So many drones over #Gaza city it sounds like everyone is out mowing their lawns in the dark
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) November 16, 2012
The other day Richard compared the sound of drones flying over Gaza to the sound of lawnmowers. It occured to me that while I have a second-hand familiarity with many of the sounds of war (maybe first-hand in the case of fighter jet flyovers), I don’t think I’ve heard the sound of constant drone surveillance -not even in movies.
Now the BBC has published a series of audio samples of the sounds of war which not only enlightens us to the fact that “In Arabic they’re known as ‘Zananna,’ literally ‘whining child,’” but way down, second from the bottom is a recording of a U.S. predator drone from 2002. (I’m going to take a wild guess that Israeli and U.S. drones don’t sound all that dissimilar.) In between the squawks of a military radio, sure enough it does kind of sound like a lawnmower.Recommended
