[electronic music begins, including synthesized vocalization, string and wind sounds, unpredictable]
What is noise, exactly? To a large extent, that depends on who you ask.
Definitions of noise exist within and between many institutions and disciplines. There are legal definitions of noise, medical definitions of noise, mathematical definitions of noise.
Etymologically, noise comes from the Latin nausea, to denote upset, malaise, sea-sickness, or Anglo-Norman for din, disturbance, uproar, brawl, and disquiet, and Old French for quarrel or disturbance ("Noise," 2015).
A common definition of noise is some variation on noise as a phenomenon that creates displeasure, or noise simply as an "unwanted or undesired sound" (Kerse, 1975; Taylor, 1970). In other words, noise may simply be a subjectively negative reaction to sonic stimuli.
While we might be satisfied with definitions limited to the desirability of the sonic event–agent at hand, we may also wish for a nuanced model of noise that takes into account factors of production, of technology, of politics, and so on. In other words, how can writing with noise help composers and audiences alike be more mindful of composition processes, technologies, and conditions?
[initial sound composition is replaced by another, deeper in pitch and with less identifiable instrumentation]
In 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1967) wrote The Art of Noise (L'arte dei Rumori), a foundational text on the increasing prominence of noise in the wake of urbanization and industrialization, and he urged composers to both embrace and write with these new noises. [sound fades out] He writes, "We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds. Our sensibility requires it.… This need and this tendency can be totally realized through the joining and substituting of noises to and for musical sounds" (p. 11). [percussive rumble begins, machine-like] He provided us with perhaps the first taxonomy of noises, and urges us to make use of these emerging sonic artifacts to more effectively express contemporary experience. Noise, for Russolo, is a byproduct of technoculture, [machine rumble ends] one that changes our listening habits and therefore our sensibilities. Noises are artifacts that can teach us much about the world around us.
[electric saw noise begins, rising and falling in pitch and intensity]
My conception of noise is similar, though my aim is not to create a new orchestra, but instead to think about what noise might be, and how it acts on us. This brings me to the first characteristic of noise.
[synthesized high hat begins new electronic song that overtakes saw]
In his discussion of how many listeners experience noise musics such as Merzbow, Paul Hegarty writes (2001),
The listener struggles to find a way through, in or above the noise music but gives up at a certain point: rhythms are to be found, frequencies to be followed—it is not just random, but—eventually "the listener" is pulverised into believing there is a link. Noise music becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are no longer in a position to accept or deny.
His description of encountering noise music centers on the work that is to be done both by and on the listener.
[new composition begins with twang, click, and string sounds]
There are many kinds of work that noise may prompt in audiences. Noises may cause physical pain, as in the case of sound cannons used to manage demonstrations and riots (Gayl, 2002), or the use of high-amplitude sound to torture prisoners (Hill, 2012). Noises may require a listener to attempt to focus despite competing sounds. As an audience, you may struggle to hear me speak while there is music playing; you expend attention energy. [synthesized organ sound joins the composition] When we must endure irregular frequencies or amplitudes or movements, we must do work to focus or to ignore. We might also discuss noise's ability to cause discomfort, as in very high frequencies, repetitions, and prolonged duration, or psychological torture (Neustadt, 2004). Noise need not reach the heights of torture, of course. Horror films have long used sonic techniques that contribute to suspense, unease, and shock in audiences (Hayward, 2009). [sustained tone and clicks]
Noise makes us work harder.
Now very often, other agents in the communication situation experience an increase in energy expenditure as well. Instruments and speakers and technologies might be pushed to uncomfortable or even malfunctioning limits. Even more importantly to our current concern, however, noise compositions also often require composers to work harder. Unless the noise in a composition is the result of accident or glitch, the composer must think carefully about her use of noise in a rhetorical situation, and also think about how to alter materials, media, formats, and tools to achieve these effects. For instance, a composer might wish to emulate the musical technologies of a particular time. The composer must at least begin to understand the material conditions of the "wobble" or "scratch" of a turntable, [wobbling, scratching, and whirls] or the "whirl" of an over-compressed mp3. If she is to emulate these noises, she must either reproduce them with the actual materials (and therefore get her hands dirty, rather than working with presets so frequently present in audio composition technologies) or by manipulating contemporary media to re-present those effects.
