Musicians don’t want tunes used for torture

I think there's a difference between an action meant to teach and an action meant to cripple. Playing music for an hour to discourage someone from disturbing the peace may be unpleasant, but it isn't harmful -- in fact it's less harmful and more likely to succeed than conventional approaches like fines or jail. Playing music at painful volume for 20 hours a day, for a month or two, is damaging and may well be intended to do lasting harm.

For further contemplation of appropriate and inappropriate responses to wrongdoing, I recommend "The Admonishments of Kherishdar" here:
http://www.stardancer.org/kherishdar2/
The culture is alien, but many of the underlying concepts still apply.

I think Voldemort would be getting more successful results, actually.

Transcendental evolution is what happens when a latent saint or messiah goes active. It's a little hard to describe in English. But look at religious history around the world and you'll see that a lot of messiahs and saints were at some point caught and tortured, or otherwise placed under extreme stress. Some souls are always in the world with, hm, emergency response abilities tucked away. It takes a lot to activate those; the more powerful the person's potential, the higher the threshold. Of course, there are transcendent people who arrive in active mode -- the lamas for example -- but the latent ones are there to deal with disasters and atrocities. You really, really do not want to be leaning over one with a knife when that light goes on.

Also, any human soul has some potential for radical transformation, metamorphosis under stress. Some of the results are nasty, like certain types of charismatic warleaders or zealots. Some are ordinary people abruptly reaching saint potential for the first time. The soul, like the body, can sometimes achieve great things in moments of dire need ... but unlike the body, the soul's abrupt growth can stick in that position sometimes. This is why some cultures practice spiritual disciplines of extreme stress -- fasting, vigils, self-mutilation, etc. The harder you push, the bigger the risk and the bigger the potential breakthrough. Many people just suffer, some people break, some people die ... and some people become conduits for the living divine, of assorted flavors.

If you look at history, you can spot some interesting examples. It's one of several reasons why torture, especially on a large scale, is almost always a Very Bad Idea.

Some of the stories of what enlightened ones have done are impressive examples of what can be gotten away with if you have the ability to make physics look the other way for a second.

Precisely.

Think of reality like a computer network or program. Most people can only influence the lowest layer, which has certain options ("read textbook," "kiss girl," etc.) that anyone can use. If your magical, spiritual, or philosophical tradition teaches you how to log in, then you get some additional user benefits ("pray: message > God," "sense ambient magic," etc.) but still at a basic level. Above that are layers upon layers of more rarefied access, which require more study, knowledge, and skill to reach. Each one lets you do more. Some layers allow you to make brief exceptions to standard parameters, or more properly, shift the parameters applied to a given situation. The higher your level, the more dramatic the changes you can make.

Sort of like that. However, it's more like the way some systems are set up to give different amounts of authority: guests can see things but can't change much, users can change some things, forum moderators can do special things like deleting messages or blocking users, and sysadmins can do anything. Programmers create systems. The rule "you can only make changes to your own account" applies to users, but not guests (who have no account) or moderators (who can ban troublesome accounts). Hacks and cheats aren't part of intended usage; permission gradients are.

People get into arguments over what constitutes a "hack" or "cheat" of reality, compared to what are simply different permission gradients. If Jesus heals someone, it's a sysadmin privilege. If a regular person heals someone, it's a cheat code you must have gotten from SatanicHacker, and you tend to get banned from Christian.relg for it. Some people will look the other way for things like healing, while others will throw a fit about it; depends on the time and place. Other systems may allow that kind of function at lower levels, or not at all.