Music as symbolic action

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe and exemplify a theoretical perspective for the analysis of music as symbolic action in critical studies of discourse. We use deployments of music by legislatures in Australia, the UK, and the USA as exemplar cases to develop foundations for a critical, non-semiotic perspective that sees music work as gestalt complexes of physical and cultural forces that move people towards or away from specific actions and attitudes. In presenting our perspective we critique some semiotic assertions about music that are commonplaces in discourse studies and elsewhere. Our cases draw on news reports and scholarly discourse about the use of music as a means of torture in warfare and as a means of purifying urban public spaces by keeping youth and homeless people out of them at night.

Introduction

Music is a complex human phenomenon that is central to cultures the world over. It has been analysed as semiosis (Machin and Richardson, 2012; Tagg, 1987; Van Leeuwen, 1999); rhetoric (Butler, 1980; Graham and Luttrell, 2019; Hawkins, 2003; Vickers, 1984); and sheer communication (Cross, 2014; Gfeller, 2002; Osmond-Smith, 1971). Many other perspectives might be included, such as the extensive music perception literature in psychology and neuropsychology, sheerly artistic analyses, or the vast literature on music and identity from musicology and cultural studies. But those stand outside the argument we present here. Our overall aim is to provide a foundation for theorising music as ‘symbolic action’ (Burke, 1978) within the broader aims of critical discourse studies and its concerns about power. In doing so we show the culturally transitive character of music; specific modes of doing things to people, places, institutions and cultures by musical means; and the complex cultural intersections of institutional and personal power that are best seen through the lens of symbolic action.

A symbolic action perspective is distinct from, though in some cases complementary to, a semiotic approach. The difference between the two can be seen most directly and elaborately in Burke’s What are the signs of what? (Burke, 1962). Whereas semiotics relies on a sign-object-interpretation relationship of one sort or another, a symbolic action perspective takes a view on meaning that theorises language as a system of titles for situations in which fictions, intentions, motivations, and the many species of cultural enhancement that give words their transformational force are all brought to bear upon groups and individuals in any meaning making event. The alembic functions of language, Burke shows, render our natural, supernatural, and sociopolitical worlds into various verbal worlds in which all things become possible, and in which all things are coloured by the ‘group motives’ endemic to any particular language (Burke, 1962, p. 6). A symbolic action perspective is uninterested in the definitional (or scientistic) regimes that semiotics can best investigate, which is to say the is-/is-not conceptual and propositional aspects of meaning. It is instead concerned primarily with how our meanings work as motivated and motivating forces: in short, it looks for the do-/do-not preceptual aspects of meaning (Burke, 1966). Finally, a symbolic action perspective distinguishes between action and motion, with an analytical focus on action (Burke, 1978). Action is motivated, unpredictable, wilful, and enculturated whereas motion is sheer physics, untroubled by the vagaries of culture or individual wills. To distinguish between action and motion is to grasp the difference between kicking a stone and kicking another person. The results of kicking a stone can be analysed or predicted using the laws of physics which, if correct, are fairly much eternal in their assumed validity. The consequences of kicking another person will invoke personal histories, laws, cultural morés, moods, character, circumstance, social hierarchies and any number of other potential influences. While action is always grounded in motion the inverse does not hold (Burke, 1978).

The cases we use here to exemplify our argument are in some degree extreme or at least atypical where analyses of music are concerned. The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was beyond criminal, designed to humiliate, degrade, and torture. Music was a omnipresent part of the kinds of ‘enhanced interrogation’, ‘torture light’ or ‘touch-free torture’ used in those places (Stafford Smith, 2008). Our other selection of exemplars comprises efforts in Australia and the UK to clear public spaces of homeless people and youth. Both exemplar classes have characteristics that helpfully foreground the cultural force of music on the one hand and its sheer physics on the other, both of which are required to clearly see music as symbolic action.

Music as meaning versus music as symbolic action

Analytical approaches to music have tended to see music as meaning, usually as either referential or non-referential modes of expressing emotion (see, e.g. Hunter and Schellenberg, 2010; Juslin and Sloboda, 2013). Cultural and communicative analyses have tended towards semiotic or social semiotic models (Machin and Richardson, 2012; Tagg, 1987; Van Leeuwen, 1999; Way, 2019). Rhetorical approaches tend towards issues of style, symmetry, and epideixis (Graham and Luttrell, 2019). Communicative models tend towards issues of referentiality, community and collective identity (Frith, 2004; Osmond-Smith, 1971; Rajs, 2007). These are useful models focused on how people make meaning with and of music. Our focus here, though, is on music as symbolic action, as a means of doing things to and through other people. We see this as especially useful if not necessary in understanding the way music can figure in the exercise of power at multiple levels, a key concern of critical discourse studies.

