#12708. Headphones, Auditory Violence and the Sonic Flooding of Corporeal Space
October 2026 | publication date |
Proposal available till | 21-05-2025 |
4 total number of authors per manuscript | 0 $ |
The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for |
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Journal’s subject area: |
Cultural Studies;
Health (social science);
Social Psychology; |
Places in the authors’ list:
1 place - free (for sale)
2 place - free (for sale)
3 place - free (for sale)
4 place - free (for sale)
More details about the manuscript: Science Citation Index Expanded or/and Social Sciences Citation Index
Abstract:
In this article, I develop and redirect Julian Henriques’s model of sonic dominance through examination of accounts of acoustic violence and torture involving headphones. Specifically, I show how auditory experience has been weaponized as an intracorporeal phenomenon, with headphones effecting a sense of sounds invading the interior phenomenological space of the head. By analysing reported cases of sonic violence and torture involving headphones through a composite theoretical lens drawn from the fields of music, sound and body studies, I argue that in saturating the head’s perceived interior with sound, perpetrators of violence perform sonic dominance across two interrelated levels: the subjugation of interiorized auditory space via the notion of flooding, in which attention is directed towards the experience of the body as a vessel for sound; and the resulting manipulation of phenomenological head–mind linkages, with emphasis on the head as a ‘space’ for both sound and thought.
Keywords:
head; headphones; interiority; sound; space; torture; violence
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