Whispers toward a Taxonomy of Noise
[drum machine and synthesized hand-claps begin]
In all of my sound design assignments, I require the use of noise. One example I will use for the sake of illustration in this chapter is an assignment in which I ask students to redesign the sound of a short scene from a film. Here is a short description of the assignment I provide to students in this second-year undergraduate course focused on multimedia production:
[initial percussion fades out, replaced by 8-bit instrument-based electronic music, including drum machine triangle, cymbals, telephone ringing, and cowbell]
You will reimagine the sound design for a short scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Conversation, or The Shining. Your goal is not to reproduce the sound design, but to thoughtfully rethink the design. You must produce some form of three categories of sound: dialogue, music, and sound effects. Your new sound design must also make use of noise as defined in course materials and discussions. You will be evaluated based on a) the quality of your sound design (levels, sound quality), b) creative and effective use of noise, c) collection and use of new recorded sound (you may use prerecorded sound for 20% or less of the project), and d) your ability to articulate your sound design based on principles and readings we have used in class. Submit your finished project with a 500+ word essay that describes your decisions, process, and influences.
This assignment follows several weeks of studying sound design, from music to sound effects, from film to podcasts. We learn theory and then turn to using professional recording equipment and editing software. So, students' main task in this assignment is to perform the theory and techniques of sound design in a way that re-thinks these scenes and that employs noise to communicate something to the audience. [electronic music makes a "winding down" move before resuming regular tempo] The films I choose for them all employ noise in unique ways and to different ends, so they will already have thought through these techniques and effects to a large extent.
[sound composition begins to feature digital gongs and 8-bit instruments]
I'll now share with you a kind of taxonomy of noise techniques I share with students as a guide. As I discuss them, you might think through how you would approach redesigning a scene from a film. In terms of work, consider a few questions. How would noise help shape the audience's experience? What do you want them to feel? Fear, worry, boredom, stress, suspense? How do you want to shape their sense of time and space? What kind of work could you make them perform?
Next, think about dirt. How can you use noise to call attention to the dirt? Do you want to reveal something about cultural narratives of violence, for example? Or gender representation? These questions are well-suited to the shower scene from Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), for instance. Or do you want to comment directly on the medium of film or digital video? What kinds of noise allow you to accomplish this?
Here, I have six major categories, or characteristics of sound, that can be altered to make noise—those sound–events that make our audiences do work. That give us—the sonic explorers—and our audiences a somewhat dirty new media experience in which we might see the media, the tools, the processes, and so on.
[static buzz begins, percussion gains speed]
For purposes of this discussion, amplitude can be best understood as the volume, or loudness of a sound. And so first, we might think about the volume of a sound and the work that volume requires of materials and audiences. While we often associate noise with loudness, we might also consider the effectiveness of very quiet, just-audible sounds to create a sense of irritation, mystery, and distraction.
Secondly, we might think of the envelope of the sound. An envelope describes—or in production, dictates—how a sound's amplitude acts over time. Perhaps the sound occurs very suddenly, perhaps it takes several seconds to reach peak volume from silence. Perhaps a sound ends very abruptly or decays over several seconds. All scenarios will affect the audience's experience of the scene differently, from a jump-scare to a slow build of suspense.
[percussion music replaced by sounds of shower; then iconic rhythmic string pulses from Psycho and a series of screams]
Right now, we are hearing a cinematic breakthrough in the use of what's called nonlinear sound—any sound that exceeds the intended capabilities of the instrument with which it is created or transmitted. Nonlinear sound involves both amplitude (volume) and frequency (pitch). In the case of amplitude, we hear violins played at a volume beyond their design, creating a sense of distortion and strain. We also, though, hear a distinct and sudden change in amplitude, going from the white-noise-like sound of the shower to the sharp, howling violins. [sounds from Psycho end]
Silence, of course, can be just as powerful as any sound, particularly as its duration increases. This power can result from a number of factors, from forcing audiences to hear their immediate surroundings, a la John Cage, or by changing our sense of time. Often, extended silences make audiences perceive of time as passing much more slowly than if accompanied by music and other sounds.