Part of the difficulty in comprehending music as action of any kind is the effects of nominalisation (Djonov and Van Leeuwen, 2018). As terminology, music is nominalised action. The effects of that include the removal of all aspects of human agency, whether on the music making or the music listening side. In some cases nominalisation leads to a false sense of agency for music itself, even in the most incisive analyses. Hirsch’s (2012) outstanding book on music in crime and punishment asserts the following: ‘I study music in action rather than as a species of property. Indeed, though the prevention and punishment of crime may not seem to invite music’s involvement, music operates—acts—in this regard to startling ends, and these ends directly affect people in complicated ways’ (p. 4). For us this expresses a grammatical mistake. Music per se cannot act of its own accord and therefore typically appears in a dramatist grammar as either means (Agency) or part of context (Scene) (Burke, 1945/1962: Ch 1). In some cases, musicality might be seen as a property of Agents, as when people are described as being musical. Music can also take up the grammatical position of Purpose, as in music is my life type statements.

Some awkward efforts have been made to rescue music from the stultifying effects of its nominalisation using terms like ‘musicking’ and ‘to music’ (Small, 1998; Sturman, 2019). The efforts required to unpack the noun are extensive because, as terminology, music covers an enormous multitude of activities and contexts, as indicated by Small (1998). He says that ‘[t]o music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing’ (Small,1998: 9). Small includes piano removalists, road crew, and ticket sales people among those involved in the verbal group ‘to music’ (p. 9). Sturman (2019) notes that a musical score also plays a role in objectifying our understandings of music. Vinyl records, cassettes, and reels of tape are similarly thing-like objects that hide the social, cultural and political aspects of music, not just in its making, but also its placement in movies, streaming services and all media forms.

The otherwise muted public attention given to music as anything other than entertainment or pleasure can be transformed into high intensity conflict during political campaigns, with artists, politicians and audiences fighting over the right to associate specific pieces of music with those campaigns (see, e.g. Patch, 2017). Episodes such as those described by Patch, in which political candidates are sued or publicly skewered for using songs without permission express much more than issues of political partisanship. Centuries of copyright law, commercial considerations in respect of audience and marketing, the personal and interpersonal politics of the artists involved, and culture itself all impinge loudly on such matters. The nominalisation of music hides social, cultural, legal and technical complexity – from the vagaries of composition and arrangement, to rehearsals, to the often fraught and mysterious processes of recording and performing music, to the manifold accidents of interaction with audiences of all kinds. The term music for us, then, always refers to complex, active cultural and technical processes that are largely hidden by the term itself.

With all those aspects of music in mind, we focus specifically on the deployment (or distribution in political economic terms) of recorded music by legislators to achieve military and political aims. We choose these classes of musical acts to establish a foundation for later analyses of composition, production and performance, and to more pointedly exemplify the value of seeing music as symbolic action in the exercise of power. We specifically do not analyse lyrics in the cases we present because they are either absent from the kinds of music being deployed or irrelevant to the aims of that deployment, with the legislative emphasis operating at the level of genre rather than any particular message. What becomes clear in the cases we show here is the difference between music as a system of physical forces – what Burke would call ‘sheer motion’ – and music as a culturally charged system of ‘symbolic action’ (Burke, 1966).

Music as symbolic action and music as semiosis

Music had its reputation cleansed during the Romantic era during which its negative aspects were muted, thereby removing its cultural dialectics (Hirsch, 2012: 16). Like creativity more generally, post-Romantic cultural elites typically cast music in a positive light as the language of the spirit, the universal language, the source of identity, and so on (Hirsch, 2012: 16–17). We make no such assumptions. An analysis of music in the aggressive contexts we have chosen may seem anathema, but as Ross (2016) says:

When music is applied to warlike ends, we tend to believe that it has been turned against its innocent nature. To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. (Ross, 2016)

Ross (2016) identifies multiple ways that music is used as violence, including outright torture. Cloonan (2011) shows us that the use of music as a weapon, and its place as an integral element of violence, is an historically perennial fact, from Troy to VietNam, from Jericho to recent wars in the Middle East. Quignard (2016) tells us that ‘in ancient Greece, the mousa of mousikè was named Erato. She was a prophetess of Pan, the god of panic, traveling in a state of trance under the effect of drink and the consumption of human flesh’ (Quignard, 2016: 1). Plato’s criticisms of music focused on the civic detriment wrought by what he saw as the trancelike state of an oral society – fast moving towards literacy – that should instead give itself over to reason (Havelock, 2019). He saw the people of Athens as victims of music. Today’s commonplace cultural assumptions about the unerringly beneficial effects of music may well be little more than historical anomaly (Hirsch, 2012: Ch. 1).

