MUTE investigates, both empirically and theoretically, the much neglected role of music and sound - and their inherent contradictions - in situations of confinement and displacement from the Cold War period to contemporary times. It explores a leap in the technologies of terror that takes place in the context of psychological warfare and international treaties on torture and human rights after World War II, giving rise to new scientific interrogation/torture methods that continue to be practiced to this day. Going beyond the fragmented nature of case studies that predominate in the current field of research, MUTE will provide a theoretical framework for attentive and dialectical forms of listening that refuse simplistic dichotomies that would posit music as intrinsically negative or positive. Drawing on (ethno)musicology, history, social anthropology, critical theory, human rights law, and sound art, its three research objectives are summarized below.
1. MUTE will document, map, and theoretically analyse sonic torture in the context of new torture methods that emerge in the Cold War, based on psychological research that focused on sensory deprivation and 'mind manipulation'. Relying on cultural notions of pain, these methods hsbr often been understood, even to this day, as less painful not only by civil society but also by courts of law. By bringing together survivor testimony, archival research, international law, legal proceedings and scientific knowledge from various disciplines, the project aims not only to historicize and critically analyse our recent past, but also contribute to current debates about the criminalization of these methods and issues of redress. Its comparative, historically grounded, empirical and theoretical analysis will consolidate a particular new field of study, rendering a clear and general picture of the geography, technologies, and dynamics of such uses in their complexity and their various phases and contexts.
2. At the same time, MUTE carefully attends to how music and sound can become a valuable tool of survival and community reclaimed from below – some times even in the very same setting in which they are weaponized. Through participatory workshops and qualitative research with prisoners and refugees or people of migrant background displaced in Greece, it will explore the role of music and sound in reinforcing agency, enabling community building, the way they relate with space, time, memory, and trauma. MUTE's emphasis on the ethical and methodological foundations for present and future research that deals with subjects who have been exposed to trauma, aims to produce an ethics blueprint that takes into account the well-being of participants as well as researchers from the risk of (re)traumatization.
3. MUTE theorizes the ethics of witnessing in research, art practices, but also socio-political processes, giving emphasis on the notion of listening. How is trauma acoustically represented? What is the ethical and political positionality of listening as witnessing? What kind of response and responsibilities does listening-witnessing call for? How can listening become the means through which societies can go beyond the divisions of conflict? will also theorize the ethical responsibility to respond to trauma testimony in ways that open the debate about confinement and displacement in our own scholarly and artistic response
