Of sound health: how industries from marketing to medicine to the military deploy sound and its impact on our physical and mental wellbeing

When we think about how sound is manipulated to produce psychological and physiological effects, the most obvious, widespread example is music, whose primary function is to make us feel a certain way. In other contexts, sound can also be employed for impact, designed to disturb and deter us, as when used by the military, for example, or to persuade and influence us in subtle and overt ways (advertising provides many examples).

In this piece, EM GUIDE speaks with experts across different fields — law, medicine, music, and marketing — to explore how sound is utilised in different industries, and the impacts of this use on our physical and mental well-being. Presumably, all our readers are music fans and can speak to the powerful, often transformative potential of music, especially when heard in communal and live settings. Whether obnoxious or surreptitious, music and other sounds have many applications outside of recreational contexts too, and are utilised to affect us for better and for worse. 
 

Sonic warfare

On March 15, 2025, some 325,000 people assembled in the streets of Novi Sad, Serbia, standing together in 15 minutes of silence to honour the 15 victims of an infrastructure collapse at Novi Sad railway station last November (a 16th victim died on March 21). The demonstration was one of hundreds of protests that have taken place in the country since the incident, with many blaming government corruption and shady dealings with Chinese contractors for the collapse. Serbian government officials, meanwhile, have largely tried to deflect blame and shirk accountability.

Video footage taken at the March 15 protest captured a high-pitched noise causing the crowds to briefly disperse in terror before returning to their positions on the street. Some suspected that the Serbian government might have used an LRAD, a long-range acoustic device, to disturb the demonstrators.

One protester said the noise sounded like a "plane was landing from the direction of the presidency building". Serbia’s populist president, Aleksandar Vučić, had already warned protestors that “those disrupting peace will be arrested and severely punished.” LRADs are illegal in Serbia, and following the March 15 incident, the government initially denied possessing any. When photographs emerged of the device mounted on a car at the protest, Serbian officials admitted to owning some of the devices, but denied having used them. James Parker, associate professor of law at Melbourne University who specialises in the jurisprudence of sound, says the March 15 incident is an interesting example of how difficult it can be to prosecute the unlawful weaponization of sound. “The specific dynamics of hearing a loud, shocking sound in that context is interesting,” he says. Parker can’t say for certain that an LRAD was used in Novi Sad. “It’s definitely possible since LRADs can be connected to MP3 players to play any sound,” he says. “But the roaring sound heard in Novi Sad isn’t typical of an LRAD, which is better known for its high-pitched and ear-splittingly loud alert tone.” Perhaps more important than the tool used is the intended and actual effect of the instrument. “If this is the weaponization of sound, it's in a slightly different way,” says Parker. “It's not about targeting the pain threshold in your inner ear, it’s about scaring the living shit out of you during a silent protest.” According to NPR, hundreds who were in the crowd complained of experiencing ”headaches, confusion, ear pressure or nausea” following the incident. These symptoms are consistent with those elicited by an acoustic weapon.

LRADs were developed following an Al Qaeda attack on a Navy destroyer off the coast of Yemen in 2000 that killed seventeen Americans and two suicide bombers. LRADs emit a powerful, narrow beam of sound that can act as a loudspeaker or, when set to alert mode, as a repellent to those in its vicinity. Initially deployed to protect large sea vessels from pirates, LRADs are now also extensively used by law enforcement. In 2020, LRAD manufacturer Genasys reported that the devices had been used by police in more than 450 cities across the US.

The LRAD’s alert feature emits loud beeping and chirping noises at up to 162 decibels from as far as 8.9km away. Sounds louder than 120dB are generally severely painful to the human ear. At 140dB or higher, sounds can cause instant and permanent damage. In 2021, the New York Police Department agreed in a legal settlement to stop using the alert feature after six Black Lives Matter activists sued the department for the migraines, sinus pain, dizziness, facial pressure, and ringing in their ears they experienced after being subjected to an LRAD at a Manhattan protest in 2014. “It’s specifically designed to target the most vulnerable pitch range for human hearing and cause pain,” says Parker of the LRAD’s alert feature. “If you're subjected to it, you can’t just chill and cope with the sound, you will have to move out of its way.”

Sound has been used as an instrument of war for centuries. The bugle was used by Roman legions as a tool for control and command as early as 93 AD, while advancements in technology helped soldiers locate enemy artillery and detect submarines underwater during World War 1. Over the past hundred years, sonic warfare has become prolific, increasingly advanced, and mutifarious, from acoustic mines first used by the German navy in 1940 and triggered by the sound of passing ships, to the music used to torture prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and many other detention facilities, ranging from heavy metal to Christina Aguilera to Westlife.