In critical discourse studies, a study by Machin and Richardson (2012) is exceptional in this regard. They analyse, through social semiotic means, the ways in which music was used by fascists in Germany and Britain to arouse nationalistic and fascistic sentiment. As much as we appreciate the work and its aims, we would point to some aspects of the semiotic perspective that we see as problematic but that also help us make the case for symbolic action and its dramatistic viewpoint. Machin and Richardson (2012) are careful to note that, like language, ‘we have come to make cultural associations between particular musical sounds and patterns and emotions, attitudes, settings and events’, and that ‘[s]ounds and sound qualities can have meaning through cultural accumulation of associations’ (p. 330). In that we agree wholeheartedly, but only at the level of whole musical pieces or musical genres. In arguing from a semiotic perspective that note choice, pitch, rhythm, tempo and key have specific meanings in and of themselves, the argument edges towards what we see as an essentialism that contradicts their cultural association argument. For example, they suggest that higher pitches are associated ‘with higher levels of energy and brightness and lower pitches with associations of low levels of energy’ (p. 335). There is no clear correlation between the physical effort involved in, for example, singing or playing a high note than a low one, although typical visual accompaniments of face-pulling and expansive gesturing can give the impression that there is such a correlation (Thompson et al., 2005). At a sheer sonic level, acoustics is clear that the greater energy is in low frequencies to which anyone who has ever tried to soundproof a room can attest (Botteldooren, 1995). In dance clubs, the ‘beat drop’ almost always involves an explosive introduction of low frequency instruments, usually bass and drums, to realise driving energy in a track. In other contexts, a high-pitched scream will induce all sorts of energies and inferences.

Machin and Richardson also include the semiotic commonplace asserting that major keys are perceived as happy and minor keys are perceived as sad. Since the North American adoption of West-African musical melody and harmony systems in Jazz and Blues, discussions of tonality in terms of major and minor keys are largely moot, given the majority of recorded popular music now uses the tonally ambiguous centres of these styles (Rohrmeier, 2020). In popular music, key is often ambiguous thanks to heavy reliance on pentatonic scales, such as the AC/DC track TNT, or Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog, both reliable party tracks. Or take for instance LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem in E minor, or Those Were The Days and Drunken Sailor (both in minor keys) as older examples of songs in minor keys that are anything but sad. Conversely, REM’s Everybody Hurts, Hey There Delilah and Prince’s Nothing Compares To You are all sad songs in major keys. There are any number of examples that counter the major-minor assumption which, like the other semiotic commonplaces we have mentioned, has for decades featured in semiotic, social, and humanistic analyses of music. But we know of no particular elemental part of music that has definite, universal, inherent, or automatic effects in respect of listeners’ perceptions or associations. At one level, musical effects are a matter of context-bound associations, certainly, which Richardson (2017) goes on to elaborate in a later publication. Moreover, musical effects are related to whole pieces, or even whole genres, rather than to isolate semiotic elements in the music. Or, to put it differently, we argue that the motivational functions of music cannot be analysed sufficiently through methods that derive from semiotics with its sign-signifier focus. In fact we think that an elemental semiotic approach can work in opposition to the more contextual, generic, and culture-level perspectives that a symbolic action approach can provide (Graham, 2016).

While we critique the semiotic approach here, we understand its usefulness in analysing the stimulus-response character of cultural conventions and the scientistic aspects of meaning making. We also note liminal approaches to sound and music in the literature that sit between semiotic and symbolic action approaches. Van Leeuwen (1999), for example, specifies ‘sound acts’ in the way that Austin and Searle specify speech acts ( p. 92).

