Headphones, Auditory Violence and the Sonic Flooding of Corporeal Space

Abstract

In this article, I develop and redirect Julian Henriques’s model of sonic dominance through examination of accounts of acoustic violence and torture involving headphones. Specifically, I show how auditory experience has been weaponized as an intracorporeal phenomenon, with headphones effecting a sense of sounds invading the interior phenomenological space of the head. By analysing reported cases of sonic violence and torture involving headphones through a composite theoretical lens drawn from the fields of music, sound and body studies, I argue that in saturating the head’s perceived interior with sound, perpetrators of violence perform sonic dominance across two interrelated levels: the subjugation of interiorized auditory space via the notion of flooding, in which attention is directed towards the experience of the body as a vessel for sound; and the resulting manipulation of phenomenological head–mind linkages, with emphasis on the head as a ‘space’ for both sound and thought.