CSCT MRP
Miles Weafer
The Problems and Possibilities of Noise Production
Noise accompanies civilization. Noises – or unwanted sounds - are encountered by
virtually everyone, almost every day. The kind of noise that is addressed most often is popularly
referred to as noise pollution: the undesirable, seemingly ceaseless, and excessively loud sounds
that are an undisputed part of urban environments, technological apparatuses, and often, a culture
of promotion - car horns, construction equipment, radio advertisements and the like. Not only are
these kinds of sounds inescapably encountered as noise (Who would deny that Toronto’s Yonge
and Gould intersection is noisy?) but it is often noted that this kind of noise has adverse effects on
human health: living or working at Yonge and Gould might make you go a little deaf.
Psychologists have stressed the problematic physical changes that excessively loud or high
pitched sounds elicit in the body of the listener, stressing that in addition to deafness, noise may
cause “increases in blood pressure and heart rate as well as mild perspiration” (Morgenson). In
this light, noise emerges as a biohazard: a kind of pollution which must be lessened for the sake
of pleasure, health, and safety. It also emerges as a particularly unavoidable symptom of
overdevelopment and the way in which technological apparatuses are acquired and amassed to
the point of disrupting social utility as a whole. As music theorist Sigmund Levarie notes:
“Electric appliances, crowded stores and supermarkets, factory machines, automobiles, trains,
airplanes – whatever the technological gain, the concomitant phenomenon and the price we pay
for it is noise, and usually at a high degree of loudness” (29). Without denying the health risks of
excessively loud sounds, and without denying their association with technological apparatuses, I
would like to consider the cultural significance of noises ranging beyond the obviously disruptive
sounds of urban growth and machines. A thorough consideration of noise - of its sources and its
effects - necessitates a hesitation to conceptually reduce noise to something that is heard, and a
hesitation to limit one’s analysis to the ways that noise affects those who hear it. This paper
(1)
Weafer 2
reconsiders the degree to which noise can be experienced as disorderly, unrefined, or distracting
apart from a relationship of contrast to sounds that qualify as sufficiently ordered, refined, or
appropriate. Noise, like anything else, does not affect the body directly; rather, culture intervenes.
Where there is noise, there are analytic frameworks and particular projects that distinguish it as
such. My position is that noise is a byproduct of order. Noise signifies culture’s excess:
environmental stimuli or cultural productions which are stipulated to be meaningless, disorderly,
unwanted or outside particular models of artistic value, communication, and scientific analysis.
Because noise contrasts not only silence, but music, communicated messages, and media signals,
I will argue that noise is characterized less by its auditory quality than by its relationship of
contrast to that which is categorized as meaningful sound or signal according to dominant
conceptual models or codes.
Noise is alarming not only because it may be a biological threat; noise is also an
unavoidable symptom of the increasing proliferation of publicly acknowledged - which is to say
standardized and therefore potentially limiting - conceptual frameworks for understanding and
imagining the world. My position is that the increasing proliferation of disruptive sound - noise is testament to the increasing imposition of rigidly determined systems of production and
categories of distinction, as much as an onslaught of loud construction equipment is testament to
urban or suburban sprawl. Alongside the material processes of machines and the excessively loud
sounds that are produced inadvertently by their procedures, a wider spectrum of sounds becomes
qualified as noise – put into order in their very disorderliness before ever having sounded. Noise
is the sound which is disallowed meaning in order to make other sounds meaningful; as such, its
presence is indicative of cultural frameworks which are maintained to perpetuate social
distinction, consumerism, and other exclusively beneficial ideologies, all at the cost of social
exclusion, personal isolation, and a cultural environment that remains remarkably intrusive while
its meaning becomes increasingly vague. Although in the larger context of categorization and
order noise is not necessarily heard, the paradigm of auditory phenomena provides a particularly
Weafer 3
useful way to talk about the encroachment of rigorously calculated cultural constructions;
metaphors of sound and hearing emphasize the proliferation of aesthetic or analytic frameworks
into and throughout daily life. Sound cannot be easily contained by a barrier; “sound, unlike light,
casts no shadow” (Levarie 23), and one cannot disregard existing cultural frameworks and look
away from culture any more than we can listen away from sound. Regardless of whether noise is
emitted by mechanical constructions, it surfaces as a phenomenal expression of rigorously
designed and popularly maintained frameworks of evaluation. When noise is experienced as
noisy, it is testament to systems of codes and exclusion that have become so naturalized that they
construct daily life in the very absence of their positive occurrence.
Because noise is not the lack of sound, but sound which lacks sufficient orderliness, noise
emerges as a negative space – “negative” in that it lacks both sufficient organization and critical
potency. More so than silence, disorderly sound imposes itself as a phenomenon, and as noise
happens, it traces out the borders of permissible sound according to dominant models. However,
noise can do this without necessarily lending legitimacy to the analytic frameworks from which it
is derived. Critical attention to the ways that noise is encountered in the context of music theory,
media and communications, and scientific analysis, emphasizes that the presence and
perpetuation of culturally constructed ways of hearing, communicating, and understanding the
world function by selection – by the exclusion of some phenomena – and by doing so, threaten to
dismiss or devalue a growing spectrum of information and experience. Music theory, whether
prognostic or reflective, illustrates how the increasingly rigorous and efficient codification of
phenomena, and of sounds in particular, both constructs that which is encountered as meaningless
excess and becomes a kind of meaningless excess itself. Critical attention to the work of
conservative music theorist Sigmund Levarie (1977) illustrates how universalizing endorsements
of particular models of form and beauty in music serve to devalue sounds that contrast, and are
excluded from their boundaries. Jacques Attali (1985) argues that music, or sound arrangement,
in all of its historically emergent forms, serves as an informative precursor to economic, material
Weafer 4
circumstances. Attali’s account of the political economy of music is significant not only because
it relates cultural productions to material circumstances, but because it emphasizes the inherent
flaw in rigorously ordering patterns of sound; Attali brings to light a strange inversion that is most
apparent in music, but which takes place throughout the culture industry: attentive exclusion of
noise for the sake of meaning produces cultural artifacts which are as meaningless as they are
sterile. Complementary to Attali’s position, I will emphasize how occurrences of noise herald the
overwhelming, but continued proliferation of customary but fatally flawed ways of hearing,
understanding, and communicating the world. Noise is both alarm and proof - phenomena which
foreground the potential limitations of analytic frameworks and the unwanted result of customary
understandings and procedures which prevail unchecked.
In order to emphasize the exclusionary rigidity and potential self exhaustion of
established analytic frameworks, I will focus on theoretical accounts of sound and noise which
emphasize the apparatuses that accompany audio production. Periodically, but with increasing
frequency, the impositions of cultural mediation manifest themselves in the mechanical or
electronic procedures of the technological apparatuses that produce, record, and evaluate
arrangements of sound. The functions of the machines that accompany rigid analytic frameworks
- scientific apparatuses, musical instruments and machines that produce, detect, and qualify sound
- and the way that their existence and functions intersect with the phenomenal occurrence and
ontological category of noise dramatize the way that culture functions like an ordering system. In
the language of audio-visual production, noise refers to sounds or sights which stray from what
an apparatus is designed to do: the unplanned “hiss” or “hum” sounds, or the sight of visual
“snow” that accompanies the mechanisms of audio and visual production, reproduction, and
playback. While dissonance or criticism may not arise in the process of imagining or planning
cultural productions, the limitations of these procedures are often revealed when they take on
form and momentum as machines, as instruments. The limitations that characterize the apparatus
itself - its production of excess sound and its inability to function with gathering momentum –
Weafer 5
emerge as a literal noise which parallels the problem of precisely delineated procedures in
general. While cultural frameworks such as musical and linguistic codes do not make noise, as
they proliferate, and seem more natural, they determine that certain phenomena are experienced
as noise. While the repetition of language and music may not necessarily emit a deafening roar, it
threatens to result, albeit unintentionally, in a persistent, inarticulate hum. Language theorists
such as William Rasch (1992) have criticized models and theories of communication which
intentionally exclude the circumstantial variation, the noise, that is part of any act of
communication; he argues that inadequate attention to the entire field of information which
accompanies dialogue, in favor of that which is decidedly the message, results in an exclusion of
the empirical difference in which the other resides - an elimination of dialogue and a reduction of
speaking to meaningless sound: noise. While systems articulated in metal and steel and electronic
apparatuses produce noises we can hear, noise is also a referent for the way that systems of any
kind produce excess, or become excessively efficient, gathering momentum and demanding
adherence without benefiting anyone in particular.
Alongside any act of programming, codification, or artistic production is the potential for
variation, for noise – for stimuli and information which is circumstantial, but which derives its
characteristic undesirability from the projects themselves. Given that noise will not go away, I
would argue that it offers more for communication and cultural production if it is investigated –
dwelled upon - instead of resisted, ignored, or dismissed. While theorists and scientists who are
critical of their own methodologies have long since reflected on the problems of relentless
adherence to pre-established frameworks and on the critical and progressive possibilities of noise,
this paper suggests that these same problems are demonstrated publicly - made apparent to a nonspecialized community at large - through a particularly difficult kind of audio production; when,
in the late twentieth century, the practice of intentionally producing disorderly sounds with noisy
technological apparatuses gave way to the genre of Noise, sound producers such as The Nihilist
Spasm Band, Lou Reed, and Merzbow began to use noise, and their relationship to it, as a way of
Weafer 6
interrogating sounds which has long since been dismissed as undesirable interference. By
dwelling on noise, forcing listeners to endure dissonant, disorderly sound, the Noise producer
works like the critical theorist, drawing attention to the processes of codification and the rigidity
of existing analytic frameworks without lending legitimacy to them. In the case of Noise music,
noise, considered in the right attitude, becomes the means of cultural investigation and unraveling
not through critical theory, but through the much more inclusive practice of making and listening
to arrangements of sound.
1. constructed noise
Many existing accounts of music theory exercise the distinctions between sound and
noise that is central to any musical genre, type, or style – a distinction that, in addition to
facilitating the production of desirable, adequately ordered and precise sounds, also inadvertently
constructs dissonant sounds – sounds which precisely do not accord. The fact that the sounds of
which music is composed – notes and beats, phrases, pieces, productions and recorded
compilations – derive their dominant meaning from codes, or previously existing, publicly
acknowledged frameworks of difference is clearly demonstrated in the musical staff, time
signatures, scales, and genres. It is also demonstrated in the listener’s experience of what Torben
Sangild (2004) calls a musical “gesture”: a sound which derives meaning from its “more or less
culturally coded” situation in a larger musical composition (1) – experiences of music which are
“in a certain sense objective” (1). Another music theorist, Sigmund Levarie (1977), has noted that
musical gestures claim existence in the imagination before being uttered by any particular
instruments; “To evoke the ‘Star-spangled Banner’, he notes, “one does not first wonder whether
it is hummed or trumpeted but rather how its opening line ‘goes’”. (25) In addition to involving
the association of the musical phrase with particular instruments, the production of music always
risks imperfection; music can be played poorly, interrupted, muffled by other noises, or subjected
to the technical difficulties of particular amplifying or broadcasting technologies. The fact that the
line “goes” a certain way makes any deviation an error, unwanted sound – noise.