With sound we announce our presence, hail, warn, call for help, lull to sleep, comfort, and much more. Birds have their pleasure calls, distress calls, territorial defence calls, flight calls, flock calls and so on, but, as Schafer noted . . . so have people. In the right context, music can be a pleasure call, the car horn a territorial defence call, the police siren an alarm call and so on. In all this the dividing line between speech, music, and other sounds is thin (p. 92)

The last sentence of that insightful passage indicates the liminality between action and motion in the chosen examples. Like Austin and Searle’s speech acts, the sound and the act are the ‘same thing’, so to speak. They brook no conversation since they are what they are in a strictly conventionalised sense. Certainly this is not an argument to assume the noises that birds make are in the same order as sophisticated human language, nor that an abstract conversation can be carried on with car horns or police sirens. Car horns cannot be used to discuss car horns, just as police sirens cannot discuss the nature of any emergency they might signify. And while Van Leeuwen notes that train whistles can be used to pass on ‘many different messages between trains’, such exchanges cannot be confounded with the broader frame of human meaning since the train noises have to be translated back to language to become messages; that is, although they rely on language for their meaning, they are not language. Nor are they in the same order as the rhythmic songs noted by Mumford (1934/1962) and others that have regulated work in the past: ‘The workshop song, the street cries of the tinker . . . the chanties of the sailor hauling the ropes, the traditional songs of the field, the wine-press’ (p. 343). These are also more sophisticated liminal examples insofar as they are forms of self-regulating action that are tied almost completely to specific classes of motion. Similarly with the advertisers’ ideas of musical regulation, in which customers are subliminally nudged along, calmed, or excited by sounds, music, smells, and other ambient stimuli that have ‘a powerful effect on the human brain’ in some allegedly automatic (i.e. non-symbolic) way (Akoustic-Arts, 2023). Such appeals are always to motion, to the physiology or neurology of human subjects, regardless of culture or circumstance. The symbolic action approach is wholly interested in enculturated action, to the point at which the critical distinction between action and motion becomes most clear. Contact, context, and culture are critical points at which the symbolic action of music can be most clearly seen.

In researching the uses of music in Nazi concentration camps, Brauer (2016) makes the following conclusions in respect of music and meaning, contact and context:

Music itself has no inherent meaning or emotional content. This is what makes the contact zone necessary and productive. Music’s effect and the emotions attached to music are strongly linked to experiences, those at the time of listening as well as past experiences that have already been internalized in the listener. The effect also depends on the circumstances surrounding perception . . . Furthermore, the impact of music is not entirely determined by the individual listener; it is dependent on broader, shared social factors and is subject to change over time. (Brauer, 2016: 9)

Which is also to say that an approach relying on cultural association to explain why particular musical pieces acquire certain social valencies should avoid where possible essentialising or universalising any component parts of that music. In fact for critical social analysis componentry need not enter the picture at all. The cultural force of any musical piece derives from its overall conventionalised place in a given culture at a given time for given groups of people. Nor are musical conventions universally consistent in their effects across cultures and sub-cultures. Because music is a culturally, historically, and socially dynamic product of infinitely complex human interactions, the status and effects of any piece or genre are always in transition, always on the move. Beyond the sheer geography of space, time impinges, and musical forms that are culturally powerful in one place or one era can be totally repulsive in another, as we show below.

Musical weapons

In outlining what we mean by the term musical weapons we need to establish important distinctions between the sheer motion of sound and the symbolic action of music through which both music and sound are weaponised. Burke (1978) points to the fundamental nature of the motion-action distinction:

This is the basic polarity (like the traditional pair res and verba, things and the words for things). It’s at the root of such distinctions as mind-body, spirit-matter, superstructure- substructure, and Descartes’ dualism, thought and extension. I say “at the root of such distinctions” though no such terms quite match the motion-action pair. (Burke, 1978: 809)

The distinction is the basis of Burke’s (1978) dramatistic analysis which extends to ‘modes of symbolicity as different as primitive speech, styles of music, painting, sculpture, dance, highly developed mathematical nomenclatures, traffic signals, road maps, or mere dreams’ (p. 809). To make our case for a symbolic action perspective on music as discourse we present case studies of torture using music and sound in prison camps and urban policing. We begin with the urban context.

Doing urban warfare with music

The most recent practices of urban sonic policing began in 1985 in Canada when a chain of 7-Eleven stores began playing Mozart and Beethoven to get rid of loitering teenagers from outside their stores (Hirsch, 2012: pp. 16–18; Prisco, 2019). In 1999, in the Illawara district of New South Wales, a shopping mall used a single Bing Crosby song on repeat, again to ward off troublesome teenagers after hours (Apap, 2008). The Irish Times reports the Woolongong innovation as follows:

An Australian mall has turned to Bing Crosby to scare away loitering teenagers from its entrances, according to a report yesterday. . . . The Warrawong Westfield mall in Wollongong, south of Sydney, has begun playing Crosby’s hit My Heart is Taking Lessons repeatedly to keep its entrances teenager-free, The Daily Telegraph said. (The Irish Times, 1999)

The BBC reports that the programme was fairly much an instant success with police suggesting that other communities put ‘loudspeakers in public squares and railway stations’ to achieve the same results (BBC, 1999). Hirsch (2012) details other legislative campaigns to purify public spaces throughout English speaking countries using mostly classical music, but also other genres of ‘uncool’ light pop from the 1950s (2012: Ch 2).

