The Sounds of War: Drones Over Ukraine

In an exclusive extract from his new book Ukrainian Field Notes, author Gianmarco Del Re explores the soundscape of ScanEagles and Shahed drones turning the skies over Kyiv into a sonic warzone

The word drone comes from Old English, referring both to the male honeybee and its buzzing sound – a meaning that now feels grimly prophetic. In places long subjected to drone warfare, people often name them after the noise they make. Along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, drones have been called bangana (“buzzing wasp”); in Gaza, Israeli drones are nicknamed zanana, slang for a “nagging wife”, a term that mimics their ceaseless hum. In each case, the sound is not incidental but central: an acoustic weapon that invades daily life, produces fear, and can leave lasting trauma.

The sound a drone makes depends on its size. Small commercial drones produce a high-pitched buzz from their electric motors. Military drones vary: some are launched by hand or catapult and use larger electric motors or small piston engines. The ScanEagle, for example, has been described as sounding like a chainsaw or weed trimmer. In 2015, designer Ruben Pater and Gonçalo F. Cardoso released A Study into 21st Century Drone Acoustics, a record cataloguing the sounds of 16 different drones – a contemporary equivalent of a birdwatcher’s field guide, but for the militarised sky.

Their work belongs to a broader inquiry into what Steve Goodman called the militarisation of the audiosphere. Long before drones, Luigi Russolo had argued in L’arte dei rumori that modern life demanded a new musical language built from industrial sound. For Russolo, the growing complexity of machinery and urban noise meant that music and noise were destined to converge. What he imagined as an aesthetic future now returns in darker form: the sounds of war entering the everyday soundscape and, eventually, music itself.

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