The Sound of Hate. The New Yorker, July 4, 2016.
There are considerable resources online devoted to the dark subject of music, torture, and violence. This page at Social Musicology has links to important articles by Suzanne Cusick, M.J. Grant, and others. Grant recently wrote a powerful overview of the music-and-torture question for VAN magazine, which has rapidly established itself as a venue for unfettered music writing. On music torture at Guantánamo and other American prisons, see Cusick’s “You are in a place that is out of the world…,” Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian’s Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq, Moustafa Bayoumi’s “Disco Inferno,” and David Peisner’s “Music as Torture,” among other sources. The log of the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani can be read here.
Some significant books that I was unable to discuss in the piece: Jonathan Pieslak’s Radicalism & Music, examining the musical tastes of Al Qaeda militants, racist skinheads, Christian radicals, and eco/animal rights militants; Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare; and the anthologies Music, Politics, and Violence, Music and Conflict, and Music and Genocide. Pieslak recently wrote a piece on the music of the Islamic State.