Noise music

Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals, and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static, hiss and hum, feedback, live machine sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic.¹ The Futurist art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada art movement, and later the Surrealist and Fluxus art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones and Takehisa Kosugi.²

During the early 1900s a number of art music practitioners began exploring atonality. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg proposed the incorporation of harmonic systems that were, at the time, considered dissonant. This lead to the development of twelve tone technique and serialism.³ In his book 1910: the Emancipation of Dissonance Thomas J. Harrison suggests that this development might be described as a metanarrative to justify the so called dionysian pleasures of atonal noise.⁴

History

Avant-garde precursors

Luigi Russolo, a futurist painter of the very early 20th century, was perhaps the first noise artist.⁷ His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises, stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of this genre, and many artists are now familiar with his manifesto.

By the 1920s, modernists Edgard Varèse and George Antheil began to use early mechanical musical instruments—such as the player piano and the siren—to create music that mirrored the noise of the modern world.⁹ Antheil’s best-known noise composition is his 30 minutes long Ballet Mécanique (1924), originally conceived as the musical accompaniment to the Dada film of the same name by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger. Eventually the film makers and composers chose to let their creations evolve separately, although the film credits still included Antheil. Nevertheless, Ballet Mécanique premiered as concert music in Paris in 1926.¹⁰ Antonio Russolo was another Italian Futurist composer; the brother of the more famous Luigi Russolo. There exists a 78 rpm record made by him in 1921 that is the only surviving sound recording that features the original intonarumori. Both pieces, Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines. In 1923 Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive.

In the 1930s, under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco,¹¹ Lou Harrison and John Cage began composing music for "junk" percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately-tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more. Cage started his Imaginary Landscape series in 1939, which combined recorded sound, percussion, and, in the case of Imaginary Landscape #4, twelve radios.¹²

Modern to postmodern noise

The art critic Rosalind Krauss argued that by 1968 artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist."¹⁶ Sound art found itself in the same condition, but with an added emphasis on distribution.¹⁷ Antiform process art became the terms used to describe this post-modern post-industrial culture and the process by which it is made.¹⁸ Serious art music responded to this conjuncture in terms of intense noise, for example the LaMonte Young Fluxus composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42-1:52 AM Paris Encore From Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc..¹⁹ Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for amplified percussion and window panes and his Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the flooor.²⁰

The sudden post-industrial affordability of home cassette recording technology in the 1970s, combined with the simultaneous influence of punk rock, established the no wave aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today.²⁶

The aptly-named noise rock fuses rock to noise, usually with recognizable "rock" instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality, improvisation, and white noise.³⁵ One notable band of this genre is Sonic Youth who took inspiration from the no wave noise composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (himself a student of LaMonte Young).³⁶ Marc Masters, in his book on the no wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars and DNA drew on punk rock, avant-garde minimalism and performance art.³⁷ Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest that was organized by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columns in June 1981³⁸ followed by the Speed Trials noise rock series organized by Live Skull members in May 1983. Also notable in this vein is Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, an avante-garde recording by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 consisting of repeating tape loops as John Lennon plays on different rock instruments such as piano, organ and drums along with sound effects (including reverb, delay and distortion), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and converses with Yoko Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds.³⁹

Since the late 1980s in Japan there has been a prolific output of "harsh" noise music by the noise figurehead Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’s Merz art project of psychological collage).⁴⁰

Definitions

In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno and through their work traces the history of "noise". He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted," "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's composition 4'33", in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie to NON to Glenn Branca.

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society. He indicates that noise music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious of society - validating and testing new social and political realities.

Characteristics

Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noise mentioned below and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways. ⁴⁴ One can find the distinct effort to create something harshly beautiful from something perceived as ugly in what can be identified as a search for the post-industrial sublime (philosophy) in art.⁴⁵

In music, dissonance is the quality of sounds which seems "unstable", and has an aural "need" to "resolve" to a "stable" consonance.⁴⁶ Despite the fact that words like "unpleasant" and "grating" are often used to describe the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music which is perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance. ⁴⁷ In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution.⁴⁸

In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as 'snow' on a degraded television or video image.⁴⁹ In signal processing or computing it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication.

White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density. ⁵⁰ In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies. ⁵¹

In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by naïve art, some contemporary digital art noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge, and vinyl records. ⁵² Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++ software used in creating the viral symphOny by Joseph Nechvatal).⁵³ ⁵⁴

Noise compilations

Contents

History

Avant-garde precursors

Modern to postmodern noise

Definitions

Characteristics

Noise compilations

See also

References

Footnotes

Further reading

External links