Noise music (or simply noise) is a subgenre of experimental music that is characterised by its use of unwanted noise as a primary musical element. The genre has roots in early 20th century avant-garde music, but later drew influence from industrial and electronic music. It is characterized by a rejection of conventional music theory and traditional song structures, often featuring little or no melody, rhythm, or harmony. This type of music tends to challenge the conventional distinction between musical and non-musical sound.Priest, Eldritch. "Music Noise" in Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and The Aesthetics of Failure, p. 132. London: Bloomsbury Publishing; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.
"Noise as music" originated as an avant-garde music style in the 1910s through the work of Luigi Russolo, an Italian Futurist who published the manifesto The Art of Noises in 1913. Elements of noise music were later explored by artists in the Dada and Fluxus movements, as well as through electroacoustic music, modern classical and musique concrète. Composers such as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and James Tenney would explicitly use the term "noise" to describe some of their experimental practices. During the 1960s and 1970s, compositions such as Robert Ashley's "The Wolfman" (1964) and Pauline Oliveros's "A Little Noise In The System" (1967) were among the earliest examples of contemporary noise music, while works by non-academic artists such as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music were influential for later noise artists.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of industrial music and commercial synthesizers, encouraged non-musicians to experiment with strictly noise-oriented styles, leading to genres such as power electronics, coined by the English group Whitehouse, as well as post-industrial styles like dark ambient, death industrial and power noise.Hymen Records, Converter, Coma record description. . Access date: 8 August 2008. The 1980s cassette underground would facilitate most of these releases. In Japan, the Japanoise scene, which stemmed out of the Kansai no wave movement, produced several influential noise acts such as Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hanatarash, C.C.C.C., and Incapacitants, who, together with American and European noise artists the Haters, Daniel Menche, Vomir, and Richard Ramirez, contributed to the emergence of harsh noise and harsh noise wall into the 1990s.
During the 2000s and 2010s, the American noise underground, drawing from the Brooklyn noise scene, blended kosmische Musik, progressive electronic, ambient, drone and new age into a style known as post-noise. The movement had been catalyzed by the Skaters, a group formed by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark in 2004. Artists included Oneohtrix Point Never, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, Laurel Halo, Sun Araw, Yellow Swans, and Emeralds.
Etymology
According to Danish noise and music theorist Torben Sangild, no single definition of noise in music is possible. Sangild instead provides three basic definitions of noise: a musical acoustics definition, a second communicative definition based on distortion or disturbance of a communicative signal, and a third definition based in subjectivity (what is noise to one person can be meaningful to another; what was considered unpleasant sound yesterday is not today).Sangild, Torben, The Aesthetics of Noise. Copenhagen: Datanom, 2002. pp. 12–13 In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. 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. 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.. 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.
According to Murray Schafer, there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, and a disturbance in any signaling system (such as static on a telephone). Definitions regarding what is considered noise, relative to music, have changed over time.Joseph Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), p. 19. Ben Watson, in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution, points out that Ludwig van Beethoven's Grosse Fuge (1825) "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven's publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately.Watson 2009, 109–10.
In the 1920s, the French composer Edgard Varèse was influenced by the ideals of New York Dada associated via Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia's magazine 391. He conceived of the elements of his music in terms of sound-masses. This resulted in his compositions Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Intégrales of the early 1920s. Varèse declared that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question "What is music but organized noises?"
In attempting to define 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 John Cage's composition 4'33", in which an audience and performer sit through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), 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.Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 401.
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.Ctheory.net Paul Hegarty, "Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music", in Life in the Wires, edited by Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, 86–98 (Victoria, Canada: NWP CTheory Books, 2004).
Noise music can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques, physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings, field recording, computer-generated noise, noise produced by stochastic processes, and other randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion, feedback, static, hiss and hum. There may also be emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy, continuous pieces. More generally noise music may contain aspects such as improvisation, extended technique, cacophony and indeterminacy. In many instances, conventional use of melody, harmony, rhythm, or pulse is dispensed with.Chris Atton, "Fan Discourse and the Construction of Noise Music as a Genre", Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 3 (September 2011): 324–42. Citation on 326.Torben Sangild, The Aesthetics of Noise (Copenhagen: Datanom, 2002):. . Reprinted at UbuWeb.Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007): 3–19.Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 2009): 60–76.
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.UBU.com, Torben Sangild, "The Aesthetics of Noise", Datanom, 2002. 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).UBU.com, Steven Mygind Pedersen, Joseph Nechvatal: viral symphOny (Alfred, New York: Institute for Electronic Arts, School of Art & Design, Alfred University, 2007).Observatori A.C. (ed.), Observatori 2008: After The Future (Valencia, Spain: Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, 2008), p. 80.
Contemporary noise music is often associated with extreme volume and distortion, as well as computerized sounds and 8+kHz sine waves.Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. 2012. p. 193Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007), pp. 189–92.Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 6–10.Such as 23 VIII 64 2:50:45 – 3:11 am The Volga Delta From Studies In The Bowed Disc from The Black Record (1969)
History
Pre-20th century
During the 14th century, the charivari, a European and North American folk custom designed to shame a member of the community, made use of a mock parade aimed to make as much noise as possible by beating on pots and pans or anything that came to hand, these parades were often referred to as "rough music".The Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway: Folklore and customs, by Dr Peter Millington Includes a rare photograph of a ran-tan at Rampton, Nottinghamshire (1909) By the 19th century, the classical period led to one of the earliest examples of non-musical sounds being used in contemporary western music such as Beethoven’s Wellington's Victory (1813), which included sounds of muskets and cannons to represent battle. Later, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880) went further by writing real cannon fire directly into the score.
1910s–1930s: Early noise music
French composer Carol-Bérard born in 1885 was a pupil of Isaac Albéniz. Bérard studied and was influenced by primitive music and instruments. During the early 1900s, he experimented with noises as music, developed a notation system for them, and wrote on the challenges of instrumenting noise music. In 1910, Bérard composed a Symphony of Mechanical Force. His work made the connection between music and noise publicly visible years before Futurism.
By 1913, Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo wrote his manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises, stating that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds: "We must break this restricted circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-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. Works entitled Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a City) and Convegno d'aeroplani e d'automobili (The Meeting of Aeroplanes and Automobiles) were both performed for the first time in 1914.