The frequency of a sound, in plain terms, is the pitch of a given sound.
As I discussed earlier, infrasound is any sound around or below 20 Hz, the lower limits of typical human hearing. Hypersound is any sound that exists around or above typical human hearing. And so our first opportunity when discussing frequency is to explore and flirt with the boundaries of human hearing. We might use very broad frequencies (as in white noise) or very narrow frequencies.
Let's return to the shower scene from Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960). In terms of frequency, we are affected by both the relatively high pitch of the violins, but also the pitch range, going from a wide range of frequency with the sound of the shower (as you'll remember, white and pink noises contain a full frequency spectrum) to a relatively narrow but rapidly changing frequency. The violins are also playing harsh, dissonant chords.
[footsteps
Woman's voice: I want you to go as quietly as possible and not make a sound until I tell you to run. Then run as quickly as you can. Now, does everybody understand?
Chorus of children answer: Yes, Miss Hayworth!
Woman's voice: Alright, John, you lead the way.
rustles]
Another Hitchcock film's sound design also makes use of nonlinear sound, highlighting its physical–rhetorical effects.
Research shows that nonlinear sounds in many horror films tap into our instincts, mimicking the distress cries of animals, and thus inspire various levels of fear and empathy. In this scene from The Birds (Hitchcock, 1963), we are presented with both screaming children and a "horrifying avian language" artificially produced for the film, resulting in a score with a "rich [sound] of nonlinear characteristics" (Blumstein, Davitian, & Kaye, 2010, p. 753).
[rustling; fluttering; bird shrieks; childrenʼs screams of fright; squawking; screaming; cawing]
[rhythmic pulse of sound similar to a helicopter in proximity]
Time offers us several opportunities to make work. We might take this piece by Sun Ra (1974) titled "Space Probe" and consider how important periodicity can be to our ability to easily encounter music. [unmelodic solo joins helicopter pulse] Periodicity is simply the regularity of an event, like a consistent beat or tempo. Elements in this track do not seem to follow typical rules of tempo. [helicopter pulse fades away as music comes to forefront] I can be difficult as a listener to find something to nod our heads to, there is no easy groove to find. It requires work.
But also in terms of time we might think of endurance, in other words, how long something lasts. As is true with silence, we can greatly affect our audiences' sense of time by extending or stretching or repeating a given signal or phrase.
[new sound composition begins, featuring 8-bit instrumentation and fluttering mp3 compression artifacts]
We have already talked through space at the beginning of this talk when I played the Bangalter (2002) piece. Movement in stereo space can work a careful listener into a strange sensation of movement. [sound ends] But we have many other options, such as panning dialogue in video production. The classic approach to dialogue in film involves positioning all dialogue in the center channel. Films like Children of Men break that tradition, by panning the dialogue to match actors' positions on the screen (Bishop, 2013).
We can also decontextualize, or make strange, sounds by both where we record them (perhaps we might record outdoor dialogue in a tiled bathroom) or where our audiences hear them. Or we may record sounds, then re-record them as played in very different acoustic spaces.
[new sound composition begins with seemingly randomly placed scratches and movement between stereo left and right]
Right now you are hearing a track titled "spamouflage" by stAllio! (2003). stAllio! is a Indianapolis-based glitch artist that has, for a long time, been creating music that is comprised of over-compressed mp3 files, failing hard drives, and other digital malfunctions.
[the sound composition corrals glitches and scratches into greater density and purpose]
There's a long history of using corrupted devices and sources to make pseudorandom compositions, like circuit-bending, a precursor to glitch and other software-based practices.
In circuit-bending, the artist rewires an existing instrument to create very new sounds, sounds of malfunction. These are good examples of a process-based noise composition. The processes, to a large extent, dictate the composition. [new composition begins with plinks, boings, block-strikes, then sustained growling bass] The composer enters into a kind of unpredictable relationship with her instrument, and neither has full control.
