“Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or the well.” – Florence Nightingale
The lingering, PTSD-like effects of auditory overstimulation (read: “sound torture”) are well-established, both psychologically and historically. In medieval Europe, torture-by-sound joined chains, racks, and blades as instruments of coercion par excellence; today, one can behold artifacts of punitive sound-blasting in the Medieval Torture Museums of Chicago and Los Angeles. As the museum exhibits demonstrate, sound torture could take different forms: “The monotony of repetitive beats combined with sudden jarring interruptions induced confusion, while uproar and clamor during interrogations magnified helplessness. The human psyche, highly responsive to oscillation and feedback loops, became an instrument of suffering itself.”[1]
“Sound of Torture.” From the Chicago branch of the Medieval Torture Museum.
But one need hardly return to the medieval world for examples of the devastating effects of sound overload. Indeed, one need not go back very far at all. Extremely loud, repetitive sounds were instruments of torture in regional wars throughout the later 20th century. POW camps in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and Vietnam made ample use of them. Each had prisons that specialized in the use of loud, jarring sounds to induce sleep deprivation, disorientation, and extreme stress. Prisoners broke down and provided information about, for example, enemy troop movements and attack plans.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, accounts of sonic violence multiplied; they also revealed a new inventiveness in devising ways to overload victims’ perceptual systems. Sound became an integral element of interrogation-focused torture. Today, researchers look closely at the audio technologies employed by military personnel as tools for sensory–affective regulation.[2] Among these tools, headphones have received special attention, as their use, we are told, can effect “a sense of sounds invading the interior phenomenological space of the head.”[3]
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When I entered Cooper Barnabas Hospital in March 2026 for coronary bypass surgery, little did I know that I was entering just such a psycho-physiological war zone. But I was. A cacophony of loud rhythmic sounds in the hospital room penetrated my cerebral space and fostered a sense of helplessness and despair. Headphones were not necessary to effect the cerebral invasion. Nursing personnel checking vital signs and other metabolic parameters routinely reactivated loud rhythmic beeping from the cardiac monitor, and typically raced out of the room before I could ask them to reset the monitor to standby mode.
Others simply didn’t know how to make the adjustment. Monitors directly behind my head were intolerably loud and resistant to cancellation by the nursing staff – when staff even bothered to come to the room. It usually required three successive calls to the nursing station before anyone came to the room. In one case, I rang the bell four times with no result. When a nurse finally came to the room, she told me no one had notified her of my need for assistance. This happened repeatedly. “Sorry, no one told us to come to your room,” I heard over and over again. Were such denials a further element of torture? But what, pray tell, was I to confess?
The multiplicity of loud rhythmic beeps directly behind my head stymied some of the nurses. “The beeping is necessary,” one remarked. “It’s making sure your metabolic rate is within normal parameters.” A minute later, a second nurse (or perhaps a nurse tech) entered the room and, without a word, walked behind the bed and pushed a button that silenced the loud beeping and ended the torture. (Was gaslighting part of the treatment plan?)
Added to the mix was the incessant beeping caused by an albumin infusion. The gel-like liquid was simply too thick for the line; it bubbled up at intervals of 2-3 minutes, setting off the recurrent din that would plague me for over an hour. No sooner did a nursing tech silence the wailing beep and reestablish albumin flow than it bubbled up and set off the alarm once again. So I spent the hour of albumin administration in aural agony. (N.B. I was ready, indeed, eager, to confess.) Why, I humbly asked, did the hospital not use lines adequate to the chemical composition of the drugs being administered? Since the beeping recurred every several minutes, why didn’t someone – anyone – simply stay in the room for the hour-long drug administration? I don’t know, and neither did any of the nursing attendants, all of whom, I was repeatedly told, were simply doing their jobs.
Suffice it to say that military personnel employing loud, repetitive, stress-inducing sounds to breakdown prisoners could have learned a thing or two from my experience at Cooperman Barnabas. I can imagine Theodor Eicke, commandant of Dachau concentration camp and an early architect of sonic torture, sitting quietly in a corner of the room and taking notes amid the array of interpenetrating clangs and beeps that made life in the hospital room an exercise in battlefield endurance.
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[1] “When Sound Becomes a Weapon: Noise in Torture and Fear,” The Medieval Museum Torture Blog, 25 September 2025 (https://medievaltorturemuseum.com/blog/when-sound-becomes-weapon-noise-torture-and-fear/).
[2] See, for example, Morag J. Grant, “The illogical logic of music torture: Torture 23(2): 4–13, 2013; David Peisner, “Music as torture: War is loud,” SPIN December. (https://www.spin.com/2006/11/music-torture-war-loud); and most comprehensively, Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015.
[3] Jacob A. Downs, “Headphones, Auditory Violence and the Sonic Flooding of Corporeal Space,” Body & Society, 27:58-85, 2021, pp. 58-59.
Copyright © 2026 by Paul E. Stepansky. All rights reserved. The author kindly requests that educators using his blog essays in their courses and seminars let him know via info[at]keynote-books.com.
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