It's hard to know what makes Lawrence Abu Hamdan's half-hour audio documentary, 'The Freedom of Speech Itself', a work of art, exactly – aside from it being presented in a gallery. With its edifying, investigative tone, its interview-led format, its natty title music, it could just as easily be a program on Radio 4 – which isn't to disparage its often fascinating subject matter.
'Language analysis for the determination of origin' (LADO, for short) may not sound particularly exciting, but actually the legal and scientific shift from analyzing what people say, to the way they say it – their accent, idioms, etc – has any number of hugely significant applications: from aiding criminal investigations to the main topic of this documentary, assessing the authenticity of claims by asylum seekers. Yet in fact, as various linguistic experts explain, the whole notion of geographically stable speech patterns is, in a world marked by pluralism, hybridity, and constant migration, deeply flawed – and leads to such absurd and dangerous outcomes as the UK Home Office sending native Sierra Leoneans 'back home' to Nigeria, based purely on their pronunciation of one phoneme (once you're suitably outraged, there's a petition to the local MP that you can sign).
Following the documentary, then, the remainder of the hour gets filled with random selections from Abu Hamdan's ongoing research project into sound and legalism, 'Aural Contract'. This, more overtly, is sound art: an archive of mainly found material, presented without comment – from Slobodan Milosevic complaining, through a female court translator, that such feminization undermines his case, to rock band Judas Priest playing their records backwards to disprove the notion of subliminal Satanic messages. Such specific hearings, as it were, may be individually quirky or amusing; but taken together they build a powerful sense of voice and speech as inchoate, malleable, constantly subject to imagination.