The trend of using sonic measures to repel teenagers from urban spaces took a non-symbolic turn into the realm of noise in 2006 with a device called ‘the mosquito’ (Townsend, 2010). Despite ongoing protests and human rights litigation it remains in use today. The mosquito emits a loud, high-pitched noise at frequencies that can only typically be heard by people younger than 25. That includes babies and young children. Consequently it ran into legislative problems in Europe:

An investigation by the Council of Europe found that the controversial “mosquito” device should be banned from Britain immediately because it violates legislation prohibiting torture. It found that “inflicting acoustic pain on young people and treating them as if they were unwanted birds or pests, is harmful [and] highly offensive”. (Townsend, 2010)

There have been multiple challenges to the mosquito for human rights violations and its discriminatory use against teenagers, children, and babies (Kirk, 2017). It has been declared in violation of torture statutes in the UK, EU and Scottish Parliaments (Watling, 2021). We are aware of no such legalistic efforts where the use of music is involved. While it remains in use, the mosquito’s effectiveness as teen deterrent is waning: being ever industrious, teenagers began to use its sound as a ringtone to keep their communications hidden from adults (Block, 2006).

The use of classical and older popular music to deter teenagers and other undesirable types from loitering in public spaces continued apace. Brisbane City Council (BCC), the local legislative body for the State capital of Queensland, Australia, began a programme of sonic policing designed around the deployment of western ‘classical’ music in 2012 (Lynch, 2019). The programme implemented a public address (PA) system playing classical music very loudly in prominent public spaces between the hours of 9 pm and 7 am to deter populations of homeless people, young people, and other groups identified as undesirable by Council. The music was explicitly intended to make sleeping in public spaces untenable for disadvantaged and vulnerable groups with the desired end of dispersing those people from the city centre altogether. But if the desired outcome was simply sleep deprivation and discouraging homeless populations by blasting noise at them, then a sine wave, or any other sound played at sufficient volume would achieve the same effect (Bonnet and Arand, 2000). However, the BCC approach also includes multiple forms of symbolic violence as an important part of the technical effect.

An outsourced security organisation is responsible for the BCC PA systems and for programming the classical recordings to be played on a loop, a genre-level decision. The approach is predicated on an assumption that the BCC’s undesirables would not and could not enjoy classical music and that it would be aesthetically and therefore culturally offensive to them. Any act necessarily includes sheer, non-symbolic motion, and the music is played at loud volumes to augment the cultural effects with physiological ones. Many cultural and legal implications arise. For example, while the council can seemingly get away with playing loud classical music all night at levels that contravene its own noise regulations, it could not as easily get away with loudly deployed playlists comprising Metallica, Beastie Boys, or Gangsta rap all night long. Classical music is an acceptable choice of musical weapon, largely because it is identified with the Romantic version of high culture in which ‘good’ art is assumed to civilise upon contact. In other words, classical music is considered in many legislative contexts to be a normative system. To be effective as normative violence, the BCC deploys both aspects of its strategy: the symbolic, or culturally loaded genre-level decisions and the sheer motion of sound played at loud levels.

War and musical torture

There are identities to be drawn between trends in urban deployment of music and the methods found in the well-documented ‘advanced interrogation techniques’, or torture, deployed against the prisoners of war in American Black Ops sites like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib (Stafford Smith, 2008). Again, symbolic and non-symbolic aspects are in evidence almost wherever the matter is discussed. In all cases, volume is used to deprive victims of sleep. On that basis it is easy to view the method as a programme of non-symbolic biophysical disruption based solely on the sheer motion of sonic force. Cusick (2008) hits on the motion-action pair in defence of a high-minded idea of music, even while recognising the damage being done to victims:

. . . it is not at all clear that the music aimed at prisoners in detention camps has functioned as music. Rather, it has more often functioned as sheer sound with which to assault a prisoner’s sense of hearing; to ‘mask’ or disrupt a prisoner’s capacity to sustain an independent thought; to disrupt a prisoner’s sense of temporality (both in terms of how much time had passed and in terms of the predictability of temporal units); to undermine a prisoner’s ability to sustain somatic practices of prayer (both through behaviour at the hours of prayer and through abstinence from musical experiences considered sinful); and to bombard the prisoner’s body (skin, nerves and bones) with acoustical energy. (Cusick, 2008)