[new composition begins: quieter, twinkly, shimmering percussion begins, joined by bongos, tom-toms, and frequency surges]
Many discussions of noise begin with, or at least refer to, an influential paper that shaped not only conceptions of noise but much of contemporary technoculture: Claude Shannon's 1948 article titled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," in which he founds information theory, introduces the bit as a unit of information, discusses entropy and redundancy, and more. But of note here is that he illustrates and describes a "general communication system" in which messages are sent as signals from source to destination. The notable character, at least to the current discussion, is the "NOISE SOURCE."
The trouble with Shannon's model as applied to noise broadly is the still-prevalent idea of noise as an outside entity that disrupts an otherwise noiseless network of agents and processes. Perhaps you've heard the phrase "signal-to-noise ratio." There still exists a strong separation between the notions of signal and noise, in the same way that we distinguish mind/body, public/private, and so on. The separation of noise and signal, though, at least as we move from a mathematical to a rhetorical model of communication, is both arbitrary and political. In other words, noises are signals, signals are noises. There is no inherent characteristic of sonic phenomena that makes it noise, and there is no system that is free from interruptions, disruptions, corruptions, and the corresponding work it requires to resolve them. [sound composition begins to favor frequency shimmers and waves without drumming] Yet many still talk of noise as though it is a distinct and separate event–agent that spoils the communication party. We might call this the myth of noiselessness. It is pervasive, available in nearly every advertisement for contemporary digital devices. It is the promise of functionality, the increasingly clean and polished interfaces, the decreasing ability of users to understand or modify digital tools. It is the user-friendly, intuitive rhetoric of technology that has led many of us to reject the assumption that students are "good at technology" and replace it with "they're good at (consuming) technology." I don't say this to be flippant. It is my experience in classrooms and precisely why I teach noise and dirt.
We must come to terms with a post-Shannon model of noise, one in which noise exists in and between all event–agents in a communicative system. Noise is not an external agent, a rogue signal. Noise is inextricably embedded within event–agents, their relations, and communication systems as a whole.
[new composition begins with soothing echo surges, reminiscent of the rhythm of ocean waves or meditative throat singing and a deep-pitched electric gong]
I have been describing communication systems in terms of "event–agents," and this is drawing from Bruno Latour's (1988) formulation of actor network theory. For Latour, the basic unit of a thing or object in a network is an "actant." The salient component of Latour's actant to the present formulation of rhetorical noise is that an actant (in our case, an audible phenomenon) is neither "the same as or different from" any other actant; it is always an event that "happens only once, and at one place" (p. 162). Actants, in other words, are their relations.
Likewise, noise is not a static characteristic of sound. It is noise only insofar as it is in relation to other sounds, systems, and actants, and as it requires work. As George William Clarkson Kaye articulated in 1931, noise must be defined contextually, beyond the scope of mere desirability or subjective pleasure; he described noise as "a sound out of place" (p. 26). We can take a sound and change the relational landscape, say in terms of time, place, or purpose, and it may or may not be noise. An illustration here might be the paradoxical genre of "noise music." I like noise music. I like going to noise shows. Is it still noise if I pay for a ticket and enjoy the show? If I play noise music while I write this chapter, is it still noise? The answer, of course, is it depends! Am I expending energy, am I doing work? Or is it a pleasant and effortless soundscape that helps me focus on writing? The white noise machine some use to help them sleep—is that noise? Perhaps not while it helps them sleep, though we could deepen our understanding of work and determine that the constant stimulation of that noise is, technically, requiring subconscious work. But if we recontextualize noise music or white noise, in relationship to other people, architecture, competing sounds, visual stimuli, mood, time of day, geographical location, media or format, and so on, they will require different work.
Whether or not a sound is a noise depends on its situatedness, its context, its relations, and the work required by others to experience and interpret it.
[new composition begins: mid-pitched buzzing, higher-toned arpeggios]
Douglas Kahn (1999) argues that noises "always pertain to a complex of sources, motives, strategies, gestures, grammars, contexts, and so on.… [N]oises are never just sounds and the sounds they mask are never just sounds: they are also ideas of noise" (p. 20, emphasis added). Noise is a complex and political performance, a struggle between that which is valued as signal and that which is obscured, scrubbed away, so that what remains is a clean signal.
[sound composition is replaced by buzzy, variable static]
In her influential work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas (1966) articulates dirt as
matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. (p. 36)
[buzzes change frequency, crescendoing to stereo right]
By calling noise "dirty," I imply an opportunity to oppose systematic rejection and contravention of order. Writing noise, performing noise, affords us many opportunities to corrupt or disrupt systems. For the moment, as I am focusing in on digital composition practices, I might first say that noise helpfully threatens the cleanliness of contemporary digital culture and its dominant technologies. Clean, smooth, slick interfaces.
