Musical Torture
Contents:
Every time they take a shower they are being watched by homosexuals. Reinstitute periodic strip searches. Anyone who has talked with a professional dominatrix knows that there are a great deal of people in this country who are willing to pay to be rather brutally tortured.
Overwhelmingly, the conversations open with an exchange like this one, from Dec 19 I go nuts after three minutes! But, then, Iron Butterfly did that to my parents, not to mention the Doors , pure torture they thought. You can stay at the YMCA over and over again.
Bloggers who accept the premise that music could be torture participate eagerly—indeed, almost gleefully—in virtual conversations aimed at producing the ideal playlist for either battlefield or interrogation-room use. Ono soon became the subject of her own racist, misogynist mini-thread. I see the usefulness there. But I gotta draw the line at Yoko.
Music torture: How heavy metal broke Manuel Noriega - BBC News
Additionally, the idea that music could torture seems linked both to homophobia and to heterosexual fantasy; in fact, the most lively repertoire discussions propose as torturous popular musics easily associated with either homosexuality or the effeminacy perceived to come from being too emotionally engaged with women. My hunch that masculinity is at issue is supported by one more blog posting, one of the last at Free Republic in June, , from SauronOfMordor who, like the PsyOps spokeman, imagined sound to be more important than music.
Recordings by Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera are said to have been used against specific detainees: The point, the disintegration of identity, depends not on music but on sound.
In the absence, so far, of detailed accounts from former prisoners of their experiences, I have tried to think about this practice through my own experience of high-volume rock, and, more recently, high volume dance music. For me, both kinds of experience produced the feeling of being touched, without being touched by anyone; all of us who sang or danced were physically touched by the same force, which sometimes moved, sometimes enveloped, sometimes caressed us.
11 Popular Songs the CIA Used to Torture Prisoners in the War on Terror
From that shared experience of being touched-without-being-touched by the vibrating air in which we all moved, I drew a deeply sensual, erotic though not explicitly sexual feeling of communion with the friends and strangers around me, even as the music blessedly silenced, temporarily, my individual thoughts.
A detainee, too, must experience himself as touched without being touched, as he squats, hands shackled between his shackled ankles to an I-bolt in the floor, in a pitch-black room, unable to find any position for his body that does not cause self-inflicted pain. Surely, among many other things, the experience creates a nexus of pain, immoblility, unwanted touching without-touch ; and of being forced into self-hurting by a disembodied, invisible Power.
A dark ecstasy, the experience must be neither isolation nor communion, but a relationship that mimics the effects of the chains—the relationship of being utterly at the mercy of a merciless, ubiquitous Power. Believing they cannot be killed with impunity, the homefront bloggers at littegreen footballs and freerepublic do more than express their rage at the feminized position they occupy as non-warriors in an increasingly warrior-worshipping public culture.
Music has been used in psychological operations. The term music torture is sometimes used by critics of the practice of playing loud music incessantly to. Music torture has been common practice for the CIA ever since it began its " enhanced interrogation program" in the early s. The process is designed to .
They create and occupy as homophobic, racist and misogynist the subject position of virtuous, justified torture—a subject position identified with, and occupied by, the global national security state that has, in its most recently passed law on the treatment of detainees, declared itself exempt from international law. But I freely confess here that I have barely begun this work. I do not yet know who makes the choices in detainment facilities, and on what basis. Nor do I know whether guards and interrogation teams hear, or listen to, the music played.
What do US personnel think about this practice, and what do they feel?
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What do detainees think and feel? What do either group think and feel about the specific repertoire chosen? How, if at all, has the experience changed the musical behaviors of either group? What equipment delivers the sound? At what decibel level? Is it engineered so as to afflict without causing permanent hearing loss?
Elsewhere in this issue…
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Music as a torture weapon: exploring the dark side
The US has used LRADs and infrasonic weapons, causing reports of blown out eardrums, dizziness, ringing, and temporary deafness. Not only does the music cause headaches and sound like loud, painful banging, its aesthetic qualities demand an innate human reaction.
- Systems Metabolic Engineering!
- Masken der Begierde: Erotischer Roman (German Edition).
- Music (or sound) as a weapon.
- Music in psychological operations.
- Music torture: How heavy metal broke Manuel Noriega.
How do interrogators choose the soundtracks of musical torture? During the siege of Fallujah in November , the st PsyOps company bombed the city with Metallica. As PsyOps spokesman Ben Abel explained at the time:.
The aim is to disorient and confuse the enemy to gain a tactical advantage … our guys have been getting really creative in finding sounds they think would make the enemy upset …These guys have their own mini-disc players, with their own music, plus hundreds of downloaded sounds. The other half of my project involves mapping some of the music heard in the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. In some ways, the projects are so different as to seem unconnected: However, the same idea, that musical space is a metaphor for control, can be seen all over the camp.
A particularly clear example can be heard in the hospital barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A map of the sonic environment at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Melissa Kagen and Jake Melrose, After a few bars quiet weeping began to be heard from all sides, which became louder as we played and finally burst out in general uncontrolled sobbing. From all sides, spasmodic cries began to roll in on me.
Let us die in peace! The prisoners wished to die in peace—which is to say, they wanted the barest hint of autonomy over the space in which they die. This music, to which they are forced to listen, disturbs them not only because it disrupts that space, but because it invades their bodies. A piece played inside a brick barrack would be audible on the path outside, and the march played next to the path would be audible to anyone within. Moreover, there is a limited distinction between sounds heard by guards and sounds heard by prisoners—a difference in psychological affect, certainly, but not in the music itself.
In other words, the sounds heard by guards and prisoners were often the same and, in this strange sense, prisoners and guards were and are united in their experience. In the case of musical torture during the war on terror, this sharing was, at least in one instance, more radical. Jonathan Pieslak records the following quote from U. Grisham, who used music during interrogations in Iraq:.
- Weave and Way!
- Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo?
- ?
- Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 3.
- Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo—The Appendix;
This inference of shared experience through music is reminiscent of the musical warfare at the Siege of Fallujah, where opposing soundtracks competed for control of the city in a sonic analogue to the battle. The boundaries between torturer and victim blur—not in their power relations, but in the similarity of their experienced environment.
That shared environment is part of what I find so interesting about music in Auschwitz, and it is a feature of the camps that I have tried to visualize in my work. My partner Jake Melrose and I mapped forced music which prisoners were required to play in red, and voluntary music in blue. Performance allowed for a modicum of creative expression, an outlet not readily available for manual laborers.
This same Block 24, however, transformed into a perverse jazz club when SS officers came to unwind after a long day. By having the freedom to choose the music they wanted to hear, the guards made their authority clear and their control absolute. Moments of musical mourning, like the pianist playing Chopin, had to be squeezed in when no one was listening.
The most confusing category to me is emotional, nostalgic music: To me, this bespeaks a strange nostalgia for a specifically American childhood, even as those American children have grown up to inherit a world that is nothing like what they anticipated while watching Sesame Street. The emotional thrust of this piece would hit American soldiers much harder than prisoners less familiar with Americana. This is a particularly American kind of abuse: My project began as an attempt to think about music in space. How does music work to control space, and how can it affect bodies inhabiting that space?
But one of the most interesting aspects for me, beyond those initial questions, has been the responses.