Make it Noisy: Rereading Modernism through DIY

In aesthetic terms, the category of ‘sound’ is often split in two: ‘noise’, which is chaotic, unfamiliar, and offensive; and ‘music’, which is harmonious, resonant, and divine. These opposing concepts are brought together in the phenomenon of Noise Music, but how do practitioners make sense of this apparent discordance? Analyses that treat recorded media as primary texts declare Noise Music to be a failure, as a genre without progress. These paint Noise as a polluted form in an antagonistic relationship with traditional music. But while critiques often point to indeterminate structure as indicative of the aesthetic project’s limitations, we claim that indeterminacy itself becomes central to meaningful expression when the social context of Noise is considered. Through observational and interview data, we consider the contexts, audiences, and producers of contemporary American Noise Music. Synthesizing the performance theories of Hennion and Alexander, we demonstrate how indeterminacy situated in structured interaction allows for meaning-making and sustains a musical form based in claims to inclusion, access, and creative freedom. We show how interaction, not discourse, characterizes the central performance that constructs the meaning of Noise.

Bulletin description of the course: SS.490.05 Special Topics. This course examines everyday life through our experience of music, sound, and noise. Because the field of the sociology of music is as broad as the world of sound, we will focus on the production, meaning, use, and construction of soundscapes and auditory environments. Individual or group soundscape projects will be accompanied by readings that together will provide students with a foundation in active critical listening and the sociological study of music, sound, and noise. The course will require a good deal of listening to perhaps unfamiliar music and musical genres, but you do not need to be able to read music or play an instrument for this course. Detailed description of the course: SS.235P Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise This course examines how we understand everyday life through our experience of music, sound, and noise. Because the field of the sociology of music is as broad as the world of sound, we will focus on the production and meaning of just a few of the many styles of music around the world, from Charles Ives to Funkadelic. We will use these musical studies to then delve into the use and construction of soundscapes and auditory environments. Finally, the course will study the social and environmental effects of noise, as well as the use of silence and noise in music since Anton Webern, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhuasen, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Brian Eno, and Robert Fripp. The course will require a good deal of listening to perhaps unfamiliar music and musical genres which will be accompanied by readings that together will provide students with a foundation in the sociological study of – and active critical listening to – music, sound, and noise. You do not need to be able to read music or play an instrument for this course. Course Goals To introduce students to the relationship between music, sound, and noise in terms of our social relations, our enjoyment or annoyance, and the experience of music/sounds/noise in relation to the production of the spaces and landscapes of everyday life.

This article focuses on the passage from noise – as disruptive and strange element – to sound when it is incorporated into music. This process is directed to an under- standing of how noise has become a destabilizing element during the twentieth century, establishing a dialectic tension between rejection and acceptance as a musical element. From this point we raise two issues: the empirical aspect of noise in relation to the abstraction of what is communicated; and process of »silencing« noise as it is incorporated into music. This process is analyzed from two seemingly opposing concepts: noise repression, in which noise is taken as something to be avoided; and noise sublimation, or the worship of noise. Eventually, we will analyze examples of relatively recent repertoire of works in which this matter plays an important role: John Oswald's Pluderphonics, Christian Marclay's conceptualism, and the sound radicalism of the noise movement.

2018

Jacques Attali's 1977 text on the past, present and future of music, seen as a political attempt by power to organize violence through noise with a prophetic characteristic that is echoed by social organization is analyzed and discussed.

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2017

In this article I consider the possibility of approaching the experience of noise in a musical context as an aesthetic one. I do this in the light of many 20 th century musical developments, many of which have been described as increase in noise. Adopting a perspective from the discipline of sound studies, I examine some different approaches to noise and delineate three main claims concerning noise in music: (1) ontologically every sound is noise, (2) noise is distortion of musical form and, as my claim, (3) noise offers aesthetic pleasure mixed with unpleasant experience. To back up my proposal, I offer an example of (anti-)musical praxis of Noise music, proponents of which I see as striving to create works that would remain noise in reception, despite noise's tendency to succumb to familiarity and hence to lose its force as noise.

Revista Vortex, 2021

Noise is a complex category that has been used to describe instances of disturbance and disruption in technical vocabulary and in many artistic languages. In music, and more precisely, in sound art, noise has been imbued with specific significations that operate as aesthetical signifiers that convey meaning even beyond its intensity of volume. In this article, the theoretical aspects of noise are articulated through the analysis of concerning discourse around the transformations of the concept of sound, which ultimately resulted in the designation of a genre in itself – noise. Furthermore, it is through the enhancement of a ‘sonic turn’ that the notion of listening as a generative aesthetic practice has referred to the body as the main instance of meaning construction in relation to both time and space.

2007

Noise/Music looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyses them in terms of cultural aesthetics. Paul Hegarty argues that noise is a judgement about sound, that what was noise can become acceptable as music, and that in many ways the idea of noise is similar to the idea of the avant-garde. While it provides an excellent historical overview, the book's main concern is in the noise music that has emerged since the mid 1970s, whether through industrial music, punk, free jazz, or the purer noise of someone like Merzbow. The book progresses seamlessly from discussions of John Cage, Erik Satie, and Pauline Oliveros through to bands like Throbbing Gristle and the Boredoms. Sharp and erudite, and underpinned throughout by the ideas of thinkers like Adorno and Deleuze, Noise/Music is the perfect prim...

This dissertation attempts to discern an ontology of the artistic gesture as a libertarian practice driven by the motto of an inborn paradoxical nature, in order to provide a theoretical, aesthetical and political introduction to noise music in current times. This is made through the theorization and articulation of the idea of a dialectical paradox; the aporia that roots man's 'instability' in the arts practice. It is the attempt of 'destroying' 'art' in its dissolution in life, for the sake of life itself.

2016