Intuitive.
Easy.
User-friendly.
Seamless.
It Just Works.
Trademarked.
etc.
There are costs associated with big-W Western big-P Progress. We get thinner laptops, we lose the ability to change our own battery or make internal modifications. [static surges travel from stereo left to right and back again, evocative of a dot matrix printer] We gain greater connectivity between our digital selves [and one another], but we lose the ability to act without surveillance. And so on. But these costs are still veiled underneath what Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe (1991), more than 20 years ago, first called the "Rhetoric of Technology." [static and printer sound ends]
The Rhetoric of Technology is a warning against the framing of new media in "overly positive terms," engendering a false sense of hope and democracy in new media spaces (p. 56). In fact, as Selfe later argued with Richard Selfe, interfaces are never neutral or inert forces; they are imbued with our existing ideological, political, economic, and educational values (Selfe & Selfe, 1994). [hiss fades in slowly, almost imperceptibly] Selfe and Selfe write of dominant technologies' tendency to "value monoculturalism, capitalism, and phallologic thinking, and does so, more importantly, to the exclusion of other perspectives. Grounded in these values, computer interfaces, we maintain, enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism" (p. 486). We are called to resist popular framing of new media as mere tools and keep investigating our tools' politics despite their increasingly apolitical and objective appearances.
Likewise, in her foundational "Glitch Studies Manifesto," Rosa Menkman (2011) argues that though we continue to seek noiselessness, technologies will always bear the markers of its makers. She writes, "the dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel… [is] regrettable and ill-fated" (p. 11). [inconstant pulses become recognizable among the hiss] She calls us to action as artist–activists to participate in glitch: bend, break, misuse technologies to reveal their imperfections, their values, their vulnerabilities. The moment of glitch, for Menkman, is much more instructive than moments of functionality.
[among the hiss and pulses, rhythmless feedback-based pitches emerge]
Dirty New Media, coined by Jon Cates (2011), is likewise concerned with disrupting dominant and utopic narratives of technologies that are clean, sterile, and finished. He argues that "the corporate logic of our consumer computing devices relies on false promises of—or rather belies broken hopes for—functionality." Of Dirty New Media, Erika Peplin (2011) writes, "Technology is a field typically associated with smooth screens, organized interfaces, and on a larger scale, with the pride and 'progress' of western civilization. Dirty New Media, a branch of New Media Art, seeks to subvert these unquestioned assumptions by problematizing, rather than idealizing, common technologies." Dirty New Media practitioners respond by critically engaging with and corrupting clean and dominant language, gender, power, sexuality, pornography, and identity performance.
[returning to hiss, the sound surges in volume]
The big idea here is that "clean" and "dirty" are political performances in our technocultural landscape. Cleanliness denotes presicion, clarity, the excision of ambiguity, the erasure of material and economic production, deviation from cultural hegemony. I'm arguing that, especially in digital spaces, we have an obligation to work with noise, work with dirt. To work with that which is always present within a system but is systematically excluded, repressed, filtered.
And so when I say noise is dirty, that it corrupts one or more of the systems of which it is a part, there are multiple possibilities. The noise could be a production artifact—a sound that refers explicitly to its own production, like an over-compressed mp3 file.
Or it could be a disruption of dominant language, akin to Hélène Cixous's (1976) plea for "woman [to] write her self" (p. 875). A new language, or at least a disrupted language, allows us to subvert dominant cleanliness and express the repressed.
[hiss crescendo ends, sounded pitches return briefly, then back to hiss at mid-volume]
Or the noise/dirt could be a corruption of the ways a particular instrument should be used, like the philosophy/practice of circuit-bending, in which instrument designers rewire and repurpose old instruments to create new, strange, dynamic instruments.
Or the noise could be a common focus of Dirty New Media practitioners: engaging with what might be the cleanest of new media in terms of hegemonic representation and new media innovation: mainstream pornography. Many working in Dirty New Media consider mainstream pornography to re-present misogynistic ideals, identities, and performances of gender, and corrupt such media using techniques like pixel drifting, data bending, and data moshing. Introducing noise to the medium brings our attention to the medium itself, to more closely examine narratives and representations hiding beneath.
[hiss surges end, replaced by musical composition including indecipherable whispers and resonant electric bells]
We could extend this list of possibilities for some time, of course. But the point here is that noise is dirty; noise composition employs methods of irregularity and corruption and disruption.
I've talked through the theory—at least some of it—and now it's time to get to some concrete ways we can perform noise.
[sounds cease]