Weafer 7
Levarie’s article, Noise (1977) exemplifies how noise becomes apparent as such only
while particular ways of ordering and evaluating the world are endorsed and perpetuated. Levarie
initially appeals to pieces of psychology; in order to endorse orderly, tonal sounds over sounds
that are tonally imprecise, he notes that infants respond to loud sounds with a particular kind of
reflex, and adults respond to them by being startled, and that the primeval threat of noise which
triggers these responses can be obviated by “orderly tones in a good composition” (23). Like
Morgenson, Levarie stresses the physical destruction that results from the noise of urban centers,
arguing that in modern industrialized areas in the United States, unlike less industrialized
communities elsewhere, “hearing deteriorates in the natural course of aging” (25). Further
emphasizing the bio-hazardous effects of noise, Levarie stresses how Nazi fighter pilots made a
literal weapon out of excessively loud sound by “(attaching) extra noise producers…to their dive
bombers” (24). While these points are difficult to dispute, Levarie’s article does not remain
focused on the health risks of loud sounds; eventually, it becomes clear that Levarie stigmatizes
noise not because it is destructive to bodies or disruptive to consciousness, but simply because he
needs something with which to contrast orderly sound: “if we define sound as anything we can
hear, then noise is the kind of sound that is disorderly” (21). Levarie does not limit his discussion
of orderly and disorderly sound to an account of particular musical phrases; instead, he projects
the order he wants music to exemplify onto visual representations of sonic vibrations. Providing
two oscillograms that contrast the perfect, orderly arches of pure tone with the random, squiggly
lines of noise, he argues that both in nature, and in human life, “noise is the common
occurrence…Tone is an accomplishment” (22). While Levarie may have included the visual
representation in order to imply that his model of musical beauty is grounded in objective fact or
necessity, the image of the sine curve is emblematic of the project imagined by Levarie and
others like him: the most precise distinction between orderly and disorderly sound and the ability
to minimize – or eradicate - the latter. As Levarie himself stresses, “in the sounding world around
us, noise is far more common than tone” (22). But instead of thoroughly investigating the lived
Weafer 8
experience of acoustic phenomena, Levarie, totally focused on the ideal arc of the sine curve,
merely prioritizes the abstraction of worldly phenomena into calculations that are as necessarily
static as they are precise.
The “accomplishment” of pure tone involves controlling audio environments using
special devices. Just as the oscillograph is used to measure the degree of tonal accuracy, so too
musical instruments can be understood as devices used for controlling sound and minimizing
noise; Levarie notes that orderly tone is “a human artifact brought about primarily by special
‘instruments’ capable of creating regular vibrations” (22). But the perfect tones that Levarie
imagines requires conscious, intentional, and somewhat artificial production, risking the
possibility of failing to sound as it is imagined. Just as the project of distilling tone and ordering
music is articulated in the technological apparatuses associated with music production and
consumption, so too are the shortcomings of this project. The sine curve is an image of how
technologizations – precise and objective systems for ordering and evaluating the world - like
technological apparatuses, can have a negative impact on civilization; idealized models of
ordered sound close off the possibility for certain phenomena to be encountered as anything other
than noise. As the precise tone, the result of technological apparatuses or technical training
becomes the model of acceptable and meaningful sound, noise emerges everywhere. As one’s ear
becomes attuned to tone, much, or most, of the auditory world becomes perceived as inadequately
ordered: noisy.
Levarie's analysis begs the question of why these sounds must be devalued, besides the
fact that they lie outside established compositions and aesthetic frameworks. His unwavering
endorsement of controlled tones leads him to distinguish between good and bad technological
apparatuses in a way that is arguable at best, and may risk being wholly arbitrary; while the urban
dweller may experience the negative, physically destructive aspects of noise, Levarie fails to
emphasize how other kinds of technology – for instance, the theoretic training which leads one to
distinguish tone and order sound – can limit the variety of meaningful sounds which can be
Weafer 9
produced, and the variety of ways in which particular sounds can be encountered. At his most
arbitrary, Levarie criticizes the disruptive and tonally imprecise sound of the factory or
emergency vehicle siren as “dynamism gone wild” (19) while describing the sound of the car
horn as “re-assuring”, and “allowing us to collect our wits” merely because it is tonally precise
(19).
Thinkers like Levarie may overlook the negative effects of idealizing orderly tones,
despite the variety of possible sounds, and the variety of ways in which sounds can be
encountered and understood. While Levarie notes that “noise has become an increasingly
noticeable and significant symptom of our civilization” (21), he hesitates to consider how the
rigid categorization between sound and noise – a categorization that is central to his theory of
music – might in fact place limitations not only on what acoustic phenomena are heard, but on
how they are heard. The systems by which sound is arranged and evaluated are responsible for
noise – not for its production, but for its epistemological qualification as noise. Like precision
instruments themselves, “all technical training concentrates on how to minimize scratching,
knocking, hissing, rasping, and grating” (Levarie 28). Alongside his endorsement of particular
kinds of technologies, Levarie proposes a certain model of history: a continued project whereby
tone is accomplished, and disorderly sound - noise - is consistently eradicated. He notes that “the
path from the unlimited world of sound to the discrete experience of a piece of music” is a
process of continued selection, of “increasingly refined discrimination” (25). In terms of music,
Levarie calls this supposed movement from the randomness of nature to the order of art and
culture “distillation” (25). For him, the perfect sine curve that would accompany a carefully
produced and rigorously monitored tone serves as the unitary, streamlined arc that is emblematic
of the exclusive perfection towards which he thinks civilization should be moving. Yet the sine
curve is also indicative of the way in which the distinction that Levarie and others like him
propose, threatens to reach beyond distinguishing between adequately ordered and disorderly
tone, becoming a distinction between those who can recognize civilized sound, and those who
Weafer 10
cannot. Due to its dependence on technological instruments and technical training instead of the
enormous range of publicly available sounds, Levarie’s project of discriminating the orderly
sounds from the disorderly would present anyone but the specialist with a choice between a blind
march and an outright rejection of “civilization”.
Levarie’s adherence to standardized methods and techniques for producing and
evaluating sound is symptomatic of a social divide whose impact ranges far beyond the music
industry: a divide between insiders who understand the established system, and those whose
activities lack the kind of order that is required to qualify as meaningful. Levarie’s endorsement
of orderly tone perpetuates this barrier; those whose auditory production strays from the tonal
“distillation” he endorses become stigmatized along with the sounds for which they are
responsible; the process of distilling tone and eliminating noise is “an accomplishment of
civilized man” (29) while indistinct sounds are a “(deliberate repudiation) of (the)
accomplishments of civilization” (3) - mere acts of “rebellious barbarianism” (30). People who
produce, and attempt to communicate with sounds outside of the established order are reduced to
participants in a “precivilized worship of noise” (31). Instead of being separated by a physical
wall, as a medieval city is from invading barbarians, sound and noise are separated by a steady
conceptual differentiation that is articulated with every fetishized oscillogram. Levarie notes that
“a citizen is civilized if he understands that the alternative to limitation is chaos and anarchy”
(30). Quoting Karl Kraus, he argues that “A culture ends when the barbarians break out of it” (30)
– which is to say that culture is threatened by those who refuse to prioritize orderly sounds and
limit noise production. While “sound, unlike light, casts no shadow” (Levarie 23), Levarie’s
argument makes it clear that cultural constructs have a similarly ubiquitous existence. Given the
way that noise functions in opposition to sound, noise is not so much destroyed as it is identified
as an indispensable collection of phenomena that articulates the limits of permissible sound
emission. Public systems of arranging and evaluating sound leave no auditory production
Weafer 11
unqualified as ordered or barbaric, acceptable or to be eradicated, meaningful sound arrangements
or mere noise.
One reaction to Levarie’s conservative music theory would be to compose music out of
unconventionally loud and tonally imprecise sounds emitted by machines that are not traditionally
used as musical instruments. In The Futurist Manifesto: The Art of Noise (1913), Luigi Russolo,
idealizing the sounds that accompany the technologies and mechanisms of “a great modern
capital” (7), proposes an orchestra consisting of the sounds of factory machines and urban
environments. This example is popularly understood to constitute an early – if not the earliest example of Noise music: the opposite of the traditionally composed, tonal music that Levarie
endorses. While Levarie emphasizes the primitiveness of atonal noise, Russolo argues that for
societies existing before the nineteenth century and the development of modern machinery, “life
was nothing but silence” (4), lacking the variety of intense and prolonged sounds. Any sounds
that were prolonged and intense were “attributed a divine origin” (5), conceived of as “something
apart, different from and independent of life” (5); organized sound – music - was understood as
“a fantastic world superimposed upon reality” (5). Whereas Levarie describes the development of
music as an increasingly refined process of selecting tone and excluding dissonance, for Russolo
the most interesting music arises out of an increasingly widespread union of various, and often
dissonant sounds; the musical chord, he argues “came gradually: the assonant common chord was
followed by chords enriched with some random dissonances, to end up with the persistent and
complicated dissonances of contemporary music” (5). Stating that “machines create today such a
large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to
arouse any emotion” (5), Russolo, with the arrangement of machine sounds he calls “noisesound” (4), seems to be breaking open the spectrum of sounds that can be appreciated musically;
the sounds of pipes, valves, pistons, saws, train-rails, and whips all have a place in the Futurist
orchestra Russolo describes (7).
Weafer 12
Although Russolo insists that we must “break at all cost from the restrictive circle of pure
sounds” (6) – pure meaning both tonal and traditional - and while he insists that his project is one
of liberation from the tyranny of customary ways of making and evaluating sound, Russolo’s
project, in the end, is not all that different from Levarie’s; while Levarie makes use of musical
instruments and other special machines in order to “distill” tone, Russolo notes that “(Futurists)
want to score and regulate harmonically and rhythmically the most varied noises” (9). While
Futurists “do not want to destroy the movements and irregular vibrations” (9), they do, according
to Russolo, want to “fix the degree or pitch of the predominant vibration” (9). Russolo’s proposal
to “conquer” the “infinite variety of noise sounds” (6) resonates with a tyrannous harnessing of
the popular imagination and material labor of a citizenry, the conductor or technical regulator
standing in for the absolute authority. Russolo pursues the noise of machines that prevail in urban
environments not because of its subversive or anarchic potential, but because of its power; “noise
reigns supreme over human sensibility” (4). Russolo does not prioritize the sounds of “trolleys,
autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds” (6) as opposed to the songs of heroes and pastorals
simply because he wants humanity to be liberated from traditional cultural distinctions. Instead,
Russolo, like other Futurists, is idealizing an emergent kind of order: the cold, programmed order
and systematic nature of twentieth century machines. Russolo’s celebration of the mechanical
aspects of civilization resonates with Futurist painting of the time; Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude
Descending Staircase No. 2” (1912) is particularly emblematic of fascism as Russolo understands
it: the repetition of a prescribed task - walking - in which the human form is virtually
unrecognizable due to the mechanized structures by which it is traced; the image of a project
ensured by mechanical constitution – human error eradicated in the procedure of command, and
adherence to it. While Russolo does not propose the eradication of noise, he dismisses the
restrictions of traditional musical composition and the myth of pure tone in order to present
another myth: the complete and total regulation of human existence – an adherence to
predetermined orders or programs for one, unified, ultimate end.
Weafer 13
While Levarie’s proposal to imagine and distill the most perfect tone is not explicitly
fascist, it is remarkably clinical, premised on the eradication of any corporeal intervention; even
the “complex mechanism of the piano”, he notes, “never completely eliminates the noise of the
finger on the key” (27), and the tuning fork merely approximates the perfection of tones produced
electronically in a laboratory (27). While his article does not imply totalitarian command of all
human activity, Levarie’s unwavering valuation of tonal precision in music limits the spectrum of
audio emissions and arrangements that can be considered meaningful, and while his call to distill
orderly tone by eradicating noise is not a transparent endorsement of machine-like order and
subservience, it does reflect an attempt to account for, and order all sounds, including noise, and
place them in an unchanging relationship with one another. With the oscillogram of the perfect
sine curve, Levarie offers an image of the musical order he imagines - an image that is not unlike
Constantin Brancusi’s definitively abstract sculpture, “Golden Bird” (1919): a sleek, streamlined,
idealized perfection that presents itself as the beginning and end of form and beauty - a piece that
modernist poet Mina Loy described as “the absolute act of art conformed to continent structure”
(“Brancusi’s Golden Bird”, l 16-9). Although Levarie, unlike Russolo, does not outright declare
his intentions to arrange noises, it would be a mistake to understand noise - disorderly sound
whose visual representations would exceed the contours of the sine curve - as something that is
merely dismissed or discarded by Levarie and others like him, playing no role in the in the pure
tone that he endorses. If the myth of pure tone is to be the foundation of musical distinction, it is
crucial that sounds which do not fit the model of tone are understood and encountered as noise.
Loy describes Brancusi’s sculpture as “an incandescent curve/licked by chromatic flames/in
labyrinths of reflections” (l 22-4). While the sine curve Levarie idealizes is not visible as a
reflection of other lights, it does exist in contrast to the disorder that is excluded by its
boundaries; instead of being dismissed or discarded from Levarie’s model (his article is entitled
“Noise”, after all), noise serves as a function of ordered tone, tracing and maintaining its
boundaries.