Cusick’s claims are that any noise will do for torture and that music stops being music when it is used in the ways he describes. But the claim does not hold theoretical water. The musical weapons used in wartime and urban contexts are chosen by their curators for antagonistic cultural resonances which are assumed to be anathema to the cultural sensibilities of their targets (Hirsch, 2012; Thompson, 2017). Music is always more than the sheer motion (noise) through which it is expressed. Using classical music in urban contexts is ‘repellent’ to youth, says Thompson, again distinguishing between its symbolic and non-symbolic aspects:

classical music is not just repellent because of the order and nature of its sonic materials. Rather, classical music is offputting to some because of its symbolic capital and cultural baggage. And in being off-putting, it serves to diminish the disruptive power of ‘undesirable’ subjects. (Thompson, 2017: 279)

As state-endorsed torture, the use of music first finds its first modern place in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Hirsch (2022) summarises its nature as follows, also hitting on the action-motion pair:

This musical torture was physical and psychological, often at the same time. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, those in charge played German Christmas carols to predominantly Jewish prisoners—a taunting and humiliating attack for some on identity and tradition. . . . The message was clear. Torture victims have no voice of their own. And music, part of inmates’ cultural identities, had betrayed them. Their self-investment in music now worked for someone else. (Hirsch, 2022: 172)

A holocaust survivor was asked what she remembers hearing in the camp and said: “Just beatings, torture, hangings. Things like that. . . Just those whips going constantly and the singing.” Hirsch reports that ‘[s]imilar memories resound in accounts of music in the concentration camps. In these accounts, music caused physical pain’ (p. 172). Quignard (2016) points out that of all arts ‘music was the only one to have collaborated in the extermination of Jews organised by the Germans between 1933 and 1945. It was the only form of art to be specifically requested by the administration of the Konzentrationlager’ (Quignard, 2016: 129).

Little more than half a century later in Guantanamo Bay prisoners of war were subjected to loud, heavy guitar music, often with violent or pornographic lyrics, or pop music with female leads singing lyrical themes entirely antagonistic to Muslim morés and laws (Stafford Smith, 2008). The aim was to inflict cultural and therefore moral wounds upon detainees, adding ‘insult to injury’ (Hirsch, 2022). Hirsch again identifies the interaction of non-symbolic and symbolic aspects of the music played as torture:

The negative effects of this music depended on the sound and volume of music, regardless of the specifics of the music involved. But American soldiers also made use of particular musical selections to add to the effect, especially music associated with the West. Music in this way became a stand-in and was meant to be insulting. (Hirsch, 2022: 173)

Hirsch reports that the cultural insults included music from television shows, ‘earworms’ played at high volume on endless rotation, including Barney and Friends’ I Love You, and other Western popular music which ‘contravened Muslim proscriptions against sensual or frivolous music’ (p. 173). It is worth noting that the earworm effect mimics stroke symptoms (Buchwald et al., 2020) and effectively silences inner dialogue, denying victims their own thoughts and voice.

The Guantanamo Bay case shows the deployment of music as a symbolic act aimed at aggressively inflicting physical and cultural insults to the point of moral and psychological corruption of its victims, up to and including the breakdown of personality. The perpetrators of the violence are keenly aware of the effects of their actions but can rationalise the cultural element as merely being a matter of musical taste without consideration or discussion of the long-term destructive effects of musical violence (Hirsch, 2022). Musical torture therefore has a cultural benefit on the home front: one of the most potent and threatening aspects of these musical deployments is to absolve the torturers of moral infringements by replacing questions of morality with the seeming trivialities of aesthetic taste.

Discourse and music as symbolic action

That music, especially popular music, is seen as culturally trivial (Gerrard, 2013), if not disposable, in the West is advantageous to a state that has resolved to introduce musical torture into its warfare tactics. The relegation of music to trivia is a product of discourse formations that downplay or ignore the significance of art and artistic forms in favour of cash value and the technological effect. Such can be seen in trivialising responses to musical torture. In the US, reporting on the issue evidenced widespread humour as a response from multiple audiences:

Writing for The Nation, Moustafa Bayoumi offered a lighthearted observation: “Finally, dangerous terrorists—like everyone else—will be tortured by Britney Spears’s music!” The St. Petersburg Times even solicited song suggestions from its readers, turning torture into a game: what music would “drive the insurgents out of Fallujah, break down Iraqi prisoners or just drive their neighbours nuts”. But it wasn’t just reporters or online responses that reveled in music’s destructive use. Music students, specialists, also turned to humor in their initial processing of violent music. In a 2015 study of university music students’ perception of musical torture, John Paul and Stephanie K. Decker observed that the students were “initially confused by the concept” but quickly saw humor in it. One student explained, “Torture? I live in a place that only plays country music on the radio—now that’s torture”. (Hirsch, 2012: 124)

So music is seen as a safe, trivial, and even hilarious means to conduct torture, at least from the distant homelands of the countries committing it, despite the fact that weaponised music has produced any amount of psychological and physical harm, up to and including deafness and death from exhaustion (cf. Hirsch, 2022: 172; Brauer, 2016).

