Back in 2005, prison logs from Guantanamo Bay revealed that Christina Aguilera songs were used to torture detainees involved in the 9/11 attacks. This week, a New Yorker article called "The Sound of Hate" resurfaced those reports and delved more deeply into the practice of using music as torture. The logs revealed that Mohammed al-Qahtani, who tried to enter the U.S. to participate in the 9/11 hijackings, was kept awake using Christina music and told he could sleep "when he tells the truth." "Aguilera seems to have been chosen because female singers were thought to offend Islamist detainees," writes the New Yorker's Alex Ross. "Interrogation playlists also leaned on heavy-metal and rap numbers, which ... delivered messages of intimidation and destruction."
Ross also notes that music and sound can be effective torture devices because they're so hard to escape; you cannot close your ears the way you can your eyes, and sound can be loud enough to fill an entire space. Musical genres are important too, which is one reason why things like heavy metal would bother some people and not others. "Humans react with particular revulsion to musical signals that are not of their choice or to their liking," Ross writes. "Many neuroscientific theories about how music acts on the brain — such as Steven Pinker's notion that music is 'auditory cheesecake,' a biologically useless pleasure — ignore how personal tastes affect our processing of musical information. A genre that enrages one person may have a placebo effect on another." Which explains why you probably listen to Christina and still think, This is the most uplifting thing I've ever heard, rather than, Get me out of here.
