Affect was an essential component of the Arab uprisings, and it remains an important medium for shaping everyday politics in the Middle East and beyond. Yet endeavors to control individual and collective affect are understudied in contestations of power and the praxis of statecraft—despite robust evidence that affect and emotion are intimately entwined with political behavior, motivation for collective action, and decision-making on a range of issues spanning from voter preference to foreign policy. This paper examines how such control takes effect, situating the sensory body as a bridge and key site of interaction and contestation for diverse projects that seek to influence behavioral outcomes via the manipulation of public space. From among the bodily senses, it singles out the auditory realm as a particularly potent generator of affect and examines the entanglement of sound, hearing, and power to foreground ways the sensory body is routinely engaged in state projects. Drawing on examples from the protests that ricocheted loudly across Egypt and Tunisia from 2010-2012, and contextualizing these with evidence from Algeria as well as historical antecedents from original archival work, this article generates a framework that links phenomenological experience and political behaviors. I demonstrate how sensory inputs such as sound are engineered for political effect by elite and subaltern actors alike and argue that the ambient environment represents an important site of everyday political control.