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"During the Covid-19 pandemic, comparisons have often been drawn between lockdown measures and prison, yet people with lived experience of prison have countered that such domestic confinement bears little resemblance to the pains of imprisonment. These different viewpoints suggest that the general public has little understanding of what happens behind prison walls. This blogpost considers how prisoner writing can describe prison to the non-prisoner reader (i.e. a reader who does not have lived experience of prison), bearing witness to the carceral experience. Drawing on examples of short stories about prison, written by current or former prisoners, I examine how these writers recreate sensory aspects of prison in their writing. Carceral texts commonly recount the sights, sounds, touches, tastes and smells of prison; but, in my experience of reading and analysing prisoner writing, it is the depiction of prison sound that is most powerful and affecting. In this blogpost, I examine how prisoner-writers translate the speech and sounds of prison into written form, to convey the carceral experience to those outside prison walls."

"In the arid hills outside Damascus, Syria, there is a military prison called Saydnaya, a low-slung concrete building where prisoners are forbidden to make any noise. Because of Saydnaya's eerie quiet-and because the prison is kept dark and prisoners are frequently blindfolded-inmates develop a particularly keen sense of sound."

"This article seeks to explore the manifold ways in which carceral violence and acoustics intermingle, as manifested in the case of the military prison of Saydnaya-an infamous, state-run torture jail in Syria. As revealed by survivors' ear-testimonies and by the recent digital reconstruction of the prison's interior (available on the Amnesty International website), sound seems integral to the dynamics of power at play in the Syrian prison. A great part of the violence committed there is acoustic, one that is meticulously based on defining properties of the aural experience. "

"Filmmaker and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert is a guest producer on this week's Theory of Everything, where she learns that it's not just hipsters causing a revival in the audio cassette format but prisoners. Indeed, for most prisoners, cassettes are the only music delivery device they're allowed. Listen to her episode, "Analog Time," embedded here, as Lambert talks to some incarcerated men for whom cassette tapes are an escape, a salve, and even a medium of exchange."

"Sound, as a modality of emotion, is central to the everyday constitution of space. For an increasing population in Canada, however, incarceration forms the basis of everyday life. This paper explores the connections between sound and emotion as they play out in the under-researched context of prisons. I use a participant's term, "feeling the range," to identify the atmospheric, haptic, and emotive potential of sound as a vital tool of spatial knowledge. "

What are the considerations for acoustics in prisons?

"Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Service, and Beach House. Over time, the stars and hits have changed and the formats have evolved as well, from vinyl to CDs to MP3s. In recent years, however, the label has started releasing new albums on a medium few thought would ever see a comeback: the cassette. But there's one big user group that never entirely stopped using the old school technology. The United States prison system has the largest prison population in the world and many of its inmates listen to their music on tape. For this group, cassettes aren't necessarily the cheapest or hippest way to listen to music; in some cases, it's the only way."

Christopher Cerf, an award-winning composer for the American children's television series Sesame Street, was so disturbed by the use of his songs as psychological torture by the US during interrogation operations in Guantanamo in 2003, that he embarked on a journey with Al Jazeera World to interview a number of scientists, US Army personnel, and ex-detainees, to learn more about the psychological effects of music, and to uncover the history and use of music in torture. Among the people Cerf interviews are a US Army interrogator, a former Guantanamo prison guard, an ex-Guantanamo and Bagram detainee who recounts the use of Metallica and Marilyn Manson in torture during his time in prison, and the heavy metal band Drowning Pool, whose song "Bodies" was dubbed an unofficial soundtrack of the US military, and whose music was also used to torture prisoners.

As there are no images of Saydnaya, we were dependent on the memories of survivors to recreate what happened inside. Using architectural and acoustic modelling, we helped witnesses reconstruct the architecture of the prison and their experiences of detention.

The artist-investigator tunes his work to the undocumented, the surveilled, immigrants and prisoners; those fleeing the talons of the state