2017
In his lecture "The Music Box: Songs of Futility in a Time of Torture," delivered on March 1, 2017, at the MMaP Research Centre (Memorial University of Newfoundland), ethnomusicologist Steven Friedson examines the use of music as a weapon in "enhanced interrogation."
While Neuhaus is typically celebrated for his utopian "urban sonic design," Friedson invokes his theories to provide a metaperceptual
Friedson references Max Neuhaus to illustrate how sound, unlike sight, cannot be "closed out." Where Neuhaus used this to create immersive public art, the "Music Box" uses it to achieve sensory totalisation.
Friedson applies Neuhaus’s concept of "sound as a physical material" to the architecture of confinement. In this context, sound is not a creative sculpture but a physical weight used to break the subject's sense of space and time.
Echoing Marie Thompson’s discourse on noise, Friedson explores how the same "affective power" Neuhaus harnessed for aesthetic pleasure can be inverted into a tool for psychological "futility."