Sonic warfare is the use of sound to frighten, disorient, disperse or wear down people, and its history is shorter and stranger than the legends around it. Most documented episodes involve loudness, repetition and humiliation rather than exotic frequencies that damage bodies from a distance. This article looks at the cases that can be traced to reliable reports, the legal and ethical arguments they provoked, and the way musicians and theorists answered. It is a cultural history: it covers what was done and why it mattered, not how any device works in practice.
Steve Goodman and the ecology of fear
The most influential framework for the subject comes from Steve Goodman, a theorist. His book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, published by MIT Press in 2010, treats sound as a force that shapes mood and behavior before any conscious reaction. Its examples are deliberately mixed: long-range acoustic devices at the 2009 G20 summit in Pittsburgh, sound bombs over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency repellents aimed at teenagers in shopping malls. The same book also follows artists and musicians who use intense frequencies for aesthetic effect and for moving bodies on a dance floor.
That mixture is the point. Goodman places military hardware, retail security and club culture on one continuum of acoustic force, which is why the idea travels well into the territory described in the glossary entry on sonic warfare. The approach also explains why the topic belongs on a site about drone: sustained, low, loud or unpleasantly narrow sound is the raw material of both the weapon and the artwork, a tension that runs through the analysis of noise as a sound element.
Panama, 1989: loud music as siege tactic
One of the best-known episodes is not about technology at all. After the United States invaded Panama on December 20, 1989, Manuel Noriega took refuge in the Vatican embassy in Panama City on Christmas Eve. U.S. forces, unwilling to enter diplomatic premises, placed speakers around the perimeter and played rock and heavy metal at very high volume around the clock, according to a KQED account of the operation. Noriega surrendered on January 3, 1990.
The plan, as described there, was to smoke Noriega out, and General Maxwell Thurman ordered the speakers placed as a musical barrier around the embassy. The playlist became a piece of pop-culture trivia, with titles ranging from Guns N’ Roses to Black Sabbath, but the same account notes that national security adviser Brent Scowcroft later called the approach undignified. The episode set a pattern: loudness used as pressure, justified as non-lethal, and then remembered as embarrassing as much as effective.
Directed sound: the LRAD
The Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, belongs to a different category. According to a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty explainer, it was developed after the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, when the crew of the destroyer had no means of communicating with the small boat approaching them. The device projects sound in a narrow beam, both as a hailing system for spoken warnings and as a deterrent tone. The same explainer describes output of around 150 decibels, with a maker’s spokesman claiming it does no harm and critics pointing to risks of headaches, panic and potential hearing loss.
Its first widely reported use against attackers came at sea. In November 2005 the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit was attacked by pirates roughly 100 miles off Somalia, and the crew used an LRAD while the ship sped up and changed course, according to a newspaper report from that week. The attackers never got close enough to board. Four years later, in 2009, police in Pittsburgh used a truck-mounted unit against demonstrators at the G20 summit, the episode that made the device a headline item, and by 2013 the same explainer counted sales to 60 countries. Civil liberties groups in the United States and Canada have questioned its use on crowds.
The Mosquito: a sound only the young can hear
The Mosquito device is a quieter story with a sharper ethical edge. Designed by Howard Stapleton of Compound Security Systems in Wales, it emits a pulsed tone near 17 kilohertz that most adults cannot hear, as Stapleton explained in an NPR interview. Shops used it to drive teenagers away from their entrances, and the interview reports nearly a thousand units sold across the United Kingdom. In the interview, Isabel Stapleton puts the practical limit at around 20 years of age, so the people least able to hear the tone are precisely the adults who bought it.
That asymmetry drew formal criticism. On June 25, 2010, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe called for a ban on acoustic devices that target young people, arguing that they treat teenagers as pests, could infringe rights to private life and assembly, and might amount to degrading treatment because they inflict acoustic pain. The glossary entry on the Mosquito device covers its afterlife, including the ringtone built from the same principle.
Music as interrogation tool
The most disturbing documented use of sound as pressure involves detention. In a 2008 article in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the musicologist Suzanne Cusick used interrogators’ and former detainees’ accounts and unclassified military documents to show that loud music was a standard, openly acknowledged part of harsh interrogation at sites including Bagram, Guantánamo and Camp Nama in Baghdad between 2002 and 2006. She also reports that the same military materials teach ways of resisting this pressure, and her article closes with the account of a young American contractor held for ninety-seven days in 2006. She notes that U.S. Army interrogation field manuals from 1992 and 2006 filed such music under an approach called futility, which aims to persuade detainees that resistance is pointless.
Musicians pushed back publicly. In December 2008 the British legal charity Reprieve launched the Zero dB campaign, and Massive Attack and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine joined it in demanding that the U.S. military stop using their recordings on detainees. The campaign name refers to silence. The episode shows a reversal of the usual flow: instead of artists borrowing the language of military sound, working musicians insisted that their output not be conscripted.
Why the documented record matters
The cases above share a feature that gets lost in sensational retellings: none of them depends on an exotic frequency that harms bodies at a distance. The Noriega operation used rock and heavy metal over speakers. The LRAD, as the RFE/RL explainer describes it, is a loud directed beam that police also used to broadcast warnings, and the dispute is about whether loudness at that level counts as harmless. The Mosquito is a retail product whose controversy is about who it singles out. Cusick’s detention material concerns loud music used in custody, where the effect comes from the setting and the compulsion rather than from any property of the sound itself.
That is also why the rhetoric of weapons sits uneasily next to the rhetoric of music. When a recording is played to someone who cannot leave, who cannot lower the volume and who cannot predict when it will end, the same song changes function. Many of the reactions described by Goodman, by the Council of Europe and by the musicians of Zero dB turn on that loss of consent, not on decibels alone.
Myths, limits and the role of art
Popular accounts often blur these cases with stories of frequencies that rupture organs or induce nausea at will. Those claims belong to a different file, examined in the article on infrasound and the brown note myth and in the glossary entry on the brown note. The documented record is more mundane and more political: volume, repetition, directional amplification and age-selective tones used to disperse, deter or demoralize.
Artistic responses fall into three groups. Some work from within the aesthetics of force, as in the lineage of industrial music and the saturated slabs of noise wall. Others, following the Futurist celebration of noise, treat intensity as material. A third group, closer to acoustic ecology, studies how sound environments act on communities, and so supplies the vocabulary for describing harm. Goodman’s contribution was to see that all three share a premise: sound acts on bodies before it means anything.
For the cultural side of that premise, the site’s article on drone music in film shows how cinema turned the same unease into a soundtrack.
