Music as torture / Music as weapon

ifp

Well-known member
I'd imagine most people have read about this before, but its quite an interesting article and goes beyond the more obvious just stating how music has been weaponized

http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cusick_eng.htm

Abstract
One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega’s surrender, the use of “acoustic bombardment” has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.

The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel—and disturbing—perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government’s use of music in the “war on terror” tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves?

This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community’s conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis.
 
Also of interest, but surprisingly not mentioned in Cusick's piece, is The Men Who Stare At Goats, Jon Ronson's analysis of US PsyOps published in 2004 (which was a companion piece to his three-part Channel 4 television series, The Crazy Rulers Of The World, also broadcast in 2004).

It was early in Steven Halpern's career as a composer of a series of
meditation and subliminal CDs (titles include Achieving Your Ideal
Weight and Nurturing Your Inner Child) that he met Jim Channon in 1978
at a New Age conference in California. Jim said he wanted somehow to use
Steven's music to make the American soldier more peaceful, and he also
hoped to deploy Steven's music in the battlefield to make the enemy feel
more peaceful too. "He said he needed to convince the higher-up military
brass; the top ranks," said Steven. "These are people who had never
known a meditative state. I think he wanted to get them into it without
naming it."

Or maybe hypnotise them with subliminal sounds?

Steven told me a little about the power of subliminal sounds. One time,
he said, an American evangelical church blasted the congregation with
silent sounds during the hymns. At the end of the service, they found
their donations had tripled.

Almost all the people Jim visited during his two-year journey were, like
Steven Halpern, Californians. Jim went through Reichian rebirthing,
primal arm-wrestling, and naked hot-tub encounter sessions at the Esalen
Institute. He saw it as America's role "to lead the world to paradise".

He returned from his journey in 1979 and produced what he called First
Earth Battalion Operations Manual. The manual was a 125-page mixture of
drawings and graphs and maps and polemical essays and point by point
redesigns of every aspect of military life. The new battlefield uniform
would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs
to enhance night vision and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit
"indigenous music and words of peace".

There was, Jim accepted, a possibility that these measures might not be
enough to pacify an enemy. In that eventuality, the loudspeakers
attached to the uniforms would be switched to broadcast "discordant
sounds". Bigger loudspeakers would be mounted on military vehicles, each
playing acid rock music out of synch with the other to confuse the enemy.

[ ... ]

And so it was that Jim Channon's madcap vision, triggered by his
post-combat depression, found its way into the highest levels of the US military.

In May 2003, shortly after President Bush had announced "the end of
major hostilities" in the war in Iraq, a little piece of the First Earth
Battalion philosophy was put into practice by PsyOps (US army
Psychological Operations) behind a disused railway station in the tiny
Iraqi town of al-Qa'im, on the Syrian border ... More ...

Perhaps this is the way it happened: in the late 1970s Jim Channon,
traumatised from Vietnam, sought solace in the emerging human potential
movement of California. He took his ideas back into the army and they
struck a chord with the top brass who had never before seen themselves
as New Age, but in their post-Vietnam funk it all made sense to them.
Then, over the decades that followed, the army, being what it is,
recovered its strength and saw that some of the ideas contained within
Jim's manual could be used to shatter people rather than heal them.
Those are the ideas that live on in the war on terror​

And Iraq as a movie/music-video set: 'Apocalypse Now' Music Fires Up U.S. Troops for Raid, by Alistair Lyon

BAGHDAD - U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film "Apocalypse Now" before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

With Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
The attempts to transcribe music into language or language into music reflect this will to construct a universal language operating on the same scale as the exchanges made necessary by colonial expansion: music, a flexible code, was dreamed of as an instrument of world unification, the language of all the mighty. For example, in one of the most talked-about essays of the nineteenth century, Francois Sudre, a French engineer, presented a procedure for the formation of a musical language. The Academie des Beaux-Arts de l'Institut, in its report of 1827, found that "the author perfectly fulfilled the goal he set out to accomplish. Providing men with a new means of communicating their ideas to one another, of transmitting them long distances and in the deepest night, is a true service to society." In Sudre's musical language, the seven notes of the scale could be ussed to express any idea. Using only three notes, Sudre devised telephony, in other words, "the art of using the sounds of an instrument to send from a distance signals transmitting orders, dispatches, and phrases inscribed in advance in a special vocabulary... designed to conform to the range of the regulation bugle and adapt it to military art." The idea of a language coded in music is linked to idea of military order and imperial universality.

From Jacques Attali's Noise... just came across this passage, thought it germain to the topic. I like the idea that the sentiment "music is a universal language" is rooted in colonial fantasies; it had always bothered me. I do wonder how communication through drums fits into Attali's schema though -- weren't these also "orders, dispatches, and phrases" transmitted through sound, but without capitalism or colonialism as an engine?
 
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