Weafer 14
While Levarie, unlike Russolo, does not idealize the sounds of urban and industrial
environments, the kinds of mechanical apparatuses and procedures to which Levarie does draw
attention make his project of tonal distillation and noise eradication somewhat suspect: the fact
that Levarie employs the oscillograph - a machine which does not produce sound, but images of
which facilitate the monitoring of existing sounds – illustrates how his attention to tone is less
about the way things sound than the way in which they fit into a comfortable, but potentially
arbitrary, analytic framework. While technical training produces knowledgeable musicians, the
oscillograph, which measures actual musical productions, serves as a reminder of the artificiality
of the perfect tone which Levarie feels music should strive to achieve. The working oscillograph
is likely accompanied by its own sounds – hums, buzzes, and clicks which are likely atonal, and
which may contribute to disruptive noise in the world at large. Yet, Levarie doesn’t address these
sounds or the material situation of the oscillograph at all. This absence in Levarie’s analysis
suggests a larger rhetorical strategy. Russolo includes only the sounds of efficient machinery
because the sounds of machines squeaking, rusting, and breaking would threaten his myth of total
societal efficiency; likewise, any attention by Levarie to the fact that sound occurs in particular
circumstances would threaten the naturalness with which his imagined goal of tonal distillation is
perceived. The perfect tone which Levarie endorses is not an occurrence, but an ideal, and its
significance is dependent on the amount of times the distinction between permissibly ordered
tone and unacceptable, disorderly noise is rearticulated. In terms of rearticulating this distinction,
occurrences of noise are just as useful as occurrences of sufficiently ordered tones; noise,
repeatedly experienced as grating, as unendurable, is assurance that tone-based models of musical
achievement such as Levarie’s, are being upheld. But when the noises that inevitably occur are
understood not as naturally dissonant or disruptive – when they are understood, instead, as a
result of the system by which other sounds are valued - noise serves to reveal the artificiality by
which both disorderly noises and adequately ordered and arranged tones are evaluated.
Weafer 15
The fact that Levarie’s conservative model of form and utility in music is founded upon
the exclusion of sounds deemed disorderly illustrates that, in addition to being a potential
biohazard, noise is disruptive because its existence clashes with existing models of sound
evaluation. Yet, the idea that noise – dissonant, disruptive sounds - persists as music theory
collides with pop psychology. A recent public radio broadcast of a show entitled Radio Lab, for
instance, claims to “re-imagine the disastrous 1913 debut of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring…through
the lens of modern neurology” (Abumrad 1). Claims like these ignore the likelihood that
dissonance is culturally constructed. The Stravinsky riot may have less to do with determinate,
neurological dispositions than it does with the mobilization of a culturally distinguished group of
people who rearticulate the dominant ways of ordering sound by reacting badly to their opposite.
The field of psychology contributes to an investigation of noise, but not by justifying the
reduction of audio culture to biological determinism; instead, the strict method of scientific
analysis illustrates how noises – here, not disorderly sounds, but stimuli which interfere with the
clear communication of a signal – instigate reflection on the limitations of particular methods and
the conclusions drawn from them. In the context of psychological and neurological
experimentation, “noise” refers to the incidental, unpredicted phenomena which arise for the
subject, and are monitored by the experimenter, but which cannot be granted significance
according to the directives of the particular experiment – meaningless stimuli, on an empirical,
neurological level. As science developed ways of examining the human brain by stimulating live
subjects with cortical electrodes and tracking brain activity, scientists, such as Nathan Perry
(1966), voiced concerns about potential methodological problems. The standard method of using
cortical electrodes is to stimulate parts of the brain repeatedly and record the changes that
accompany the stimulation. Perry draws attention to the way that signal – the brain activity that is
directly related to electric stimulation of the electrodes – is conceptually packaged out from noise
– or the brain activity that is incidental to the specific site of the electrode’s charges; incidental
noise is assumed to cancel out with enough repetitions while meaningful signal will be present
Weafer 16
every time the stimulation occurs (“One assumption in this method is that potential changes
evoked by each stimulus presentation [the signal] will be time-locked and will summate with
repetition. A second and corollary assumption is that remaining potential changes (the noise) will
be random and cancel out with enough repetitions” [Perry 1022]). Perry notes that it is crucial
that researchers “present data regarding the degree to which the signal exceeds the noise or, at
least, to acknowledge that this has been examined” (1022) and in fact that “failure to use
noise…makes it difficult to determine whether a cortical event related to the stimulus did indeed
occur” (1022). Perry is differentiating between the good scientist, hesitant to predict that what
they assume is noise will cancel out with repetition, and the bad scientist, who prematurely
concludes that what they are measuring is indeed meaningful brain activity consistent with
particular stimulation instead of merely incidental brain activity – noise. While the good scientist,
attentive to incidental cortical responses, will use the encounters with noise as information which
will allow them to reconsider their hypothesis, for the bad scientist, noise remains a blind spot in
their investigation.
Music theorists can take a cue from the scientist who refuses to dismiss or eradicate
noise, choosing instead to re-evaluate the limitations of their hypotheses and methods signaled by
noise. Whether it arises in the context of psychology or music theory, the phenomenon of noise –
of stimuli which is dissonant and dismissed because it lacks sufficient orderliness – not only
demands the question What is producing this noise? but also the question Why must certain
stimuli be disallowed meaningful existence? Like the bad scientist unwilling to question the
validity of their findings, Levarie is unwilling to consider the significance of the noises which can
be encountered almost constantly in musical production, but which lack representation in his
tone-biased model of musical arrangement and evaluation. Critical attention to Levarie’s
argument reveals that his model of “civilized” music functions by denying meaning to sounds
deemed to be disorderly; he cannot reflect on the noise which exceeds the boundaries of the
Weafer 17
perfect sine curve without drawing attention to the artificiality of the distinction between tone and
noise – a distinction that is at the heart of his projected distillation of tone.
2. functional noise
In what follows, I would like to focus on historical theoretical accounts of music and
popular culture more generally, that avoid both Levarie’s functional devaluation of noise and
Russolo’s opportunistic embrace of it – accounts which emphasize instead how noises
constructed by the dominant models of form and utility in music can lead to the instability of
these models. Noise is destructive to the cultural forms out of which it arises because it attracts
criticism, as Jacques Attali (1985) demonstrates; as many others describe, noise is equally a
referent for that which cultural forms can become, plagued by over-efficient production
technologies and systems of evaluation. In Noise: the political economy of music (1985),
originally published in 1977, Attali stresses that music and noise, in addition to being examples of
the way that order functions by exclusion, are also auditory expressions of the historically
contingent means by which things are produced and wealth is exchanged; “every code of music”,
he argues, “is rooted in the ideologies and technologies of its age, and at the same time produces
them” (19). Attali declares his intentions not to theorize about music, but through music (4).
Whereas Levarie and Russolo present tonal distillation and popular accord respectively, as the
ultimate goal of music, Attali stresses that there is no meaning intrinsic to music itself; instead,
music “can be defined as noise given form according to a (historically contingent) code” (25). He
relates the state of musical production to the dominant and emergent cultural and political orders,
arguing that music is “a credible metaphor for (reality)” (5) because “the code of music simulates
the accepted rules of society” (29). Attali stresses that music is a particularly useful tool for
theorizing about cultural and economic forms because music prefigures the form and dynamics of
material reality, exploring “much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities
in a given code” (11); musical products are cultural sites where the meaning of various other
human activities, especially economics, is carried over, reflected, defined, and distorted, working
Weafer 18
like a complicated play of mirrors, providing a vision of reality that is more rich in its
unfamiliarity than reality itself (5).
Attali describes three “zones, three stages, three strategic uses of music by power” (19),
arguing that music, as we understand it today, is derived from an initial attempt to address the
excessively loud and violently disruptive sounds of daily life and that project’s mutation into a
customary, meaningless – virtually automatic - maintenance of customary musical arrangements
and systems of their evaluation. For Attali, music has developed according to three major stages:
the ritual inclusion of noise in music’s pre-capitalist existence yielding to complex, written music,
and then, recorded music – stages which construct a wider spectrum of sounds as noise, denying
them a place in meaningful sound arrangement. Attali suggests that this development results in an
increase in the range of sounds which are encountered as noise, as well as popular, but isolating
attempts to escape noise. Music was initially used in rituals to make people forget general
violence; in pre-capitalist societies, the production of ritual music was a popular “channelization
of noise and a simulation of sacrifice, a sublimation to create order and political integration” (26).
Congruent with popular characterizations of noise as loud, violent affectation, early music was
founded on what Attali calls the “biological reality” of noise: in excess of a certain frequency of
decibel, noise is “a source of pain” and a “weapon of death” (27). This affective power of
excessively loud sound is of obvious use for powerful people who wish to inflict violence on
individuals’ bodies. However, Attali stresses that even this excessively loud and clearly
physically disruptive noise is most useful for authoritative purposes when it becomes codified –
when it becomes ingrained with a publicly acknowledged system of representation; the precapitalist ritual of music - the channelization of excessively loud, punctual, and disruptive sounds
- substitutes general violence and affirms that “a society is possible if the imaginary of
individuals is sublimated” (26). For Attali, the pre-capitalist game of music amounts to “the
organization of controlled panic” (27), a “simulation of sacrifice” (26) which “resembles the
game of power (that it accompanied): provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security”
Weafer 19
(28); “create a problem in order to solve it” (28). In ritual music, as Attali describes it, universally
disruptive audio emissions function as a scapegoat, brought to public attention as a means of
highlighting and making use of noise for order’s sake.
It is in his account of the ritual use of noise that Attali comes closest to describing the
kind of barbaric celebration of noise that music theorists like Levarie find appalling. But as
Attali’s history of noise progresses, he ceases to equate noise with excessively loud or bodyoriented, physically disruptive sound; musical production characterized as controlled panic gives
way to music that controls without generating panic, and eventually, music which controls
populations without requiring popular participation. Attali argues that the classical, or “tonal”
music which emerged in the eighteenth century, amounts to a spectacle that suggests the
possibility of societal organization – a representation of one single “consensual representation of
the world” (46). Instead of being a shared, procedural experience of immediately present and
occurring sounds, classical music functions as a more abstract system of “harmonic writing and
standardized scores” (52); harmony in music “(makes) people believe in the harmony of the
world” (46). With the emergence of commercial exchange and its predominant beneficiaries came
significant changes in the way music was produced and evaluated; instead of channeling violence,
intellectualized, rigorously coded music provides a spectacular “image of the ultimate social
cohesion, achieved through commercial exchange and the progress of rational knowledge” (46).
Instead of serving as a contained re-enactment of physically disruptive sound, music under early
capitalism, with its demonstration of harmony, has “the reign of reason and the scientific
representation of the world” imposed on it (60) – in turn, imposing this ideology on its listeners.
It is this kind of music, which Attali rightly calls representation, which connotes Levarie’s
project of tonal distillation. While representational music is quite different from the ritual music
that preceded it (for instance, representational music involves a gulf between the orchestra and
the audience [47]), both kinds of music naturalize the social and economic arrangements which
they accompany; ritual music makes people forget the threat of death by channeling excessively
Weafer 20
loud sounds reminiscent of mortality, and representational music continually uses musical accord
– harmony – and minimizes dissonance to evoke “an absolute relation between well-being and
order in nature” (60). In light of the way that science - the most rigorous systematization of the
world - must address the unaccounted for information that it encounters, reconsidering its own
methodology with repeated experiments, it is not surprising that the music of representation itself a substitute for the simulated sacrifice of ritual incorporation – reveals its own limitations
once its demonstrations of natural harmony are repeated to a certain degree. Emerging out of this
reconfiguration of representational music, and eventually taking its place, is the musical era that
Attali refers to as “repetition”. Facilitated by technologies and techniques of audio reproduction
and mass marketing, later twentieth century music no longer consists of ritual or spectacle.
Instead, technological apparatuses bring the end of representational music; once recorded and
reproduced, music is removed from both its association with and dependence on the continued
efforts of particular artists, and from its situation in the midst of particular codes. Recording
technology allows music to be stockpiled for a time in the future, and the egalitarian logic of mass
marketing functions by “erasing value-creating differences” (106). Popular, repetitive “mass
music” serves to integrate consumers, normalize and homogenize cultures, and silence any other
sounds (111).
