Playing loud repetitive music is a common form of ‘torture.’ What kind of music is normally played? Will Oremus reports:

• The music has to be loud and repetitive.
• In the US the music is either aggressive such as Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, or Jangly such as Barney’s “I Love You”.
• The best strategy is to customize the music for each prisoner. Different people hate and like different things, so to be effective you have to find the music that your specific prisoner hates.
• In reality though the music selection seems to be more about the captor’s personal entertainment. Panama’s Dictator Manuel Noriega was repeatedly blasted with Van Halen’s “Panama”.

To read more about the art of selecting the right torture music, some other famous artists that have the ‘honour’ of being selected by the US military as effective torture musicians, what the Pentagon has to say about it, what a US psychological operations sergeant believes, how music preferences evolve over time, what science has to say about it, how Christmas plays into it, and thoughts on whether or not it’s an effective interrogation technique, click here.

Source: Slate