“A lot of the reason why sound is used as a weapon or a technique of power, control, and violence — and this includes music — is because people don't take it seriously,” says Parker. “It doesn't leave a scar, it doesn't leave any kind of bodily damage that you can easily see. It’s more internal — it’s in your eardrum and in the psychological trauma experienced.”

The absence of visual signs of bodily damage means that people underestimate the potency of sound and the harm it can cause. “People just don’t think it’s that bad,” says Parker. “They don't intuitively think you can break someone psychologically by exposing them to music for a long period of time, and you definitely can.”

Subjecting detainees to loud music was one of the methods of torture, euphemized as  “enhanced interrogation techniques”, employed by the US military from the early 2000s as part of its “war on terror”. What was sometimes known as “futility music” involved playing songs like Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” at blaring volume and on repeat for hours and hours in places such as Guantanamo Bay and a detention centre on the Iraqi-Syrian border? Rage Against The Machine’s “Killing In The Name” was another popular choice, but the selections spanned well beyond ear-splitting heavy metal and hard rock. “I Love You”, the theme song from the children’s TV show Barney & Friends, might be free from scorching guitar riffs, but it’s the kind of annoying earworm that gets stuck in your head at first listen, let alone when played on a loop and intended to “break” detainees psychologically. Some music was also chosen to scandalize its targets. “They imagined the detainees to be Islamic and very devout, and so they thought it was funny to taunt people with highly sexualised songs,” says Parker.

“The message was basically, you’re at the hands of the American imperial order, and 'top 40 music or music that we imagine is not appropriate to your religion.”
Celebrated artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan revealed another kind of sonic torture in his acclaimed acoustic survey of the Assad regime's Saydnaya prison in Syria, where making the slightest of noises puts detainees at risk of being killed by prison guards. In his essay on the artwork, Parker describes the opening minutes of Saydnaya (the missing 19db), where a former inmate explains that  “silence is the master” in the Syrian prison. “You can’t raise your voice. You can only whisper. And silence is what allows you to hear everything.” Prisoners were tortured and brutally beaten on a daily basis, but were forbidden from crying out or screaming. The sound of the beatings was the only thing that would pierce the silence in the prison, chilling fellow detainees who could never make their psychic pain audible.

Every ten to fifteen days, prison guards would collect hundreds of detainees from their cells, beat them, then load them into trucks at around 5 am and drive off. These prisoners were never seen or heard from again. The fifteen minutes of silence heard in between the trucks leaving and returning to the prison was referred to by one prisoner as “the sound of executions.” In 2023, Abu Hamdan founded Earshot, a non-governmental organization conducting “sonic investigations for communities affected by corporate, state, and environmental injustice”. Much of the organization’s work so far has focussed on how Israel has weaponized sound in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, and uses sonic analysis to investigate alleged war crimes.

Healing through music

The professionalisation of music therapy was born out of the terrors evoked by the sounds of war. Community musicians visited war veterans experiencing “shell shock” after exposure to intense shelling in the First and Second World Wars, and the benefits to soldiers were immediately felt, leading the hospitals to hire musicians to provide ongoing services.

Distinguished music therapist Dr. Deforia Lane recalls the seeds of her future career being planted when she was a child.  “I noticed how music changed people or the environment around me, it would bring people to tears at church and it would have arthritic women who could [ordinarily] barely make it down the aisle almost running with their arms fully extended singing songs of praise,” says the former director of music therapy at University Hospitals in Cleveland. “I just wondered what it was about music that could do that.”

 

At college, she majored in vocal performance and opera until an elective taken in music therapy immediately convinced her that this was her true calling. “I saw that I could use music beyond the stage,” she says. “I could use it to reach a child with autism or an adult with a mental disorder or a cancer patient.”

Music therapy is a science, a clinical and evidence-based profession. Once she switched to studying music therapy full-time, Lane realised that she’d need to produce studies containing replicable data to demonstrate the effectiveness of her practice. She learned about Salivary Immunoglobulin A (S-IgA), an antibody and protein produced by the immune system to fight infections, and conducted an experiment in which she tested the saliva of hospitalized children who had a 30-minute music therapy session. Patients who received the music therapy showed a significant increase in their S-IgA compared to children who did not receive the therapy session.

“That was a night in the lab that I will never forget,” says Lane. “I nicknamed it the spit and sing test, I literally had to collect the spit in test tubes and cap it and centrifuge it, and it was amazing to see that the results were so pronounced; that the music had caused an anatomical response.”