The phenomenon of noise plays a crucial role in the three successive kinds of music that
Attali describes; “the political economy of music”, he stresses, “should take as its point of
departure the study of the material it highlights – noise – and its meaning at the time of the origin
of (humankind)” (26). Attali’s insistence that the ritual inclusion of naturally disruptive acoustic
stimuli wanes as capitalist exchange becomes the dominant world view poses a serious challenge
for music theory and cultural criticism focused on the affective tyranny of excessively loud
noises. He stresses that early capitalist systems of power, unlike previous social-economic orders,
do not maintain order by making people forget about the general thread of bodily violence; rather,
abstract, capitalist forms of world order, as reflected in the music that accompanies them,
Weafer 21
function by according with complex, but well established, systems of explicit differences - in
music, the differences between established tones, scales, rhythms, tempos and volumes - and by
disqualifying sounds that do not accord: noises. In Attali’s words, “The harmonic system
functions through rules and prohibitions: in particular, what is prohibited are repeated
dissonances, in other words, critiques of differences” (62). The harmonic system does not
function by including excessively loud noises and affecting participants so as to keep them in
line; rather – and this is epitomized in Levarie’s rejection of vibration that exceeds the boundaries
he has set out - ideology is maintained and populations are controlled by minimizing noise:
dissonance – a critique of difference. As a result, representational music presents an idealized
picture of compatibility between the natural world and human created systems - be they aesthetic
or economic. As Attali states, “the utility of (written) music is not to create order but to make
people believe in its existence and universal value, in its impossibility outside of exchange” (57).
It’s fairly clear how music ordered by harmony and exchange makes exchange seem natural,
whether it is the exchange of complementary notes and phrases, or economic exchange premised
on the intermediary of currency and market value. However, the ideological implications of
harmony demonstrating, representational music are more significant than its tendency to lend
legitimacy to a particular economic system. Representation, as Attali depicts it, is the means of
imagining a politicized future of any kind; it demonstrates the utility of exchange by arranging
complementary sounds of increasing complexity, a spectacle which is fundamental to the
naturalization of any complex understanding of the world.
The era dominated by representational music – for Attali, an era spanning from the time
of classical music’s common practice until the widespread use of recording technology – marks a
significant shift in the importance of cultural constructions. In addition to requiring specially
designed and constructed instruments, and an exclusive, technically trained group of people to
operate them, classical, representational music requires strict adherence to publicly acknowledged
cultural frameworks (such as the western scale, expressed in the grand staff) and an audience
Weafer 22
attuned to the system of its evaluation. The radical redefinition of noise which accompanies
classical, harmony producing, representational music reflects the significant cultural shift
impacting music. Ritual music included and ordered the noises of the natural world as publicly
participated confirmation of the possibility of ordering nature. With representational music,
however, noise is encountered by the players and the listeners as unwanted sound – mistakes: a
category or collection of sounds upon whose exclusion the degree of success of the musical
production can be ascertained. Mistakes are noisy not because of some primordial affectation, but
because they clash with the demonstration and endorsement of the harmony and exchange that
music had become.
3. noise accumulation
While Attali describes pre-capitalist musical events as ritual, and early capitalist musical
arrangements as representation, he describes the musical culture of late capitalism – for him, a
period of time that included the late 1970’s when he wrote Noise - as repetition. In cultural
environments dominated by the production of multiple, virtually identical products, the noise
accompanying musical production is neither disruptive sounds included so they can be ordered,
nor tonally imprecise or disharmonious sounds that interfere with representation; rather, repetitive
music itself amounts to the noise of meaningless sound. While the pre-historical invention of the
musical instrument allowed for the incorporation of noise and the publication of written music
allowed for a widespread representation of order and construction of disorderly sounds as noise,
recording technology, for the first time, allows particular acoustic productions to be continually
ridded of noise, or the unplanned sounds of arbitrary circumstance. The irony of technological
development is that as noise becomes systematically excluded by technological maintenance and
reproduction of sound, the incapacity of technological frameworks and technicians to provide
stimulating music becomes more apparent. Not only does disagreeable sound stand out in an
acoustic environment characterized by a high, sterilizing degree of audio fidelity, but the overall
failure of repetitive music - music premised on audio purity and fidelity instead of the complexity
Weafer 23
of its phrases – to provide complex and developing harmonious arrangements, becomes glaringly
apparent as it is repeated.
For Attali, twentieth century music illustrates that the systems by which music can make
a spectacle of imagined order have been “thoroughly explored” (81), and it is at this point in
music’s development that music becomes valued according to the precise measurements and
novel sounds of the ever-growing array of technological apparatuses. Instead of sounding
viscerally urgent, instead of providing increasingly complex, harmonic arrangements of sound
and imaginations of the world, the prevailing music of the twentieth century – the hit parade – is
qualified by the degree to which it is repeated; instead of the immediacy of ritual or the intricacy
of representation, “the usage of music will be evaluated exclusively by polls determining the
quantity of the music broadcast” (84). Attali stresses that the music of the hit parade is designed
not to differentiate from its predecessors and contemporaries, but to resemble them; the same hit
songs are heard on every radio station in every location. Finally, in a time where the cultural
producer “produces what technology makes possible, instead of creating the technology for what
(they wish) to produce” (115), it is no longer required that musical products demonstrate, or
provide the foundation for, harmonic arrangements of increasing complexity. Attali describes this
cultural environment - both the music and the political economy it predates - as a “transcending
of men by their knowledge and tools” (115). Attali suggests that Muzak - a brand of light,
minimally rousing, vocal-less music created in the nineteen twenties to accompany waiting on the
phone which has since accompanied activities in office buildings and bureaucratic environments
everywhere - is emblematic of the problems facing twentieth century music and culture in
general; the sleek production and unobtrusive familiarity of Muzak (colloquially, “elevator
music”) seems to be a good example of the noise exclusion sought out earlier, in the
arrangements of representational music. However, the musical phrases are so sterile and
standardized that they can only be repeated until they amount to meaningless sounds: noise.
Weafer 24
Programmed according to work schedules, Muzak amounts to the musical articulation of an
omnipresent structure of efficient behavior.
The process of musical creation - and often the process of its evaluation – have always
required special apparatuses, be they the noise-making devices that accompany the human voice
in musical rituals, or the precision instruments and musical notation designed for performances of
classical music. But in the era of repetition, tools originally intended to serve the production and
publication of particular sounds and sound arrangements come to dictate how music is produced,
the kind of music that is produced, and the ways in which music is engaged. In addition to
overwhelming the inhabited audio and visual environment, the devices required for recording
music – devices such as musical instruments, recording studios, broadcasting and wired radio
service, speakers and receivers – have taken on a certain priority. Richard Hoggart (2006)
highlights the jukebox as a material expression of the “particularly thin and pallid form of
dissipation” of mid twentieth century popular culture (30). In a passage worth quoting at length
he notes how the obvious physical presence of the jukebox machine is accompanied by a narrow
spectrum of musical selections lacking overall in both urgency and harmonic complexity:
About a dozen records are available at any time; a numbered button is pressed for the one
wanted, which is selected from a key of titles…Some of the tunes are catchy; all have
been doctored for presentation so that they have the kind of beat which is currently
popular; much use is made of the ‘hollow-cosmos’ effect which echo-chamber recording
gives. (30)
While Hoggart mentions the excessive volume of sound (“the ‘nickelodeon’ is allowed to blare
out so that the noise would be sufficient to fill a good-sized ballroom, rather than a converted
shop in the main street” [30]), he also comments on another noisy quality of the emission: the
noise of a beat so standardized that its insignificance, its failure to develop into complexity, adds
to the “hollow cosmos effect” (30). In Hoggart’s description, the jukebox reduces any significant
contribution to either the production or selection of the music which is consumed. This reduction
Weafer 25
of music to a mechanistic function is not limited to the jukebox machine’s encasement of the
records; just as vinyl singles must accord with the circumference and rotation speed demanded by
the jukebox, concurrent popular music tracks, including those of supposedly subversive genres,
rarely stray from the two and a half to four minute time slots offered by commercial radio and
television music stations. The most proliferative kind of noise emerging from the jukebox is
neither the excessive volume of its speakers nor the sounds of the mechanical processes that
accompany track changes, but the sound of the standardized music itself: the noise of repetition
stressed by Attali. Having little or no relation to the environment in which it is received, and
offering no unique sound arrangements, music which appeals to gimmicky sound effects like
echo chambers is as devoid of communication as an echoed sound is devoid of precision.
Attali stresses that in the age of musical repetition - an age dominated by technologies of
audio production, recording, and playback - “music escapes from musicians” (115). Obviously,
contemporary popular music is devoid of a meaningful association with a particular producer; the
demand for high production value, instead of the artistic creations or vocal resonances of any
particular performer, makes stars out of studio production teams. Given how recording
technology allows sounds, including human voices, to be heard beyond the place and time of their
production, music also “escapes from musicians” because its reproductions are available in the
absence of musicians. But the era of musical repetition impacts more than the substantive
duration of musical performance; out of the sheer quantity and precision of new sound
production, recording, and playback technologies arises a kind of music that denies the musician
– the complicator of musical codes – any significant individual input at all. The musician no
longer “(conceives) structures and (theorizes) on the basis of their experience” (115), no longer
“(combines) foreseeable sounds originating from stable (musical) instruments” (115); instead
“their role is only to guide the unpredictable unfolding of sound production” (115). Attali points
out that even the listener is just another technician; as sound recording technology plays an
increasingly important role in music making, “what counts is the clinical purity of the acoustics”
Weafer 26
(106). This obsession with the purity of sound, as opposed to the communication of any kind of
value, redefines the role that is available for the music listener who is “conditioned by these
production criteria” and “behaves like a sound engineer” (106). Valued as an accumulation of
production criteria instead of a means of communicating ideas about the natural and cultural
world, musical phrases and tropes become units of production, dependent on explicit, publicly
acknowledged calculations. Attali draws attention to this shift in the way music is valued noting
that:
“In the case of semi-identical objects selling for the same price and arriving on the
market in quantities so high that the radio programmers, let alone the consumers, cannot
test them all, differentiation requires a ranking scheme exterior to their production, one
recognized as legitimate by the consumer and capable of defining for them the use-value
of the title. For the use-value of a song is not only reflected, but also created by its place
on the hit parade: a title that no longer ranks has no use value” (107).
Clearly, Attali is not just describing a change in the way music is made, and a change in how and
when it can be encountered, but a change in the way that music is related to and understood.
Whereas audio recording and reproduction technologies were initially a means of capturing and
preserving musical spectacles (“repetition began as the byproduct of representation”[84]) in the
late twentieth century, due not only to developments is audio technology but also to an
unprecedented prioritization of standards and prohibitions so precise that they require complex
apparatuses for their production and detection, music itself becomes mere content by which the
apparatus becomes the focus; “Representation has become the auxiliary of repetition”. (84) In
other words, music itself becomes primarily a way to make use of sound recording and sound
reproduction devices.
Music’s escape from musicians is due, to a significant degree, to economic stakes; the
record companies who have come to dominate concurrent music production, the inventors and
owners of the music-making apparatuses that are valued the most, profit according to the quantity
Weafer 27
of recordings consumed. Consumers are encouraged to acquire, in the form of the recording,
more hours of music than they could ever manage to listen to; instead of just listening to music in
the age of repetition, people “stockpile what they want time to hear” (101). Attali makes it clear
that, as with apparatuses which provide visual representations of music (like the oscillograph
favored by Levarie), methods of valuing music according to its popularity – the degree of its
consumption – result in music that neither has to be identified with on a personal level nor
requires being listened to at all.
