This is a selection of academic writing on the topic. Most of the authors listed are scholars with in-depth research experience on the topic.

Last updated: 3 September 2024

Brauer, Juliane. 2009. Musik im Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen. Berlin: Metropol.

—. 2016. “How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps.” Music & Politics X (1). https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0010.103.

Brunson, Angela Michelle. 2021. “Faith, Hope, and Torture: Music in the Prisoner-of-War Camps of North Vietnam.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Calero Carramolino, Elsa. 2017. “La música es el verdugo. Comparativa sonora entre los campos de concentración nazi y las cárceles franquistas.” AV notas (2): 32-45.

—. 2022. “Prácticas musicales en el ecosistema sonoro penitenciario franquista (1938-1948): Propaganda, contrapropaganda y clandestinidad.” Revista de musicología 45 (1/2): 355-360.

—. 2023. “Loss of place, loss of self: musical heterotopias in Franco’s prisons (1938-1945).” Ethnomusicology Forum 32 (3): 440-455 https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2023.2268086.

Chornik, Katia. 2013. “Music and Torture in Chilean Detention Centers: Conversations with an Ex-Agent of Pinochet’s Secret Police.”  the world of music (new series) 2 (1): 51-65.

Cusick, Suzanne G. 2006. 2006. “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon.” Trans: Revista transcultural de música 10 https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/152/music-as-torture-music-as-weapon

—. “’You are in a place that is out of the world. . .’: Music in the Detention Camps of the “Global War on Terror”.” Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (1): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196308080012.

—.2013. “Towards an Acoustemology of Detention in the ‘Global War on Terror.’” In Music, Sound and Space, edited by Georgina Born. 275–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511675850.017.

—.2014. “Afterword to “You are in a place that is out of the world…”: Music in the Detention Camps of the “Global War on Terror”.” Transposition 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.493.

Cusick, Suzanne G., and Branden W. Joseph. 2011. “Across an Invisible Line: A Conversation about Music and Torture.” Grey Room 42 (42): 6-21. https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00024.

Fackler, Guido. 2000. “‘Des’ Lagers Stimme’ Musik im KZ ; Alltag und Häftlingskultur in den Konzentrationslagern 1933-1936. Bremen: Edition Temmen.

Grant, M. J. 2013a. “Music and Punishment in the British Army in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Music and Torture – Music and Punishment.” the world of music (new series) 2 (1).

—. 2013b. “The illogical logic of music torture.” Torture 23 (2): 4-13.

—. 2014. “Pathways to music torture.” Transposition 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.494.

—. 2023. “Bleed a little louder: Sound, silence and music torture.” VIRUS – Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte der Medizin 1: 15-32. https://doi.org/10.1553/virus21s015.

Herzfeld-Schild, Marie-Louise. L. 2013. “‘He plays on the pillory’. The use of musical instruments for punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.” Torture 23 (2): 14-23.

Hirsch, Lily E. 2012. “Music as Torture.” In Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, 110–31. United States: University of Michigan Press.

Kennaway, James Gordon. 2016. Bad vibrations: The history of the idea of music as cause of disease. London: Routledge.

Klause, Inna. 2013. “Music and ‘re-education’ in the Soviet Gulag.” Torture 23 (2): 24-33. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24480890.

—. 2014. Der Klang des Gulag: Musik und Musiker in den sowjetischen Zwangsarbeitslagern der 1920er- bis 1950er-Jahre. Göttingen: V & R unipress.

—. “Und alles mit Musikbegleitung” : Musikausübung im Gulag und in den nationalsozialistischen KZ im Vergleich. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Knapp, Gabriele. 1996. Das Frauenorchester in Auschwitz: Musikalische Zwangsarbeit und ihre Bewältigung. Hamburg: von Bockel.

Mangaoang, Áine. 2013. “Dancing to distraction: mediating ‘docile bodies’ in ‘Philippine Thriller video’.” Torture 23 (2): 44-54.

—.2019. Dangerous Mediations : Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.

Metzner, Susanne, Jesko Verhey, Patricia Braak, and Jan Hots. 2018. “Auditory sensitivity in survivors of torture, political violence and flight—An exploratory study on risks and opportunities of music therapy.” The Arts in Psychotherapy 58: 33-41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2018.02.001.

Mitran, Anna J. 2016. “Facing the music: Moral intellectual property rights as a solution to artist outrage about music torture.” Cornell Law Review 101 (2): 505-530.

Naliwajek-Mazurek, Katarzyna. 2013. “Music and Torture in Nazi Sites of Persecution and Genocide in Occupied Poland, 1939-1945.” the world of music (new series) 2 (1).

Nowak, Manfred. 2022. “Music Torture in the ‘War on Terror’.” In The Routledge Companion to Music and Human Rights, edited by Julian Fifer, Angela Impey, Peter G. Kirchschlaeger, Manfred Nowak and George Ulrich, 325-331. London: Routledge.

Nowak, Manfred, interviewed by M. J. Grant. 2013. “”Human Rights Have Made a Difference”: An Interview with Manfred Nowak.” the world of music (new series). 2 (1): 91-98.

Papaeti, Anna. 2013a. “Music and ‘re-education’ in Greek prison camps: from Makronisos (1947-1955) to Giaros (1967-1968).” Torture 23 (2): 34-43.

—2013b.  “Music, Torture, Testimony: Reopening the Case of the Greek Junta (1967–1974).” the world of music (new series) 2 (1): 67–89.

Papaeti, Anna, and M. J. Grant. 2013. “Torture. Introduction.” Torture 23 (2): 1-3.

Windsor, W. Luke 2019. “Music in Detention and Interrogation: The Musical Ecology of Fear”. In Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, edited by Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads Walther-Hansen and Martin Knakkergaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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