Noise is Essential.

Whereas a lot of thinking about noise out there focuses on the undesirability of noise, I am primarily interested in how it is not only desired in some cases, but is absolutely essential in music. The ebb and flow of musical style throughout history illustrates that there are competing desires for crisp clean clarity in musical precision and a desire for embellishing structures with lots of filigree. Case in point, music of the medieval through renaissance was embellished to the extreme in the baroque period. The baroque period was then chiseled down into more of a crisp, simpler style of the classical period. The classical period was then embellished by the romantic period. Some people may consider the advent of serialism as more of a noisy period. I think, to the contrary, that serialism (though quite complex), was intended to quantify and hence perfect music toward a new egalitarianism-hence, the interest in mathematical combinatorial procedures. This was met with resistance by composers such as Ligeti, Xenakis and Penderecki in the 50’s and 60’s. Which was then met with by the minimalist and post-modernist movements in the 70’s and 80’s. Who knows what’s happening now? Well, there is the noise movement of the 90’s that continues to a certain degree today.

Perhaps I’m overgeneralizing historical movements, and even taking considerable license with the term “noise.” I suspect, however, that there is something to this idea of the desirability of noise. Noise as a cognitive dissonance or as a “this is just too much to take in” element in music that is beautiful and essential.

Is Noise Categorizable?

Noise is a tricky subject. It evades capture into cognitive categorical thinking. Noise is a paradox. It is everything and it is nothing. Every category that you try to put noise into it reveals contradictions or even evictions from said category. Take the statement “Noise is unwanted sound.” Unwanted by whom? If we are to except that noise only exists subjectively than what is noise music? Noise music in the ears of many avid listeners is quite beautiful. Someone may say in response to this, “well, noise music is made up of ‘acoustic noise,’ which is not subjective.” Well then, what is acoustic noise? If you say “white noise” is acoustic noise you would be wrong. White noise is a mathematical construction that does not exist outside of theory, much like a circle or a triangle. White noise is a kind of theoretical randomness that states that all frequencies are of equal amplitude. A computer, which may purport to be creating white noise, can only create pseudo random numbers and hence pseudo white noise.

Is noise disorder? Disorder is no less tricky of a subject than noise itself. But I suppose disorder represents that which cannot be comprehended. Defining noise is certainly disorderly. But when noise becomes captured into music, is it still noise or does is become something else entirely? When 4’33” by John Cage is performed, do the sounds that arise from listening to them in the sort of forced concert environment turn them into something that is not noise?