Throughout his discussion of the earlier types of noise, Attali makes use of the figure of
the musician – be he the jongleur of the festival, or the “rent collecting” writer of classical music
– as a socio-economic touchstone for particular developments in music.(1) But as audio recording
becomes valued on its own terms, as the copy “triumphs” over the original (89) and the
performers and listeners are replaced with technicians, the controllers and beneficiaries of
musical production become more difficult to identify and locate; power initially invested in
people becomes entrenched in procedures. Attali describes the failure of representation not as a
major rupture in the way that power is carried out but as “a simple rearrangement of power, a
tactical fracture, the institution of a new and obscure technocratic justification of power in
organizations” (83). In place of particular people who participate in a musical event or ascribe to
a particular system of arranging and evaluating sound, technological apparatuses themselves
become the socio-economic touchstone of repetitive music. While the (gradual) replacement of
ritual music with the intricately planned harmonic music signified the emergence of societies
founded on a shared image of the ideally ordered society instead of the management of
immediate, violent forces of nature, the cultural domination of recorded, repetitive music
illustrates the abandonment of any shared or universal imaginary: “after the strategy of bestowing
form has tried everything, the represented ritual disappears beneath an acceptance of nonsense
and a search for a new code” (83). This search never arrives at a code worth maintaining because,
as the word “repetition” suggests, in a cultural environment where every variable thing centers
Weafer 28
around and refers back to a transparent and universally acknowledged model, every sound comes
closer to having the same impact, and every utterance, to being synonymous. Attali stresses that
the noise of repetition indicates a break from music and societies which used violent or disruptive
sounds to lend legitimacy to the possibility of ordered society, and from musicians who disallow
dissonant, disharmonious sounds, to project the possibility of perfecting society by way of
prohibitions; the recorded performance, the standardized theme, or the marketing algorithm
achieves “centralized authority over the emission” (124), not by overwhelming the sounds of the
natural world, like the musical ritual, and not by providing harmonic exchanges and disallowing
dissonance (like the rules and prohibitions of classical music), but, rather, by promoting and
valuing the maximum repetition of musical forms – be they particular songs, musical phrases,
genres, etcetera.
Repetitive music demonstrates “a domination of (people) by organization” (121). In the
paradigm of repetitive music “it is no longer a question of making people believe (in a particular
way of ordering society), as it was in representation. Rather, it is a question of Silencing” (122).
Attali portrays the entire repetitive music industry as a machine that is responsible for, and is the
beneficiary of, a control of sound that is more total, encompassing, and overwhelming than that
exhibited in the time of the musical ritual or the classical concert: “silence in sound” (124) – the
endless accumulation of familiar, tonally precise, acoustically clear, but quite unoriginal and
meaningless sounds. There is an eerie, deafening silence during the production of repetitive
music. Attali describes the sound in the recording studio, - a silence facilitated by noiseminimization devices and the exclusive, small number of producers - as a “double silence of men
and commodities in the factory” (121). It illustrates how power “in its invading, deafening
presence can be calm: people (can) no longer talk to one another” (122). Outside the studio, the
products of repetitive musical production serve to produce a similar silence in sound; as
“unanimity becomes the criterion for beauty” (121), “security (in numbers, in the accord with the
standard) takes precedence over freedom (to make and incorporate any variety of sounds)” (121).
Weafer 29
Theodore Adorno (1941) has famously proposed that jazz songs are particularly good examples
of the way that popular musical frameworks lessen the potential of meaningful tonal deviations.
In jazz, he argues, even the notes which are precisely discordant with the basic, underlying
musical phrase serve to reinforce its simple repetition because “they are apperceived as existing
stimuli only because they are corrected by the ear to the right note” (218). The way that the
seemingly complicated twists and turns of jazz melodies merely reinforce the same, standard
chord progression by which the song began presents a musical dilemma whose impact ranges
beyond the particular kind of jazz particularly disagreeable to Adorno; the few strategies
available to music makers reflect the same proneness to standardization despite what seem to be
subversive deviations from the norm. Attali describes how the contemporary music maker is
faced with a decision of either accepting and embracing the stagnant, meaningless, standard
phrases of popular music, or arranging sound according to the dictates of an elite interpretive
community; if an artist attempts to produce music which can be valued beyond statistical
representation - music whose phrases differ from the standard form - their creative act is reduced
to the production of music which clashes with the popular sound. As Attali puts it, counter
cultural music making “becomes a question of writing music in uncultured forms” (115) – of
valuing music not according to widely understood standards and codes, but according to elite
value systems and guidelines which must be constantly altered so as to avoid any devaluing
overlap with those of the popular music industry. However, “the strategy of continually
attempting to invent a new code precludes any chance of producing one that could remain stable”
(116); thus, the strategy of the avant-garde during repetition produces music that is as devoid of
the potential to develop into complexity as popular tunes. Whereas ritual music perpetuated and
was dependent on the myth of society’s total control of nature, and whereas representational
music perpetuated and was dependent on the myth of a perfect harmonious society brought on by
exchange, both repetitive music such as the jazz Adorno describes, and the avant-garde that he
and others present as a remedy, are equally dependent on the myth of authenticity – of wholly
Weafer 30
new and personally meaningful sound arrangements despite the overwhelming impact and
inescapable presence of standardization.
Attali considers the music recording industry to be a primary contributive factor to the
most significant categorical divides imposed on music, producing a musical horizon unequally
divided between minimally recorded bands (bands which he refers to as “residue of the festival”
(106)) and the economically and popularly dominating recorded artists who are “disembodied,
ground up, manipulated” by their medium (106). Auslander (1999) may offer a stronger case for
the standardizing power of recorded music, stressing that performers and performances of popular
music (and rock and roll in particular) – producers and productions that Attali would describe as
residue of the musical ritual or spectacle - are just as affected by recording technology as
recording artists. Emphasizing the degree to which the existence of recording technology changes
the way that live music is experienced and understood, Auslander re-evaluates Peggy Phelan’s
definition of (live) performance: “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in
a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace
afterward” (Auslander 40). Performance, as Phelan describes it, is precisely the quality of being
which suffers in a cultural landscape that is overwhelmed by the most repeated - which is to say,
the recorded versions - of musical arrangements. Auslander argues that it is no longer realistic to
assume either the economic separateness of live events from records or the “ontological
pristineness” of live performance (40); since the invention of audio recording devices, it is
increasingly difficult for performance to have a meaningful existence apart from recorded music.
Auslander describes, for instance, how the listener’s understanding of a rock concert they attend
is unavoidably related to the existence of its recorded counterparts; “It makes little sense”, he
argues,
“to speak of live performance of rock apart from recording, since rock is music made to
be recorded: it is constructed along principles derived from recording practices, inspired
Weafer 31
by earlier music heard primarily on recordings, etc. Even if a group is unlucky enough
not to have recorded, epistemologically, their music is still recorded music” (84).
This is not to say that live shows cannot produce musical variety or deviation, but rather, to say
that the variety of musical deviations arising out of performances, not unlike the dissonant sounds
in the jazz Adorno describes, always refers back to the standard musical arrangement – in this
case, the recorded song. The way live performance is affected by the very existence of recording
technology and its products illustrates how the impact of calculated and technology based
projects seep into the concert hall – not as acoustic phenomena, but as an underlying order
ultimately determined by the capabilities of machines; the very existence of recording technology
reduces performance to sounds which offer their listeners nothing new, sounds which don’t really
have to happen despite their generation of capital or distinction: noise.
Attali notes that “the mass produced music that surrounds us is the product of an
industry” (102). The world view which legitimizes the popular music recording industry – the
prioritization of technological capabilities over ingenuity – is not only demonstrated in the
content of popular records. The popular subscription to the dictates of both stagnate, pre-existing
frameworks and literal machines is just as apparent in the activities of repetitive music production
and accumulation; the production committee’s constant utilization of machines and adherence to
production guidelines is itself demonstrative of the way that in repetition “power is no longer
incarcerated in people. It is. Period.” (88) Unlike the music used in the ritual incorporation of
noise by society or the representation of the possibility of harmonious exchange, repetitive music
lacks any input by particular listeners. Repetitive music accumulates like a meaningless
monologue directed at the listener, existing independent of their listening experience because,
communicating nothing new, it requires neither their understanding nor their concentration.
Repetitive music, unlike its predecessor, representational music, is no longer heard in silence, but
instead, integrated into the audio landscape as a whole, functioning as a kind of “background
music” to a way of life instead of endowing life with meaning (Attali 101). The way in which
Weafer 32
recordings of repetitive music are put to use by consumers reflects an audio cultural environment
that is overcrowded with meaningless sounds that are not listened to so much as they are endured;
music is no longer used for creativity or communication, but as a means of blocking out the
countless, distracting other sounds with which one is bombarded, and as a fleeting attempt to be
part of something unique by investing some particular novelty with feigned personal meaning,
using it as a monologue aimed at other people. Of course, this declaration of independence
merely adds to the overcrowded audio landscape without developing into any kind of
communication; in the end, it is more of the same: noise. The repetitive noise that accumulates is
the result of machines, but it is not necessarily the sound of their gears turning, or the sound of
their excessive volume; instead, it is the sound which results from an adherence to standardized
and standardizing procedures, from a centralized control over sound which is not unlike silence
although it can be heard, and in fact demands “perpetual listening” (132) because it adds nothing
new. When it is listened to, this audio landscape resonates with the hollow cosmos effect Hoggart
attributes to mid-twentieth century pop singles; in place of communication and deprived of the
possibility of immediate relevance are utterances so vague, so ontologically exhausted by the
degree of repetition that they present nonsense where there should be meaning: in human voices
and rigorously designed cultural productions.
Attali stresses from the beginning of his argument that music provides a cultural space
which outlines existing and emergent economic organizations and political strategies, making
audible “the new world that will gradually become visible” (11). It is clear how this is the case
both in ritual music - where excessively loud sounds and sounds directly linked to the body are
addressed under special circumstances so the threat of bodily violence can be forgotten
temporarily - and in classical music – where the project of economic exchange is represented with
the exchange and harmony of musical phrases. But the phrases of repetitive music, lacking the
diversity and complexity necessary for codification, can only signify a kind of hollowness: sound
lacking immediate situational relevance and devoid of any communicative quality. In an era of
Weafer 33
audio production when power is no longer embedded in people, when people are transcended by
their tools, it is in the procedures of sound making technologies that dominant world view –
production for its own sake - becomes apparent. As Adorno (1984) stresses in a short essay on the
phonograph record, the very form and dynamics of a technological apparatus can dramatize the
crisis that he thinks popular music is facing. Like Attali, who argues that twentieth century music
production and reproduction illustrate a cultural terrain where “music has escaped from
musicians” (115), Adorno argues that the phonograph record “stems from an era which cynically
acknowledges the dominance of things over people”, where technology is “free from human
requirements and needs” (Adorno, “The Form of the Phonograph Record” 55). Congruent with
Attali’s description of twentieth century music as “a showcase of repetition”, Adorno describes
the means of musical reproduction itself, the phonograph record, as a product of decline because
“it is the first means of musical presentation that can be possessed as a thing” (58). Adorno, like
Attali, is insistent that recording technology adds nothing to the music which it uses for
reproduction; it has no use value other than the reproduction and storage of a music deprived of
its best dimension: being tied to its place and time. Thus, he argues, the cultural trends articulated
in the phonograph record do not arise out of the music it plays, but rather, out of its material form
as a cultural artifact. For Adorno, the image that epitomizes audio recording – the process of the
phonograph needle tracing the one, appropriate groove on the face of the two dimensional
reproduction of sound – is, not incidentally, reminiscent of the process of writing. This
technological procedure dramatizes, for Adorno, a music which has “relinquished its being as
mere signs” (59). Adorno stresses that while the phonograph adds nothing to the content it
reproduces, it rescues sound which would otherwise vanish, but at the cost of a literally two
dimensional petrification. While Adorno admits that the intentions to write and to write music are
“age old” (59), he stresses that the way musical notation takes form in analogue record illustrates
how writing itself entails the reduction of communication to mere accordance with a preestablished process:
Weafer 34
If, however, notes were still the mere signs for music, then, through the curves of the
needle on the phonograph record, music approaches decisively its true character as
writing. Decisively, because this writing can be recognized as true language to the extent
that it relinquishes its being as mere signs: inseparably committed to the sound that
inhabits this, and no other acoustic groove. (59)
Adorno’s emphasis on the way the needle adheres to dictates of the fabricated groove illustrates
how things have become prioritized over people – commodities such as record players, but also
things like simplified, predictable codes and standardized procedures. While sound arrangement
was always a kind of writing, Adorno suggests that when this writing emerges in actual objects
such as the record player, the material form which it takes emphasizes the degree to which music
has become dominated by procedure: the procedures of sound arrangement are so strict that they
are preferably carried out by machines. The mechanics of the phonograph illustrate quite clearly,
for all to see, how particular pieces of music become the potential functions of an actual machine.
