DISCUSSION: The History of Sonic Surveillance

In an era where AI-assisted systems are invited into intimate spaces, listening to our habits and simulating human voices, the boundary between sonic technology and tracking has dissolved. This panel brings Marsha Courneya and Toby Heys, authors of Listening In: How Audio Surveillance Became Artificial Intelligence, in conversation with cultural theorist Paul Rekret, to examine how the auditory realm has served as the primary training ground for automated surveillance. Rather than treating audio AI as a sudden leap, they map how decades of classifying, capturing, and analysing speech and acoustic environments laid the infrastructure for today's machine intelligence. From tools like Leon Theremin’s 1945 covert bug to state mass surveillance and modern smart devices, the discussion will range from the political stakes of auditory capture to how ambient interfaces manipulate human expression, and how contemporary underground music and sonic practices might contest, disrupt, or listen back to these systems.