Concrete Playground

On Friday, a story reached our eyes, via Pitchfork, that the release of a rather daring iPhone app from Atari Teenage Riot had been blocked by the Apple store. That's because, as well as the standard-issue band news, songs and video clips, the app also contains a feature called "Riotsounds Produce Riots" — a collection of sounds that, evidently, produce riots. These sounds are the very same the band claimed to have used at the Berlin May Day protest in 1999 at which several band members were arrested after rioting ensued.

"Awesome!" thought we. On the surface, this app looked to be more useful than Shazam, the spirit level app and the how-to-tie-a-bow-tie app put together, allowing us to whip out our own handy riot at the touch of a button (and all without having to stomach a single Justin Bieber melody). The band describes the sounds as "very low sub basses, square waves, noise sounds which trigger hysteria and panic within the audience", and they recommend plugging them into some big speakers. But do such extreme behaviour-influencing sounds really exist, and if they do, how did the Ataris stumble onto them first?

We asked bullshit-calling science-blogger Michael Slezak of Good, Bad and Bogus for the lowdown on the band's invention. "I really doubt that there's any basis to the claim. I mean, sounds can be annoying, they can cause pain. But there doesn't seem to be any evidence that they can incite riots. There's research into using sounds as weapons, but they're aimed at stopping riots rather than inciting them and these sounds usually need to be generated by specialised equipment." So, not your iPhone, then.

He continues, "The more likely cause of the riot in the Berlin 1999 Mayday protest was the police." The sounds — and the band's frantic, incendiary performance off the back of a truck — were only one of several factors in play that day.

If there is no credible danger and little likelihood of intent to directly cause violence through the app, what does this look like? Political speech? Satire? Historical record? Clever marketing ploy? All things the beneficent Apple should probably refrain from suppressing.

This takes place in the band's homeland of Germany, which is covered by a pretty nice European Convention on Human Rights that includes a freedom of expression (although not untempered by other democratic concerns, which in Germany extend as far as its ban on Holocaust denial). However, it sounds like the Ataris are planning to rely on a more technical, finicky "legal loophole" that would allow them to first release the app minus the riotsounds but then add them through a later "update".