The phonograph record makes visible the reduction of music-making to the fulfillment of preestablished procedures and standards; as a machine, it is a clear example of something derivative
of human projects yet persisting independently of any continued human engagement. Due to the
fact that the music – not musical notation, but actual vibrations - are silently embodied in the
shape of the phonograph record – that it inscribes music “without it ever having sounded” (6)) Adorno argues that this particular apparatus discloses the “transfiguration of all truth of artworks”
(61) that occurs in commodity culture, or the late twentieth century; concurrently, “the truthcontent of art only arises to the extent that the appearance of liveliness has abandoned it” (61).
Early in his argument, Attali proposes that music provides insight into economic infrastructures
yet to come because the paradigm of musical production functions as a complex “play of mirrors”
(5) which presents reality in forms that may not have been considered, and which sometimes
“yields nothing but the swirl of the void” (5). This swirling void is itself indicative of a decline in
the meaningfulness of music; however, in light of Adorno’s account, it emerges not out of an
Weafer 35
experience of listening to music itself, but out of the experience of seeing the technology which
makes repetitive music possible. The decline of the work of art under repetition is illustrated
particularly well in the “scriptal spiral” of the phonograph record which “disappears in the
center…but in return survives in time” (60). This lack of sound exists as a kind of noise in that it
is the byproduct of organizing frameworks by way of the apparatus - proof of a cultural
environment that is so efficiently managed that its formations no longer need to be demonstrated
in activation; like the ideology which it accompanies – the consumption of commodities for
production’s sake - the form and dynamics of musical phrases merely is. Exemplified for Adorno
in the form of the phonograph record, culture is revealed to be writing only when speech means
nothing – when the point of language is no longer a representation requiring public
acknowledgement, no longer a demonstration of anything, but simply a procedure which goes on
independently of human engagement, and the only use for the sound of music is to drown out
other, equally meaningless sounds.
Since Attali emphasizes the material circumstances that facilitate sound arrangement, his
account of overly rigid frameworks and music which is becoming increasingly predictable and
meaningless risks seeming like a domination of machines. While the overwhelming popularity of
the reified musical commodity and the popular evaluation of music according to the directives of
audio technology illustrate the mechanical quality of popular music, for Attali, the material
circumstances of music provide particularly useful cultural sites for dramatizing the development,
rigidity and eventual over-simplification and stagnation of human culture and communication in
general. The popularity of repetitive music reflects “the pure ideology of progress: value in itself,
even if it destroys the use value of communication” (Attali 116). Just as the recording of music
results in objects which last beyond their usage – audio records which are archived without being
listened to - the entire phenomenon of repetitive music makes it clear that musical codes, and
language in general, can persist despite their lack of referential precision. While the abandonment
of useful communication functions to legitimize the endorsement of technological development
Weafer 36
cost, power based on nonsense, like music evaluated according to its novel reinventions of codes
instead of developments of them, does not allow “any chance of its developing an acceptable
rationale for its domination” (Attali 116), nor any opportunity for a public critique of its power. It
is not incidental that a world view founded on halting the co-operative, increasingly complex
arrangement of phenomena, power founded on denying the opportunity for a co-operative
development of meaning (communication), would be articulated in objects which fail to develop
beyond the information and commands by which they are motivated: machines. But Attali’s
history of the relationship between music and noise is the story of humanity’s enduring potential
for violence - whether it is the random violence contained and controlled in the ritual, substituted
with the violently precise exclusion of representational music, or, most recently, articulated in the
determined, uncompromising processes of the machines and process by which repetitive music is
produced and evaluated. The machines that dominate the airwaves and archives with standardized
commodities, that monopolize the evaluation process, reducing it to a series of clear, but
unimaginative directives and precise calculations, are contemporary examples of the very human
potential for violence, violence which is now at its most precise and systematic – a “gentler
barbarism” (Adorno 61).
A popular audio culture based on novelty, repetition, and meaninglessness is particularly
powerful not only because it panders to people’s desire to be entertained without reimagining or
critically considering the world, but because the only avenues which repetitive music offers for
individual input serve to legitimize and proliferate repetitive music. As Attali puts it, “the music
of repetition becomes…a way of filling the absence of meaning in the world” (110), but it does it
by providing more novelty without significant deviation, more of the same: more repetitive noise.
In addition to replacing the development of increasingly complex musical phrases with “a
structure of universal mathematical invariants” (36), Attali describes the production of repetitive
music as a consumption of past cultures (36), a process which is barbaric, violent or destructive
because it allows the drive for fleeting, undeveloped forms of communication to ontologically
Weafer 37
overwhelm the cultural artifacts which already exist as representations of something. True to the
fundamental feature of the recording apparatus, the content which it provides - repetitive music –
offers nothing that has not been before, and not merely in the sense that the particular
arrangements must sound originally before they can be reproduced; the design of the phrases
themselves, as well as any stock speakers, stock characters, and melodramas that can be conjured
up by the words, are included not because they are new and unheard of, but because they are
immediately recognized and understood, dragged out again and again in order to fill the airwaves
and record stores.
Attali insists that although music legitimizes particular organizations of society by way of
strategically constructed and publicly understood notes and phrases, music cannot be equated
with language because “unlike the words of a language – which refer to a signified – music,
though it has a precise operationality, never has a stable reference to a code of the linguistic type”
(25); music is not an image of the ideal society coded in notes instead of words, but a code which
operates despite any precise relationship of reference to the world at large. Still, I would stress
that the “precise operationality” which Attali attributes to the form and dynamics of music is
comparable to the precise operationality of language, reflecting a similar development towards
increasing complexity and publicly held meaning, and the same eventual loss of distinct meaning
due to repetition. In a discussion of language and commodity culture, Andrew Wernick (1991)
describes how the use of sign systems – in particular, systems of different images and sounds
imbedded with popular meaning - to promote products, results in a homogenization of meaning.
Noting that speech acts have two characteristics – they perform in order to affect the listener, and
they refer, in order to mean something – Wernick argues that promotional speech (basically, the
representational practices of mass media advertising) amounts to a subordination of the first
characteristic to the second. “The point of promotion is to effect a valorizing exchange, and its
whole communicative substance is directed to that end.” (Promotional Culture188); In other
words, the image, or in the case of music, the tone, phrase or song – functions primarily to ascribe
Weafer 38
meaning to the product which is being promoted, even at the cost of its own distinct, already
established meaning or significance. Wernick argues that according to the “calculatedly
supporting role” (189) ascribed to the cultural artifact used in promotion, “the ideals and myths
conjured up by the words and symbols used to endow a product, institution or personality with
imagistic appeal are emotionally, and existentially, devalued” (189). While he addresses
promotional culture in general, Wernick outlines how audio recordings of famous songs are
particularly useful for radio and television commercials; he offers the example of a Billie Holiday
song being used to sell a Volkswagen:
“When Billie Holiday’s poignant rendition of ‘Summertime’ is played as the voice-over
for a VW ad, its own mystique as a classic performance, which is inextricable from her
own as a tragic figure, is diminished in the very act wherein that of the car is
associatively enhanced” (189).
Wernick depicts promotional culture as a virtually mechanistic procedure: an appeal to
humanness – emotions, particular bodies and biographies – in order to lend legitimacy to the
product that is being promoted. His Billie Holiday example illustrates how musical performances,
once they are recorded and repeated enough to become classic renditions of songs, face the
danger of being available as shorthand for entire contexts, including the work involved in the
recording process. At this stage, the auditory product, the particular rendition of the song, can be
used as part of a semiotic transaction that lends legitimacy to other kinds of standardized products
all the while bankrupting the source of its meaningfulness: the life of the singer who took the time
to produce, if not create the lyrics and melody. For Adorno, the needle on the phonograph record
illustrates music’s underlying existence as writing, but only once the writing means nothing in
particular; likewise, commercials which appeal to the songs of dead singers, and which, as a
result, inescapably appeal to the biography surrounding their production, illustrate how records,
which allow the stockpiling of sound itself, require not only the content, but the meaning of
authentic things in order to make up for its own, empty, mechanical procedures. Repetition is
Weafer 39
“consumption of past cultures” (Attali 36). Presumably, the cultural landscape that will result
from promotional culture is characteristic of the era of repetition Attali describes: an onslaught of
audio and visual media which is increasingly meaningless. As Attali states, in repetition “our
society mimics itself, represents and repeats itself, instead of letting us live.” (134)
A similar exhaustion of language by repetition has been expressed in literature; amidst
his account of the way that “nineteenth century realities and fantasies of sound recording
transformed lyric poetry” (xiii), Allen Weiss (2002) discusses Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven – in
particular, the way in which Poe’s bird “prefigures the psychological, epistemological, and
ontological shock of the eventuality of sound recording” (xiii). Whereas Wernick describes how
popular signs are devalued when they are included in mass media promotions of semi-identical
products, Weiss stresses how language, vocal utterances in particular, sacrifice the specificity of
their meaning when they are recorded and replayed multiple times. Weiss likens the behavior of
Poe’s bird to that of a “prototypical sound recording and broadcast device” (11); as the raven
repeats its word - the haunting “nevermore” - it becomes “both over determined and
underdetermined, concurrently nonsensical and polysemic” (11). Noting that each utterance of the
word “nevermore” merely adds to the semantic confusion, Weiss compiles a list of eleven
possible meanings of the word that develop as the speaker interrogates the bird throughout the
poem. Weiss depicts Poe’s raven as a fictional being which, by behaving like a broken record,
evokes melancholy – or the constant, unsatisfactory replacement of something lost - for both the
speaker and the reader. The poem’s speaker is literally longing for the lost - and that which is
lacking, his dead love, Lenore, is unsatisfactorily surrogated by the raven; it cannot respond to the
speaker’s interrogations about his lost love and the supernatural - and he can only guess what the
bird means in croaking the word. When it is uttered repeatedly by the surrogate, that which
should be a message - the word “nevermore” – amounts to meaningless, confusing and disturbing
sound which can only be painfully endured: noise. Poe’s speaker wants closure – both the closure
that would allow him to move on from mourning the lost person and the closure of semantic
Weafer 40
precision and clarity. But as he attempts to engage the bird in conversation, its repeated utterance
just reasserts the lack of the person lost to death, and the lack of meaning of the word lost to
repetition. For the poem’s speaker, as the word “nevermore” is repeated and referentially
ubiquified it “remains unknown whether the (word’s) master’s voice is that of the living or the
dead, the human or the inhuman” (Weiss 11). While the poem’s speaker is emotionally bound to a
particular lost person, Weiss emphasizes that the speaker’s confusion resonates with a similar
confusion faced by the nineteenth century reader whose society is only a few decades away from
the popular audio reproduction made possible by the apparatus of the phonograph. Weiss
accounts for the horrific elements of Poe’s writings in terms of their situation between “an ancient
and modern episteme, where the old oral culture of voice and memory and the new oral culture of
recording and broadcast clash in the tomb of the book” (20). It may have been clear to Poe that
the new sound culture based on recording and broadcast technologies would overwhelm not only
the old sound culture, but also the print culture in which Poe was himself a part. However, both
Poe and Weiss illustrate how writing remains useful as a means of encapsulating and addressing
the effects of emergent audio culture on existing ways of life; Poe’s verse illustrates how the
semantic precision of writing suffers when spoken language is repeated mechanically, while
Weiss’ theory draws critical attention to the way literature preserves and expresses the emotional
tensions - the disorientation, frustration and fear - that accompany the reduction of
communication to a mechanical procedure. While Poe’s speaker interrogates the raven,
demanding sense, communication, representation from the source of the repetition, critical
theorists such as Weiss try to represent the entire situation – the stakes of repetition – presenting
the possibility that, in all its reminiscence of the death of human activities and the reduction of
spoken language to meaningless noise, the bird functions like a working record player. It is
important to stress that although the raven, the record – recording technology – provides the
means of repeating sounds until they are meaningless, these objects do not act alone; instead, they
Weafer 41
are continually interrogated by the frustrated listener instigating more repetition as a solution to
meaninglessness imposed on the world by repetition.
