The Sound of Genocide: We Hear the Truths We Deny

Each sense reminds us in its own way of things we would rather not know. Vision may offer mute, obvious evidence, which we can accept or screen out. Disturbing smells act more viscerally to insist something is horribly wrong. Touch works bodily to convey unwelcome facts, such as the long-denied collapse of a relationship. Closely akin to touch at the neural level, sound registers unwanted truths corporally. Relentless, disturbing sound does emotional work even if we think we don’t hear.

The award-winning soundtrack of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest illustrates how sounds can affect minds. Glazer’s film depicts the everyday life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig, and their five children, who live in a fine home just outside the death camp wall. The film juxtaposes scenes of the Hösses swimming, playing, eating, or fighting with an eerie soundscape crafted by Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers. A watch tower and a thick, high wall with loops of barbed wire show unmistakably where the Hösses are, but the sounds of murder register more deeply. In a dynamic mix, one hears grinding, groaning, and sighing, as in the slam of two train cars rolling together. Psychologist Michael Shelton describes the film's sounds as “the ominous hum of the machinery of death." This ever-shifting metallic moan comes peppered with shots, barks, screams, and cries. The Hösses seem to have learned not to see or hear the camp, but the audience’s experience is another story (Wilkinson). Probably, Glazer, Burn, and Willers invested so much artistry in the soundtrack because of the way it conveys unseen atrocities.

Auschwitz-Birkenau by Dieglop, Nov. 24, 2018.

Dieglop, Auschwitz-Birkenau 006. 24 November, 2018. Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Whether critics admire or despise this film, they point to the way its sound works. Wendy Ide of The Guardian, who found the film transformative, describes the “suffocating intensity” of its “incredible, immersive sound design." Manohla Dargis of The New York Times calls the film “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise,” but she carefully analyzes its soundtrack, which “sounds like the engine of death.” David Klion, also writing for the Times, invokes the film’s “chilling and ingenious sound design” to argue that Zone does have a point: to let viewers see themselves in the Hösses and reflect on any human suffering today that they have walled off rather than tried to stop. Sound affects the mind and body differently than vision, and without high-end noise-canceling headphones, the sound of suffering is hard to screen out.

Like the intimate sense of touch, hearing relies on mechanoreceptors (Kandel et al. 392). In the exquisitely evolved structures of the inner ear, the vibrations of hair cells turn airwaves into patterns of neural activity. On a minute scale, hearing a scream stirs the body—it is more than a metaphor to say a scream is felt.

Current research in environmental neuroscience indicates that soundscapes affect people’s mental and physical well-being. Responding to findings that urban noise increases stress, disturbs sleep, and reduces concentration, Simone Kühn and her colleagues compared the brain activity, cognitive performance, and introspective responses of participants who listened to urban sounds, natural sounds, or no sounds (Stobbe and colleagues). Participants who listened to natural sounds reported experiencing fewer negative emotions than those who heard urban sounds or silence, and they performed slightly better cognitively, though not significantly so (Stobbe and colleagues). In a review of studies conducted across four continents, Christopher Trudeau and his colleagues found evidence of sonic injustice, through which impoverished people and people in certain ethnic or racial groups are exposed to more unwanted noise (Trudeau and colleagues). By artistically constructing the sounds of murder, Zone calls attention to an underestimated sensory modality that reveals how human actions shape the world.

Although we’ve been taught to think in terms of five senses, no sensory modality works alone. In her recent book, Of Sound Mind, neuroscientist Nina Kraus shows how closely the auditory system works with the motor system, other sensory systems, and other neural systems that enable cognition and behavior (Kraus 6). In the auditory system, top-down feedback and cross-connections influence the neural signals encoding sounds, from initial transduction to high-level processing (Kraus 50). As a result, sound perceptions are shaped by vision, touch, and smell; by bodily state; and by memories of past experiences. New perceptions of sound affect each of these other systems in turn.

In human brains, sound is never just about sound. In a comparison of Zone and Oppenheimer (which at the 2024 Academy Awards, defeated Zone for best film but lost to Zone for best sound), Alissa Wilkinson argues that what makes both films’ soundtracks so striking is the way their sounds contrast with their visual images. Intermixing what Kühn’s environmental neuroscience group tried to separate in the lab, Glazer offers audiences natural and domestic scenes against whirs and screams that suggest “the pit of hell” (Wilkinson). What do human minds do when their eyes and ears set off such divergent patterns? “The real story is in our ears,” writes Wilkinson, “and our brains can’t decide whether to tune it out, the way these characters apparently have, or listen intently to see what we’re not seeing.”

Viewers who reflect on this contrast between sound and sight may consider how hearing and vision register situations. Audiences may think about the different kinds of information ears and eyes give, the ways hearing and vision feel. In any context, one modality may become more credible. One may deserve more attention or carry more weight. By contrasting modalities, Zone does more than show how sound reveals aspects of crimes that vision can’t. The film draws attention to how sensory systems interact as they remind people of atrocities all too near.