah masjid loudspeaker were threats of retaliation, or if the adhan had been considered a threat by those who could only hear Islam’s sonic correlate through the register of war. Given the ways emotional memory can saturate perception, perhaps no sound arrives entirely untouched by the conditions under which it is heard.

I do not know what to do with this image. It contains so much. The asymmetry between a military acoustic weapon and a religious PA system; the decision to respond to a technology used to physically overwhelm the body with one used for prayer; the way in which the sonic-spiritual technology of the masjid loudspeaker, which regularly broadcast the familiar call used to organise the temporal rhythms of daily life in Fallujah, was transformed into a vernacular medium of resistance. 

Parker’s critical framework urges us to take seriously both the legal and political dimensions of sound and the sonic dimensions of power. Sound is not incidental to power. It is one of the primary media through which power organises reality and what is perceptible, restructuring attention, atmosphere, and behaviour. The concept of ‘percepticide’ encapsulates this, naming the ways in which power can render imperceptible the very conditions through which violence becomes recognisable and therefore worthy of response.8 We see several manifestations of this, from Abu Ghraib’s ‘torture discos’, in which detainees were subjected to prolonged, high-volume music as a form of sensory torture, to a US flight diversion triggered by a passenger’s adhan notification being interpreted as a security threat, to the regulations governing a British mosque’s right to broadcast the adhan in a residential area, the deployment and governance of sound is one of power’s primary instruments.9

We also see this sonic and sensory dimension of power amplified in Gaza and Lebanon, where Israeli bombardment, surveillance technologies (the constant high-pitched buzz of drones), and the control of communication infrastructures affect people’s everyday sensory life. In such contexts, the politics of perception becomes enmeshed with the politics of survival, determining what is heard, what is silenced, and what the world is conditioned to ignore. 

Cosmic Breath sounds the adhan across a room that anyone can enter. In an increasingly Islamophobic Europe, presenting the work in such a space in the centre of London is not a small act. The installation creates space for different modes of attention, listening out for the disparate yet connected worlds contained within the ten individual speakers and adhans they broadcast. Within its tenderness, there is also a resistance to the adhans policing within Europe’s borders.10

No sound arrives with a fixed interpretation, from trumpets to whispers. It is filtered by the brain, power, culture, and our memories. Neuroscience offers one language for understanding perception as an act of selection, describing which vibrations become signals and which dissolve into noise. Political regimes understand this too. Joy has a sound – so does protest, grief, and war. To listen out for what has been obscured is to resist the boundaries imposed by power and reclaim our perceptual agency; it is to hear the protest chants, music, calls to action, gathering, and prayer that power would rather render inaudible. Sound gathers bodies, synchronises emotions, and makes collective presence audible – more troublesome to power than sound alone is the dance that accompanies it.

Devotion, too, is a filtering of energy. Surah Al-Anfal asks believers to ‘respond to Allah and to the Messenger when He calls you to that which gives you life’ (8:24 Quran), refusing that which doesn’t. Across borders and technologies, the adhan remains a call towards attunement in the hope that by cultivating a practice of deep listening, we may draw closer to As-Samīʿ (ٱلْسَّمِيعُ) (The One Who Hears).