Attali’s history of music and noise is the story of what happened to violence – how the
threat of bodily harm, of proneness to death gave way to procedures and cultural constructions
which addressed the threat in their own way. As Attali puts it, “from whichever direction we
approach it, music in our societies is tied to the threat of death” (120), and it is in the possibility
of its accumulation without any development into representation that death factors into repetitive
music. Attali states that in the era of musical repetition “the threat of murder is everywhere”
(120); this is due in part to the fact that music, and the sacrificial violence from which it is
derived is no longer limited to “any closed arena of sacrifice, the ritual or the concert hall” (120).
But in addition to demonstrating the proliferation of technologically mediated forms of culture,
repetitive noise announces the death of complicated, representational music, and with it, the
narrowing spectrum of choices facing the music maker; the cycle of repetitive noise accumulation
persists whether musicians intend to produce repetitive music or defend themselves against it.
Faced with a limited range of options, the music maker in the age of repetition cannot help but
deny most people a role in the communication that music is, choosing either to produce novel
sounding, but utterly repetitive popular music, or to produce something remarkably different.
They can either arrange sound in ways that fail to develop into complexity, or produce music
according to new and fleeting codes so unfamiliar to most people that they must simply endure
them as unavoidably disruptive sounds.
4. informative noise
While Attali, Wernick and Weiss describe the noise accompanying contemporary culture
in terms of musical codes and linguistic systems, Timothy Aubry (2001) pays specific attention to
the way noise can accumulate due to the sheer quantity of individual audio emissions of all kinds.
The subject of his inquiry – white noise - like the noise Attali attributes to repetition, exists as an
unavoidable backdrop of sound that is too disjointed and privatized to offer a public
Weafer 42
communication of anything. Aubry describes white noise as “a haphazard assortment of any
different frequencies within the audio spectrum, ranging from the very high to the very low, and
producing a fairly constant sound with no pitch at all” (149). He notes that the name “white
noise” is derived from the qualitatively imprecise white light – a combination of every spectrum
(149). Colloquially, white noise refers to any auditory phenomena “that people can’t avoid
encountering, but always try to ignore” (149) – background noise that has increased to such a
degree that we can no longer block it out (152). Aubry argues that due to the proliferation of
white noise, silence is impossible: “If there is something that exists underneath and between
everything we think and say, it is white noise” (150). Like the noise which Attali attributes to
repetition, white noise, as Aubry describes it, is not easily silenced; it endures as the unspecific,
underlying sound of daily existence. Aubry’s account of white noise, however, suggests that it is
composed of significantly different ingredients than the noise of repetition; whereas repetitive
music is noisy because it endures despite offering no new arrangements of sound (despite
communicating nothing) white noise, which Aubry likens to radio or television static (148), is
simply unavoidable whether or not it is the remnants of any attempt at novelty – an accumulation
of monotonously unrelated sounds. Quoting musicologist R. Murray Shafer, Aubry points out that
“the flat continuous line…is an artificial construction. Like the flat line in space it is rarely found
in nature” (151). This image of white noise - the flat line - suggests that any audio production,
regardless of its precision or clarity, can contribute to an audio cultural environment that is
experienced as an indecipherable onslaught of noise, despite the precision of its simultaneously
occurring parts.
Aubry addresses noise pollution without appealing to the bio-hazardous aspects of noise;
instead, he stresses how noise pollution has been accounted for in terms of its capacity to distract.
Not unlike Wernick’s description of the exhaustion of referential precision due to promotional
culture, Aubry describes a visual cultural environment that is so saturated with intended novelty
that it becomes as inaudible as the visual snow that media is intended to cancel out: “the more
Weafer 43
television tries to entertain us with an excess variety of images and sounds crammed together, the
more the market tries to surprise us with an excess variety of multi-colored commodities, the
more desensitized we become, and the more it all seems like so much white noise” (167). While
he admits that white noise was in the background even before repetitive audio culture, Aubry
stresses that white noise is also due to prioritization of efficiency. Aubry focuses his discussion
on an apparatus that is emblematic of the value systems and procedures which give rise to an
oversaturated and increasingly meaningless cultural landscape: the white noise generator – a
machine used in white collar work spaces, designed to drown out the variety of distracting sounds
which may interfere with the workers’ concentration. While Aubry admits that the very invention
of the machine is symptomatic of a “hyper stimulated environment” (156), he argues that its
popularity is derived from the popular conception that deviations of thought are wasteful
byproducts. The white generator then, is “an ominous indication of the extent to which a capitalist
logic of efficiency has colonized supposedly private regions, including the mental space of the
office worker” (153). In addition to indicating the degree of legitimacy attributed to a “capitalist
logic of efficiency”, the white noise generator, in all its materiality, illustrates how rigid systems
of thought – be they capitalist logics of efficiency, prioritizations of audio fidelity, or adherence
to standard arrangements and systems of evaluation - seem to respond to noise pollution by
making more noise (152). Designed to “mask the noise created by other machines” (152), white
noise generators, and white noise generation constitute “both debris and housekeeper” (161); they
provide a (temporary) solution to one’s own distraction, while contributing the accumulation of
white noise in the surrounding environment.
Aubry stresses that there is more at stake in people’s investments in white noise
generators than managerial or capitalist demands; alongside the backdrop of white noise emitted
by the machine is an appeal to the myth of silence coupled with a strategy of producing noise in
order to cover noise – an attitude which overlooks the possibility that grating, disruptive noises
can only emerge alongside particular projects which reject them – the possibility that noise is a
Weafer 44
byproduct of particular ways of ordering music and the world more generally. The white noise
machine, according to Aubry, is a material demonstration of an attempt to “salvage the traditional
myth of the subject that is in control of (their) awareness” (157), who “focuses (their) total
attention on one thing (in isolation) and then another” (156) – “a myth that has been disturbed
partially by the increase of machine-based noise pollution” (160). If white noise, like the voice of
Althusser’s policeman, serves as a kind of “audio input” (149) which hails the hearer as a subject
responsible for taking part in a particular kind of world (specifically, a world in which
concentration is prioritized and defended at all costs), Aubry raises the telling question of whether
the active generation of white noise “defends us against interpolation or is itself a mechanism of
interpolation” (149). While it is not designed to produce, repeat, or evaluate music, the white
noise machine is an apparatus which encapsulates the negative aspects of any project which is
overly determined, and any value system that is overly rigid. Its intentionally imprecise emissions
are not only symptoms of a cultural environment that is saturated with its own excessive
repetitions, but symptoms of a citizenry which lacks any real strategies of resistance. Like the
owners of white noise machines, consumers of popular music, as Attali and others depict them,
appeal to sound making machines and appeal to sound making procedures of virtually mechanical
rigidity, to overcome noise, only to impose more noise on others.
Speaking to a world that is saturated with distinct sounds to the point of simultaneous
distraction and incomprehensibility, Aubry proposes quite a different remedy: “Realize how
strange these things are. Listen, if you can, to white noise” (169). Here, Aubry suggests the form
and dynamics of white noise, and the very acknowledgement of white noise as such, may provide
the means of breaking the cycle of noise accumulation and moving beyond a cultural environment
overrun with meaningless noise, auditory, or otherwise. With Aubry’s account of the cycle of
white noise in mind, I would argue that music and its noise are informative beyond the paradigm
of music, but not necessarily, as Attali proposes, because musical developments anticipate
changes in the organization of materials located elsewhere. The form and dynamics of particular
Weafer 45
kinds of music arise out of particular material circumstances. However, the sphere of music, and
repetitive music in particular, can also shed light on the challenges presently facing
communication. Music acts as a site which illustrates the changing value of communication; as
music becomes repetitive, the critical listener can hear the death of linguistic codes: either the
exhaustion of meaning due to the non-progressive insistence of repetition (popular music), or the
music whose meaning cannot be interpreted by anyone outside of an exclusive interpretive
community (the avant-garde). In both cases, music provides examples of cultural products that
persist despite their lack of complexity or potential to communicate anything - products whose
activation, for the most part, must simply be endured. While audio culture is just one facet of an
entire, multi-sensory repetitive cultural landscape that “mimics, represents, and repeats itself
instead of letting us live” (Attali 134), music, and audio culture in general, are particularly telling
of the way cultural productions can impose themselves on populations; when sound culture
ceases to invite the meaningful participation of the listener, when it fails to offer anything
different or distinct and just layers on top of itself instead, it is experienced as a tedious,
meaningless imposition: noise. As they shift from found pieces, to precision sound making
instruments, and then to special sound effects and recording technologies, the apparatuses used to
produce music reflect the values, attitudes and procedures which are not only detrimental to
music as we know it, but detrimental to communication – to a publicly participatory dialogue that
develops into complexity. While Attali, Adorno, and others stress the way the recording apparatus
exemplifies the standardization of popular music and the prioritization of commodities over
community, Aubry illustrates how the white noise generator – a machine which overpowers other
people’s noise with its own – is metonymic of a cultural environment in which participation is
premised on the assertion of one’s individuality at the price of increasingly universal isolation,
and the death of a shared arena of communication.
While the noisiness of repetitive music and the metonymic properties of many of the
apparatuses associated with repetitive music illustrate its isolating and stagnating potential, other
Weafer 46
thinkers have addressed the way that noise factors into communication proper. William Rasch
(1992) offers a discussion of hermeneutics and communication in general which resonates with
both Attali’s history of musical codes ruined by repetition and Aubry’s description of the cycle of
white noise perpetuation. Rasch accounts for both written and spoken communication’s failure to
provide common, co-operative representations of increasing complexity, and while he does not
emphasize how an unwavering prioritization of sound production and recording devices disrupts
general utility, Rasch does situate the failure of progress and meaning in communication in the
unwavering prioritization of one particular side of communication. He describes dialogue in a
way that complicates the more popular understanding of communication as a clear transmission
of information; while he describes understanding as “an ongoing process of overcoming
distance” (61) – both a distancing from oneself, from one’s own ideas and utterances, towards the
other, and a return to a self that is (hopefully) altered from that which existed “prior to the
breach” (61) - Rasch criticizes communication theorists who prioritize agreement in
communication. He argues that in doing so, theorists and communicators fail to be attentive to
and inclusive of the others who are addressed by the communicative gesture – others who provide
the different points of view that may allow communication to develop beyond an unchanging
monologue. Rasch situates his discussion of hermeneutics in the midst of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s
definition of understanding as immediate or achieved agreement between conversers, and
Derrida’s position that this myth of agreement is merely an appropriation of the other,
symptomatic of “the relentless pursuit of the absolute presence of unified knowledge” (62). Rasch
argues that ironically, a pursuit of absolutely present, unified knowledge results in “a battle of
wills (between) a world of harmonious Selves and a world of absolute Others” (63) where
misunderstanding is used as “a protective screen, a deflection of the gesture of interpretive
appropriation” (63). This application of language as a protective screen connotes Aubry’s
description of the production of indecipherable sound, or white noise, as a defense against the
proliferation of sounds brought about by other people using other machines. While Aubry focuses
Weafer 47
on the noise that is accumulated alongside projects of concentration and efficiency, Rasch, like
Attali, focuses on the noise which is constructed and excluded by cultural systems, and
frameworks. Aubry’s account of the increasing popularity and proliferation of the white noise
generator, and Attali’s account of the cultural dominance of repetitive music illustrate the
potential for people’s isolation amidst projects which prioritize efficiency and concentration
above all. Likewise, Rasch’s description of noise in terms of language and communication
illustrates how the adherence to the possibilities of existing systems – in the case of Rasch’s
argument, not existing machines, but existing linguistic utterances and messages – simultaneously
denies the addressee any role in communication and deprives the act of communication of the
possibility of development beyond what it already means; “the more the Self recognizes the Same
in all Others, the less, it would seem, there is to say” (Rasch 64).
Instead of treating noise as some being “whose interest it is to interfere and promote
confusion” (63), Rasch stresses that it is in the empirical and semantic imprecision of
communication, in its noise, where otherness – the possibility for newness, difference and
progression - lies; “no amount of dialogue can eliminate noise and still preserve the other” (64).
Rasch’s critical account of communication that prioritizes sameness and assures adherence to the
existing meanings illustrates, just as clearly as the consumption of white noise generators, that the
accomplishment of absolute clarity – be it in music in particular or communication in general –
reduces anyone’s participation in communication to a strict adherence to established procedures,
to a maintenance of existing arrangements or messages while denying music, or communication
in general, the possibility of being a co-operative project that develops into complexity.