And so we might corrupt or alter materials, from digital files to physical instruments. We might welcome a degree of randomness or pseudorandomness. We might adopt aleatoric composition processes in which we relinquish full control over outcomes. We might work with translation artifacts, which I might define here simply as a perceivable object resulting from some kind of conversion or translation of data, such as the whirl associated with mp3 compression. [instruments fall away leaving only bass growl] Or we might use external audio effects like distortion or bitcrush or echo, processing [audio] signals to alter their character and create more work as composers and for audiences.
[new composition begins with deep static throb]
By relation, I mean the (re)action of sound with other agents, elements, avenues, and actors within a system. The classic example of relation might be feedback, in which a signal is fed back into its source to create a feedback loop, which is self-generative and, most often, results in an offensive howl of high pitches. [throb ends, replaced with dirty amplification of a rock quartet with a strong bass line, reminiscent of a band heard late on a Friday night in a road house] But we might also think of competition: how two or more sounds act in relation to one another in a mix.
This sound is from David Lynch's film Fire Walk with Me (Badalamenti, 1992). The sound design is unique in that in order to hear the dialogue, you must work very hard to hear through the loud music. The mix, or relationship between sonic elements, presents the challenge.
[song crescendos; speaking voices are only barely distinguishable from the music; clip ends; high-pitched drone begins]
At the beginning of a workshop or class, I ask students to consider these questions, reflecting on noise on a personal, spatial, and physical level. Where and when do they encounter noise, and why is it noise? Can they identify factors like frequency or nonperiodicity or listening location? How do they cope with that noise? [drone surges with pitched melody, percussion, and synthesized voice] What work does it require, and what are the effects of that work? Next, where does noise happen in their interpersonal communication lives? Think of your last family holiday, for instance. Where are the points of strain, of work, of disconnection, of interruption? Finally, as a bridge to thinking critically about ability and disability, I ask students to find the noise in their bodies. This is typically a very easy discussion, once I begin disclosing. I might be tired or ill, I can discuss anxiety or depression, worry, the way my hands tremble. Even short discussions are typically very beautiful moments not only in terms of disclosure, but in realizing that one of the major sources of pressure to comply—or pretend to comply—with a rhetoric of functionality, of perfection, of cleanliness, is our bodies. We measure bodies, after all, against a radically unreachable ideal. Diagnoses signify abnormality, variations from a perfect body which does not exist. We are noisy bodies.
[composition swells, becoming more complex and listenable]
Then, students start to get their hands and digits dirty, digging into sounds and sound filetypes. First, I ask them to field record or sample a beautiful sound. The birds' morning songs or the cicadas on campus, or to simply sample one of their favorite songs. How can they make that sound noisy? How can they destroy something beautiful? Then, can they do the opposite? I ask them to field record one of the noises they encounter and to make it beautiful.
Then, students are ready to turn this awareness and these sonic practices outward as political action. Where do they see injustice or exclusion? Where do they see the myth of noiselessness being promoted, applied, and enforced? [higher-pitched melody is overtaken by mid-range electric growls] Where is the noise in the seemingly noiseless system? How can they find ways to corrupt or disrupt, in order to expose and spread awareness? How might they remind themselves of the systems in which they live and are expected to function noiselessly? The outcomes of these practices vary wildly, from very personal narratives of mental illnesses to deep investigations of the technologies they use every day, noting their failures as juxtaposed with the promises of functionality featured in advertisements.
Studying in Philadelphia also offers us the dubious luxury of witnessing gentrification and the sounds that accompany it. The sounds of a single block in parts of the city offer us the noises of dislocation and the promise of new, quiet, apartments.
[sound of synthesized singing comes to forefront]
[noise composition begins with deep-pitched fuzzy flourishes]
Noise philosophy approaches offer composers a range of techniques to create captivating and highly affective multimedia narratives. And if we want both our student–composers and their audiences to engage critically not only with ideas but also the media used to convey them, noise can provide the kind of anti-environment necessary to provoke that work.
There are many ways to approach these ends, but I hope this chapter has offered a few suggestions and ideas about the value and opportunities of working with and around noise and dirt.
Thanks for listening.
[fuzzy flourishes rise in pitch before gradually fading out]