Other trivialising reactions to news of musical torture include academic attempts to reframe music as ‘sheer sound’ once it is used as torture, as Cusick does above. They also include classist discourses of high art, suggesting with Matthew Arnold that genre (meant here as text type) itself is morally uplifting and essentially civilising. Hirsch (2022) notes the reaction of American composer, Ned Rorum, who suggests that Guantanamo prisoners were not being tortured by music because, based on his theory of artistic autonomy, if the music was being used for anything whatsoever it could no longer be music:

“The more an artwork succeeds as politics, the more it fails as art”. Elsewhere, he explained: “Music that does impel action tends to be not even music per se, but a hypnotic beat inciting us to battle”. According to ideas of music’s Romantic autonomy, any use of music is thereby a problem. Musicologist Stephen Hinton summed up the sentiment, “if music has a specific use then it is not really music at all”. (Hirsch, 2022: 175)

Here is another powerful reason as to why legislatures can get away with musical abuse more easily than they can with sheer sonic methods such as the mosquito: a stubborn, elitist adherence to the point of view that using music as torture debases music to the point at which it is non-musical; that it is not music if it is used for any purpose whatsoever. Hence the music is blameless as are the people who deploy it. This is a move that ignores the effects on victims in favour of concerns for music itself, a point noted by Hirsch (2022). Similarly, the urban policing trend has produced suggestions that programming classical music degrades that music to the point of non-musicality. But Thompson (2017) identifies the racist and classist aggression behind the use of classical music:

Weaponized classical music is both informed by and serves to reinforce classical music’s raced and classed connotations: the musical materials are selected on the basis that they are at odds with the cultural values and aesthetic tastes of ‘loiterers’. Likewise, the long-standing investment in classical music as a force for moral good underlines and is reinforced the imagined capacity of weaponized classical music to calm, soothe and abate deviant behaviour. (Thompson, 2017: 281)

In what follows, we discuss the implications for critical studies of discourse of understanding music as symbolic action including and beyond issues of race and class.

Music, symbolic action and critical discourse studies (CDS)

It is generally accepted that critical studies of discourse are to some large extent semiotic pursuits. What we have argued here is that a semiotic perspective, social or otherwise, is likely insufficient beyond the bounds of the linguistic paradigms from which it historically emerged, as Van Leeuwen (1999) suggested might be the case decades ago. Our approach suggests the usefulness of taking a symbolic action perspective on non- or extra-linguistic phenomena for critical analyses of discourse. Our exemplar cases point up the difference between sound as non-symbolic motion (biophysical assault) and the symbolic action of music (cultural assault). Even while those two aspects can become entirely entangled in the case of music, the distinction is essential if we are to undertake critical analyses in a symbolic action or dramatistic frame. Burke notes the significance of doing so:

Like organisms presumably have similar pleasures and pains, but these are immediately experienced only within the centrality of each one particular organism’s nervous system, as individuated at parturition.

The Self as a “person”, member of a community (Culture) characterized by motives in the realm of symbolic action, is not thus differentiated. In this respect the Self becomes a product of the Culture. (Burke, 1978: 813)

That tension – between individual bodies as sheer, biomechanical organisms existentially isolated from all others, and semi-stable groups of people with distinct and shared cultural conventions – is central to any critical understanding of human interaction. A move to the perspectival frame of symbolic action means that motive comes to the fore, along with the ethical and moral dimensions of anything defined as a motivated act. We are moved to ask how, where, when, why, and by whom something is done to some person or group with which ends in mind. In Burke’s grammar these are Scene (when/where), Act (what was done), Agent (who did it?), Agency (by what means?), and Purpose (to what ends) (Burke, 1945/1962: Ch 1). These elements describe a distinctly different critical slant on social problems than can be derived semiotically. Motive and motivation, and a constant ear for what is being asked or demanded of people, become central, with questions of what signs signify which phenomena rarely if ever being canvassed.