Another study conducted by one of Lane’s interns and co-authored by Lane investigated the effect of live and recorded perioperative music therapy on anesthesia requirements, anxiety levels, recovery time, and patient satisfaction in women experiencing surgery for diagnosis or treatment of breast cancer. There was no difference in satisfaction levels among patients who received music therapy versus those who didn’t, nor in the amount of anesthetic required, but the patients who received music therapy before their operation had lower anxiety scores, and those who had experienced live music therapy had a shorter recovery time following the operation.

Lane’s approach to treating individual patients is simple — she caters to their tastes, at least initially. That might mean playing Megadeth to relax patients who love thrash metal, then turning the volume down, decreasing the intensity of the music, and transitioning to slower and more therapeutic sounds that keep time with the body’s typical resting heart rate, between 60-80 beats per minute. “I have found this to work even in the intensive care unit, where a person is unresponsive and in a coma,” says Lane. “If their heartbeat is really up there, I can begin to sing something that their family has told me that they like, that's a favorite. And you can actually see the numbers on the monitor go from a very speedy heartbeat down to a significantly slower one.”

It’s clear from speaking with Lane and from hearing about her experiences of calming down patients suffering from PTSD and disturbed mental states that the demeanor of the therapist plays a big part in the effectiveness of the treatment. Even when she’s not singing, Lane has a soothing, mellifluous voice and an obvious knack for disarming patients and putting them at ease. When working with children in the burns unit, Lane would ask the patient’s parent or guardian to sing the child’s favourite songs along with her, then good-naturedly tease them — “Oh, your mama needs singing lessons!” — to lighten the mood. The singing and joking around would help speed up the debridement process by providing a distraction from the pain. Not all of Lane’s techniques have been the subject of scientific studies, but she’s been doing this long enough to know what works. “It's the way you interact, it’s the compassion from one heart to another, it’s the desire to make things well,” says Lane. “You can’t always measure that.”

While the benefits of music therapy are many and proven, music can also be hazardous to our health in certain situations. Tinnitus, typically characterised by a ringing, buzzing, or hissing sound that is heard in the absence of an external source, can be caused by aging, damage to the inner ear, or exposure to loud noises as heard at rock concerts or in nightclubs. Tinnitus can be managed, but not cured, with those suffering from it advised to wear earplugs in loud environments (most of us should do this anyway). Additional treatments include hearing aids, medications, healthy diet and exercise, cognitive behavioural therapy, and even tinnitus retraining therapy, where a combination of counselling and sound therapy is employed to habituate patients to the sound of their tinnitus, making it less intrusive and easier to deal with.

Inner ear damage can also affect balance, particularly among the elderly. Research conducted by the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai in 2020 revealed that people had more trouble staying balanced on an uneven surface when it was silent. “Ultimately an inability to hear puts patients at higher risk for instability and falls,” said senior author of the research Dr. Maura Cosetti. This finding is particularly significant given that falls are the leading cause of deadly injuries in the United States, and suggests that treating hearing loss might be a key step in preventing some of these fatalities.

The neuroscience behind human connection and music is a topic explored in a new documentary called We Become One, produced by AlphaTheta, the parent company of Pioneer DJ. In the film, psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel Levitin explains how our neurons fire synchronously with a beat and send electrical impulses that spur the production and release of different brain chemicals. These different brain chemicals produce different states of being, and when music inspires similar brain activity among people on the dance floor, it leads to an increased feeling of connectedness and unity. “If dopamine neurons are firing, they’re motivating us to participate in this behaviour,” says neuroscientist Dr. Julia C. Basso.

Selling sound

You’re likely familiar with some of the most successful examples of sonic branding without even realising it. The Netflix “ta-dun” that plays when you first land on its home page. The sound an Apple computer makes when it’s starting up. The satisfying pop of a ring pull chased by a fizzing drink poured over clinking ice. It’s easy to imagine this sound in particular inciting a Pavlovian response — it makes you want to head to the fridge and pull out your own can of Coke to crack open. 
Daniel Jackson, the self-described founding father of sonic branding (and founder of sound marketing agency SonicBrand) knows a thing or two about using sound to manipulate human behaviour. He’s behind the famous Kit Kat snap, a sound that has whet millions of appetites in different territories worldwide. “We must have done 1000 different snaps to get to the one that they chose,” says Jackson.

