Music can be used as a tool of psychological warfare. The term "music torture" is sometimes used to describe the practice.[citation needed] While it is acknowledged by United States interrogation experts to cause discomfort, it has also been characterized as having no "long-term effects".[1]

Music and sound have been usually used as part of a combination of interrogation methods, today recognized by international bodies as amounting to torture.[2]Attacking all senses without leaving any visible traces, they have formed the basis of the widely discussed torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They were, however, devised much earlier in the 1950s and early 1960s, as a way to counter so-called Soviet "brainwashing".[3] Methods of "noise torture" or "sound torture", which include the continuous playing of music or noise, have been paired with sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, food and drink deprivation, and stress positions.

In the war on terror, the US used the songs "The Real Slim Shady" by Eminem, the Meow Mix theme song, and "Fuck Your God" by Deicide to torture.[6]

Click here for a piece about this horrendous subject by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross from Columbia University and

here for an article from Chloe Davies on the American Civil Liberties Union website.