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.
In Kyiv in 2025, as Elsa Court noted, the sounds of war are different from those of the Blitz yet equally haunting. Russian forces launch missiles and Iranian-made Shahed drones from afar, often under cover of darkness. These large, buzzing drones – nicknamed “mopeds” by Ukrainians – turn the night into an auditory ordeal. Residents learn to judge danger by sound alone: the rising whine, the engine cut, the pause, and then the explosion. The sound has become so recognisable that practical guides now exist to help people identify Shaheds and respond appropriately.
In the village of Kivshovata, south of Kyiv and on the flight path of Russian drones and missiles, a youth orchestra went viral for performing the Shahed Overture, a piece reproducing the sound of the Iranian drones. Even in this gesture of imitation there is no triumph, only the strange fact that war has entered the realm of musical memory. DJ Crepaque, while undergoing military training, described the unsettling ambiguity of hearing a swarm overhead: “A very strange feeling of fear from the sound of a swarm of drones… and then to get the info that these are ours.”
The war has also changed for those on the frontline. The novelist Myroslav Laiuk recalled a soldier from the 93rd Brigade telling him that, compared to Bakhmut, the fighting near Pokrovsk felt like “a different war”: not abstract artillery falling somewhere nearby, but drones hunting you personally. Both Ukraine and Russia have increasingly shifted to fibre-optic FPV drones, which are harder to jam or detect. Even visitors to Ukraine notice their sonic menace. “The threat of drones was a constant, heavy presence,” Angelina Jolie observed. “You hear a low hum in the sky.”
In places like Sumy, close to the front, people have developed a grim expertise in recognising attacking drones by sound, explosive power, or silhouette. Children learn at school how to identify mines and stop severe bleeding. The war’s sonic vocabulary is now part of civilian knowledge.
Drones affect more than humans. Their low-altitude movement and constant noise disrupt wildlife, particularly birds. In 2024, a large colony of flamingos in Tuzlivski Lymany National Park abandoned their nests after prolonged exposure to drones and military activity, leaving eggs vulnerable. Elsewhere, images circulated online of fields strewn with discarded fibre-optic cable, which birds had begun using as nesting material: a bleak image of the war’s residues entering ecosystems in unexpected ways.
As these sounds entered everyday life, musicians began processing and incorporating them into their work. Drones, like air-raid sirens, became part of a new musical vocabulary. Symonenko’s contribution to the compilation KYUB: this war — a 144 BPM techno track titled Drone Attack – uses rocket explosions from the Kyiv region, synthesised drone-like sounds, and decaying blasts to structure the piece. The point is not metaphor but direct sonic inscription: war sounds become raw material for music.
Vlad Suppish took this process further. For Bergamot Lyre, he built a kick drum using recordings of explosions from the shelling of Irpin, where he and his girlfriend had been trapped in the first days of the invasion. For the snare, he combined a pitched-down tyre screech with another explosion, then shaped the result through distortion, reverb, filtering, and compression. In doing so, he turned destructive sound into something rhythmic and personal. The explosions are neutralised, but not erased; they remain embedded in the track’s structure, transformed by technique and memory.
Yet this approach is not without tension. As Alex Pervukhin told me in 2023, many artists used war sounds without having experienced war “on their skin”. For him, the issue was one of integrity: if the sound is used merely for effect, it becomes speculation.
One of the few artists to build entire works exclusively from belliphonic material – the sounds of war – is Difference Machine. His album nikoly ne zmyryatʹsya (will never reconcile) is made from field recordings gathered over four months: air-raid sirens, bomb shelters, streets, weather, church bells repurposed as alarms, weapons fire, explosions, distorted military voices, and recordings made by Ukrainians forced abroad. Much of it was captured on smartphones. The result is claustrophobic and exhausting, even when the source sounds have been heavily processed. Around 90 percent of the album’s tonal elements derive from sirens, the single greatest sonic shift in daily life after the invasion.
Difference Machine described the process to me in 2022 as psychologically draining. In the first days of the full-scale war, it was the sonic environment that changed most dramatically for him. The sky itself seemed to scream. There was a constant roar overhead, day and night, producing what he called an oppressive and apocalyptic atmosphere. For those away from the frontlines, it is often these sounds – sirens, machinery, distant explosions – that keep people in a permanent state of war, preventing psychological escape. Making the album meant listening closely to violent sounds rather than shutting them out. It was only through that act of close listening, he said, that something constructive could be made from them.
He later released two further works using war sounds – Contact and symphonia siren – before deciding he had exhausted the subject. He no longer wanted to work directly with those violent materials. “I was never trying to make something pleasant out of unpleasant things,” he told me. “I wanted to stay respectful to the origins of the sounds.”
A different response came through Drones for Drones, the fundraising tape series initiated by Clemens Poole on his Kyivpastrans label. Bringing together Ukrainian and international artists, the series plays on the double meaning of the word: musical drones raising money for military drones for friends serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It is both compilation and act of solidarity, embedded in the volunteer culture that has become central to wartime life. In 2025, Drones for Drones was presented as a sound installation in the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, where it formed part of a broader reflection on care, repair, resistance, and reconstruction.
Poole’s own project seismic data: Kyiv, Ukraine, February 24, 2022 took yet another angle. The album is made entirely from sampled and manipulated seismic recordings captured outside Kyiv on the day the full-scale invasion began. One abrupt silence in the file – beginning one minute and 56 seconds in – becomes the rhythmic basis of the whole work. A technical anomaly becomes an instrument, and a break in the continuum of sound marks a break in history itself.
That recording captures no single definitive beginning; the invasion unfolded in the early hours, diffusely, across space and time. Yet its significance lies in that threshold moment, when the familiar soundscape gave way to another order of listening. Ukraine was about to plunge into the unknown.
The above excerpt, taken from Ukrainian Field Notes: Sound, Music & Voices From Ukraine After the Full-Scale Invasion by Gianmarco Del Re, is adapted and abridged. Ukrainian Field Notes is published by Velocity Press