He realised the potential of sound marketing in the late ‘90s when working as a media planner on a campaign for Renault cars. Robert Palmer’s song “Johnny and Mary” was already being used by Renault in their advertisements for their Clio model, and they wanted to use the same song to promote the new Safrane car. “I got into looking at which radio stations Renault was going to book air time on, looking at who was listening to those stations, looking at what music was on those stations, and then turning that into a musical brief to rearrange that piece of music,” says Jackson. The key demographic for the Safrane was older male business executives, who turned out to listen to a lot of classical radio. Jackson and the team devised a classical version of Palmer’s song to target this more sophisticated customer. 
“‘Johnny and Mary’ was the fixed asset — that's the brand asset, that's its logo, that’s the distinctive asset that all brands want, and the adaptable piece was the arrangement,” says Jackson. 

“So if you compare it to a brand's font, you can change the color, you can change the typeface, you can stretch it out, but as long as you stick to that font, that asset retains its sense of what it is.”

Sonic branding, Jackson says, is an evolution from the jingles that dominated the market prior to the turn of the millennium. Jingles are still everywhere, but sonic branding exponentially expands the possibilities of a brand’s audio footprint.
“Sonic branding turned into this thing of, how do you essentially watermark every piece of music?” says Jackon. “How do you embed a melody within everything that the brand does, but keep it flexible enough so you can tell a thousand different stories across time and territory and touchpoint?”

 

Music, voice, and sound design make up the elements of sonic branding, although “music is the most flexible, emotive and, frankly, the place where there's the most revenue,” says Jackson. The use of voice has caught up slightly in recent years, with agencies regularly engaged to help design, clone, and operate AI voices for brands. Jackson has also noticed a shift away from the use of melodies, while distinctive audio assets linked to product experience are highly sought after.

Recent work done for a new airline required that Jackson and his team customise the sound design to suit different stages of the consumer experience. “We mapped every moment of the customer journey, from seeing the first piece of social content that gives someone awareness of the airline through to the booking process on the app, then the physical journey through the airport, from the check-in kiosks to airport lounges to boarding, inflight entertainment and disembarkation,” Jackson says. Luxury, technology, and Middle Eastern culture were the airline’s main branding touchpoints. SonicBrand’s job was to work within this framework to meet the customer’s needs and desires in different scenarios.

When boarding the plane and taking off, passengers typically respond well to a serene environment — music and sound design that calms them, makes them feel safe, and slows down their heart rate via low frequencies and reduced BPMs. The music used to attract attention to the brand on social media is a very different beast. “It's upbeat, it’s very exciting, it’s talking about the art of the journey and the world of possibilities,” says Jackson. “At those two contrasting points of the journey, one aim is arousal, while the pre-flight sound design aims to do the opposite, it’s more like sedation.”

Asked about the most memorable project he’s worked on, Jackson recalls an assignment for a Californian casino. They had just switched from traditional slot machines to electronic slot machines and wanted the digital machines to replicate the usual sound of coins falling out of the machine into a metal tray — the sweet cacophony of winning.
“The psychology of being in a casino is, the more you hear other people win, the more you're likely to gamble,” Jackson says. “So we re-engineered the sound of winning and called it ‘the happy sound of coins’, which meant recreating the sound of coins in a nice, subtle way. It sounded like people were still winning tons and tons of silver dollars even though there were no silver dollars in the entire place.”  

A more curious component of the job involved addressing the problem of women spending too much time in the restrooms, where they touched up their makeup to the tune of peaceful, spa-like music. “Five and a half minutes in the restroom is five and a half minutes not playing games,” says Jackson. “And so we started to run a little experiment. What if we made the restrooms less pleasant, less relaxing?” They turned up the decibels and increased the BPMs of the restroom music, and lo and behold, women began to get in and out of there quicker. “We got about two and a half minutes off the restroom time, and that two and a half minutes was then spent back at the tables,” says Jackson. The opposite technique was employed by a McDonald’s in northern Wales a couple of years ago, where Beethoven was played in an effort to reduce antisocial behaviour among youths loitering in the restaurant. Another McDonald’s in Shepherd’s Bush, London, had previously used this tactic with promising results. In 2017, there were 71 reports of crime in or near the Uxbridge Road restaurant, but this number dropped significantly once they began playing classical music in-store, according to a manager. 
 

Written by Annabel Ross

Annabel Ross is an Australian freelance journalist based in New York. She writes mainly about music and culture, and how they intersect with politics and social justice. She won the Drum Award for Best Investigative Journalism for her work on sexual assault in dance music for Mixmag. She has written for publications including The Guardian, Vice, Rolling Stone, Resident Advisor, and Billboard has a newsletter called The Politics of Dancing. 

This article is an EM GUIDE special curated by the editors of the EM GUIDE members and created in response to current trends and issues of the regional and global music industry.