The urban examples we have used are motivated by legislators seeking to keep specific kinds people out of specific public spaces. In that respect music and sound are deployed to mark out prohibited space and repel undesirable people from it. Sheer sound can be included as part of symbolic action in such cases, at least when seen from the legislators’ point of view, and in so far as noise can be included as Agency (means) alongside music. But according to our orientation, noise is a biophysical assault on the individual organism rather than on enculturated groups. Or, music is chosen to inflict cultural effects rather than biophysical ones, and it is at the level of culture that discourse operates, both constitutionally and agonistically (Lemke, 1995).

Seen from the perspective of the people at whom the measures are aimed, music is experienced as part of a hostile Scene in which their presence, and even their existence, is loudly heckled by aggressive and often unseen Agents who only appear in the form of their chosen Agency: loud and culturally offensive music. Hirsch (2012) acknowledges long-standing assumptions associated with classical music that place it in a positive pedagogical frame, one in which the classical genre purportedly civilises and elightens those who hear it (Hirsch, 2012: Ch 1). Of course, as Hirsch and others point out, the mode of policing that such initiatives undertake does nothing to improve the lot of homeless people or troublesome youth at whom the measures are aimed. Instead the measures are punitive, classist, racist, ageist, and exclusionary in their intent and operation. They are aesthetically, and therefore culturally, specific measures targeted directly at a legislatively constructed idea of what the targets are in cultural, intellectual, and socio-economic terms. Instead of a concern with the semiotic elements of music, a symbolic action perspective operates at the level of discourse without requiring analysis to reach into elemental detail, which is especially helpful in the case of music and other extra- or other-than-textual art forms. It can also be helpful amidst the current blitz of new media forms that facilitate a total immersion in new material used in new ways, cheaply produced and with world-changing social effects. We say that because once we see music as symbolic action we see a grammar of complex forces emanating from culture and institutions of all kinds, from copyright and international law to issues of identity and personal taste. We also see the diminution of music in discourse, with the downplaying of music’s negative effects on those subjected to it as punishment. Far from being simple expressions of emotion or identity, as is so often claimed for music, once seen as symbolic action, we see that music brings forth entire worlds to bear upon its audiences, along with the orientations, biases, and attitudes of those worlds.

Yet it is useful and necessary, as Attali (1985) showed, to understand the internal connections between music and noise, and that noise, as sheer physical force, is inseparable from music and life itself, just as action can never occur without motion. Similarly, Burke (1978) tells us that while all action necessarily includes sheer motion the reverse is not true. It is in the realms of motive at which symbolic action becomes most powerful in the social and cultural analysis of music as an element of Discourse. In the cases we have shown above, Music appears in the grammatical position of Agency (means) for the legislatures involved and Scene (context, environment) for the targets of the musical weapons. Agencies have a tendency to take on the colour and character of the Agents wielding them, and so the motives of the legislative Agents become a central focus for analysis. Music per se can never be Agent, even though it might be placed artificially in that grammatical role. And when legislative Agents talk about the music they are deploying to achieve social, cultural, and especially political ends, because they are talking about means, they are telling us about symbolic acts in which music is involved, about the exhortations and prohibitions they hope to impose, about the purpose and character of their public exhortations, and about their view of the people at whom their measures are aimed. In short, from the perspective of symbolic action, they are instructing us about their motives.

Music is a non-referential, non-elemental, pre-linguistic, culturally dynamic, gestalt foundation of human communication, inseparable from language itself. For centuries, music provided the framework for social and cultural memory among preliterate humans and so human cultures are thoroughly infused with its causes and effects, its residues, and its political powers (Havelock, 2019). Any discourse community will have its own sounds, its own songs, its own acoustic environments that mark it as distinct. Those environments, being comprised of conventionalised musical acts, shape what can and cannot be heard and expressed within them–the proprieties of any culture extend both from and to the sounds and music it makes. As our public sphere becomes more noisy by the day, as the silent world of print and textuality melts into the raucous, always-on, rhetorical jungle of new communication technologies, new social media forms, and new artificial intelligence tools, our challenges will, as the New London Group (Cazden et al., 1996) and Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996) told us decades ago, become increasingly multimodal, increasingly complex and condensed. Further: besides becoming more multimodalised, we are also becoming more thoroughly multimediated, by email, WhatsApp, Zoom, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and the hundreds of other platforms that constitute the foundations of our new Babel. To cope, critical discourse studies will continue to require analytical innovations that move beyond, yet also integrate, the written, the spoken, the filmed, the recorded, the artificially generated, and all the explosive new forms that are fast undermining our institutions, perceptions, and cultures. We hope to have shown the usefulness of a symbolic action perspective on music as one such innovation.