Muzak, Lo-Fi, and Acoustic Violence

Abstract

Violence, including acoustic violence, can be remarkably resistant to critique; the semiotic structures upon which scholarly arguments rely may appear, in their representationalism, to have a distancing effect from the sheer materialism of violence and pain. A tension has thus emerged in the study of acoustic violence: how does one attend to the cultural histories and aesthetics of such practices without, in such theoretical abstraction, losing sight of violence’s embodied experience and effects? This paper argues for the existence of an underacknowledged genealogy of functional music which encompasses programmed music (such as Muzak), lo-fi, and contemporary forms of acoustic violence as social technologies across historical contexts. By attending to this genealogy, it is possible to take tools of cultural critique developed for programmed music and lo-fi and turn them towards acoustic violence. Beginning by outlining the intertwined histories of acoustic violence, programmed music, and lo-fi as well as of the scholarly critique surrounding such practices, this paper then uses these histories to read a specific contemporary form of acoustic violence, the Mosquito anti-loitering device, as part of this genealogy of functional music. I demonstrate how a shared investment in interspecies relationality through vibration connects the Mosquito to programmed music and lo-fi, and in doing so offer an example of the utility of this genealogical approach in interrogating otherwise underacknowledged ideological and sociotechnological aspects of acoustic violence.