四月之声 (Sounds of April)¹ has kept censors busy in China, a collection of sound recordings that essentially tracks the failures of Shanghai’s (and China’s) Zero-Covid policy. It starts with “Shanghai has not been on lockdown and there is no need for a lockdown now” to people starving and not getting medical treatment because of the on-going lockdown. The situation is nightmarish, exemplified by an article² by The Initium that describes the situation in a big nursing home: Old people dying in batches because medical personnel was essentially redistributed to detention quarantine centers, Covid spreading like wildfire among the (mostly unvaccinated) residents and the care worker replacements nowhere near medically trained. I had to stop mid-way reading the piece.

I’ve observed how more and more audio logs are being shared on Chinese social media that record and share an incident, “Sounds of April” being a highlight of this trend.³ The up-tick strikes me as unusual and I wonder if we see a “tonal turn” here, following Doris Bachmann-Medick’s concept of cultural turns.⁴ It must be noted that her analysis stops at “pictorial turns” though - which is more than prescient with the rise of Instagram and TikTok, given the book’s original publication date (2006).

However, we may be experiencing another turn, the tonal turn.⁵ Generally, podcasts have been steeply on the rise, especially in Europe. SRF (Swiss National Broadcast) has heavily invested in podcasts in the last couple of years, following its “digital first” broadcast strategy. Wanna be hip today? Do a newsletter or a podcast. But the development in China is even more striking, some quick thoughts why:

• Initiated by the very brief period where Clubhouse was essentially uncensored in China (early 2021), with Chinese people discussing freely the genocide in Xinjiang, Tian’anmen, Taiwan, Tibet and other forbidden topics.

• With the lockdown ongoing, people are confined to their homes, their only life-line to the outside consists of phone calls, easy to record and share. Witness videos I’ve seen are often frequently filmed out of someone’s apartment from whatever floor they were, blurry and distant.

• Audio recordings are harder to fake - images, videos (deepfakes) much easier.

• Audio recordings are harder to censor than images, videos, emojis, it seems to me. 四月之声 has been shared as video, but essentially a file would suffice. Clubhouse is now censored by the way.⁶

I may interpret way too much into this, but given the broader trend towards more audio, turning to audio to evade censorship and record what’s beyond propaganda seems the next logical step.

Last modified on 2022-04-24