In consideration of the way that literal noise - white noise - is used as a protective,
individualizing screen from the overwhelmingly meaningless auditory cultural landscape to
which it also gives rise, Aubry encourages people to listen to the white noise, using the problem
itself as the means of imagining a solution. Rasch, too, suggests that communicators must be
attentive to noise, but not necessarily the noise emitted from over-regulated cultural
Weafer 48
environments; instead he suggests that both the initiators and receivers of communications would
benefit from a serious consideration of empirical variation: the noise which contrasts the
representation oriented “signal” of communication – not just the hiss, hum, or snow which
accompanies highly technologically mediated communication, but the information which
accompanies communication but exceeds the message desired by its initiator. Attention to the
empirical, situationally contingent variations in communicated messages – that which is
traditionally understood to be unrelated, confusion inducing, background “information” (65),
merely a source of confusion – allows communication to develop beyond an absolutely clear, but
ontologically stagnant monologue. Appealing to the work of physicist Robert Shaw, Rasch notes
that “the chaotic noise of the universe can serve…as a continuous and spontaneous source of new
order and new information which ensures the constant variety and richness of our experience”
(65). In other words, communication also needs the misunderstanding that results from
situationally arising interference; as Rasch puts it, echoing the problem of noise faced by the
scientist: “Precision is the goal of knowledge, but imprecision is its ever-renewable source” (73).
Communication, like scientific discovery, is limited when noise is categorically reduced to error.
In the case of irony, for instance, noise, or communicative imprecision, is intended as “desirable
uncertainty” (65) - part of the communication. Rasch accounts for irony as language’s “internally
structured complexity…proliferating against the grain of intention” (74). Irony, or desirable
uncertainty can help any representation oriented procedure avoid becoming overly rigid or
systematized; noise helps representation and communication to develop beyond the intentions of
its initiators – to be more than repetition.
Rasch’s description of communication’s reduction to monologue resonates with the
descriptions of noise previously mentioned; communication (and communication theory) which
over-stresses clarity - the return to understanding, to the self and the message which already
existed – is not unlike the unrelenting, repetitive music which results from appeals to the sounds
that machines make possible and from a machine-like adherence to existing codes and trains of
Weafer 49
thought. Rasch, however, does not focus on the way communication suffers when it becomes
these things; he is also hopeful regarding the circumstantial information which is dismissed and
treated as interference by communicating people and conservative thinkers. Aubry’s call to listen
to white noise is an invitation for people to step back from their concentration, from their focus
on the efficiency of their projects, from the individuation facilitated by the white noise machine
and similar apparatuses, and an invitation to critically consider the supposedly isolated subject in
total control of their experience – a myth which accompanies the proliferation of these machines.
Rasch offers a similar invitation: a call to cease concentrating on, to move beyond the originally
intended meaning. Rasch makes it clear that noise, not clarity, serves as a real foundation for
common experience. Citing the “Romantic hermeneutics” of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rasch
notes that thinkers like Gadamer fail to see “that the experience of the alien and the possibility of
misunderstanding is universal” (68). It is in the universally available experience of discord that
Rasch situates the possibility of communication’s development beyond the monologue. Instead of
prioritizing universal accord to the intended meaning of a message, Rasch encourages people to
embrace the process of meaning selection contingent upon the addressee’s lack of complete
understanding. Because their misunderstanding “forces selection” (74), “artful” message
receivers reading against the grain of intention” (74) question identity and assume difference
“even where difference does not immediately present itself” (70); noise - the potential unclarity,
confusion, and misunderstanding contingent upon the event of communication allows whatever is
uttered to develop beyond its one, originally intended meaning. Rasch points out that “noise may
be seen as “‘autonomy producing,’ transforming a relatively redundant and simple system into a
more complex one in which relatively autonomous subsystems emerge” (66). Rasch describes the
noise affecting communication - the empirical variation that interrupts and complicates linguistic
utterances - in terms that suggest noise’s critical potential; “once misunderstanding is injected
into the system, understanding, seen from the perspective of the more complex system that
emerges, is loosed from the anchorage of immediacy” (70). Noise’s ability to loosen
Weafer 50
understanding from its immediacy lies in noise’s provision of a “more complex system” from
which a particular communication can be approached differently instead of just being repeated,
and from which understanding can be more than enforced, popular accord. Rasch’s account of the
noise arising in communication illustrates two mutually inclusive positions: phenomena which
may seem to be meaningless and intrusive – noisy - may allow for communications to progress
beyond their initial intentions, and; the process of using noise to make communication more
complex also makes communication more of a public project because it treats addressees as
potential participants in communication, instead of just people at whom messages are aimed.
Defending his endorsement of the distillation of supposedly “pure” tone, Levarie states
that “culture ends when barbarians break out of it” (30). This statement reflects the point of view
that “culture” - contrasted here with barbarity to mean civilization or even civility - can only
develop within boundaries and limitations, and that transcending the boundaries or limitations
dictated by the status quo threatens the development of organized societies. Conservative, orderfocused evaluations of culture such as Levarie’s derive legitimacy from the biohazardous
potential of excessively loud or indistinct sounds. But in consideration of the noise of repetition
outlined by Attali and the cycle of white noise accumulation that Aubry describes, the most
destructive threat to civilization, that which threatens to dismantle the means of collective
representation, stifling the inclusion that may allow communication to develop into complexity, is
not excessively loud, insufficiently ordered sound; rather, it is the overzealous drive to universal
clarity which becomes so caught up in the momentum of its own procedures, and the sound
intentionally produced by its gears, circuits, programs, and methods, that it dismisses the
situations in which representation and communication happen. The prioritization of acoustic
clarity at all costs reduces the meaning of communication to the singular intention of that which
has been uttered intentionally, thus limiting the majority of people’s participation in
communication to strict, repetitive, adherence to the rules, regulations, procedures, technologies
and apparatuses of which communication has come to consist. The threat posed by the repetitive
Weafer 51
music Attali describes is not that it will rupture people’s eardrums, but that its emphasis on the
possibilities offered by machines, and its adherence to repetitive procedures and operations
results in an audio cultural environment of sounds which are imposed on people, while denying
listeners opportunities to participate in the development of more meaningful sounds.
The accumulation of distinct, repetitive sounds imposed on contemporary listeners –
noise which has, according to Attali, “invaded and even annulled the noise of machinery” (111) is particularly troubling; it is comprised of neither the naturally occurring, excessively loud or
body-oriented sounds that can be scapegoated by ritual music, nor the dissonant sounds
constructed and excluded by representational music in order to maintain the borders of
supposedly meaningful sound; instead, the noise of repetition is the result of prioritizing existing
musical arrangements, and eventually, prioritizing the novel sound making possibilities of actual
machines in order to drown out a cultural environment reduced to meaningless noise. As
illustrated in the cycle of white noise accumulation emblemized in the white noise generator, the
noise of repetition cannot be easily blocked out or dismissed; it is, in itself, the result of various
attempts to muffle noise. All of the thinkers I have discussed concluded that the solution to the
problem of noise, wherever noise may arise, lies in addressing noise directly – in drawing
attention to it. Although Aubry calls attention to the imposing, stagnant, and meaningless cultural
environment resulting from an appeal to repetition, it is worth stressing that there are two distinct
kinds of noise that can be emphasized; in fact, it is an over control of one kind of noise - sounds
excluded from the harmonies of representational music, and silenced by the acoustic precision of
repetitive music – that leads to the second kind of noise: the accumulative white noise of the
machines, or the noise or repetition which music production, and cultural landscapes in general
amount to as a result. However, the first kind of noise – in music, the disallowed sounds which,
according to Attali, allows music to represent exchange and harmony by excluding dissonance,
and in communication in general, the empirical variation which gets overlooked when a return to
the familiar intentions of the communication’s initiator are stressed – must also be emphasized. If
Weafer 52
this attention is to progress beyond the kind of construction, disallowance, and silencing of
disorderly sound, if it is to inspire a cultural landscape that doesn’t just impose its meaningless
repetition on constituencies, or limit participation to activities which allow noise to accumulate,
then it must be critical attention. Progressive accounts of noise must retain the critical attitude
inherent to Attali’s description of sound’s over-regulation; they must be reminiscent of Aubry’s
comparison between the consumption of noise producing machines and the equally popular equally alienating - myth of total self sufficiency, and they must retain Rasch’s hopeful attention
to the progressive influence of situationally emergent empirical variation. But critical attention to
sounds which are traditionally silenced must yield more than a retuning of one’s ear – more than
a change of attitude towards these sounds. For Rasch, it is insufficient to merely “sing the noisy
praises of chaos and leave it at that” (65). Instead, “it is more stimulating to ask what the function
of noise in the social world of human communication may be” (65). While the critical theorist
may address the constructedness of the noise that emerges in music and in culture more generally,
it remains to be considered whether the layperson can confront and address actual noises, in all
their constructedness, without lending legitimacy to the systems of evaluation that construct them
as such.
It is easy, in a sense, for critical theorists to question the existing systems and processes
of music making and of communication more generally; it is easier for them to offer alternative,
critical accounts of the devices and procedures that give rise to noise than it may be for the
participants in repetitive noise accumulation to recognize the noise-perpetuating effects of their
priorities and actions. The cycle of noise generation, neatly packaged in emblematic machines,
presents itself quite clearly to the third party choosing to give an account of the scenario. But
given that noise accumulates the most when it is used as a substitute for new, complex and
meaningful audio arrangements, given that the cycle of noise accumulation is facilitated by a
population’s situated involvement in the sounds being made, an important question remains: can
participants in noise generation, people in the midst of the value systems and cultural processes
Weafer 53
which give rise to noise, achieve an alternative, critical perspective of the noise that imposes on
their cultural landscape? Rasch stresses how noise in communication – misunderstanding - once it
is “injected into the system” (70), makes the authority of the existing intentions, the clearly
understood message, less pressing. Given the power and scope of audio culture, it is worth
considering whether literal noises can have similarly defamiliarizing and critical potential.
5. intentional noise production
For the remainder of my account of noise, I would like to consider whether, in the era of
repetitive music – an era which we can only assume persists today – there still remains potential
for meaningful music – meaningful in the same sense that critical theory about noise is
meaningful: it brings to public attention something about the horizons and limitations of audio
culture and of music itself. Attali concludes that music is meaningful, but meaningful about other
aspects of culture, its form and dynamics being indicative of particular kinds of organizations of
economic materials, structures of power, and particular ways of imagining oneself, and one’s
world beyond the scope of musical production. However, given Attali’s insistence that in the age
of musical repetition (a description which remains appropriate for contemporary ways of
producing, hearing, and understanding music) tools and procedures have taken priority over
human efforts, then audio culture is not indicative of larger practices and ideologies relevant only
elsewhere; instead, audio culture, specifically music, has become one of the leading sites for
identity formation and the affectation of others. If we are to understand music as more than a
reflection of existing or anticipated economic organizations, if we are to recognize in music a
model of primary importance not only to economics but to communication and identity, we must
consider whether music can draw attention to the problems arising out of its own over-rigidity.
Can music be made which, instead of limiting meaning and assaulting the shared cultural
landscape by resisting developments beyond established frameworks, actually draws attention to
these potential limitations, and, by doing so, obtains the potential to overcome its own
shortcomings?
Weafer 54
Judging by Attali’s account, not only do arrangements of musical phrases simulate “the
accepted rules of society” (Attali 29), but they also, at least potentially, illustrate the
shortcomings of the accepted rules, serving as a critical account of historical realities. Music’s
ability to explore the entire “range of possibilities” of a system of rules and prohibitions (5) may
also serve as an early warning system, signaling the exhaustion of communicative resources - for
music: complex, harmonic sound arrangements - for language in general: different, semantically
precise signifiers. But Attali hesitates to investigate music’s potential expression of its own
shortcomings – at least not until or unless, music becomes radically changed from what it is now.
For Attali, music serves primarily to lend legitimacy to existing and emergent economic and
political arrangements; so music can’t be critical of the status quo, much less of its own form and
dynamics. But while Adorno clearly sees technological apparatuses, such as the phonograph, as
disastrous, Attali is hesitant to conclude that the semantically imprecise, standardized sound of
repetition marks the final stage of music’s development. Attali concludes his book with a (very)
brief chapter announcing the musical age that he thinks could succeed repetition: composition.
Composition involves the creation of new musical codes instead of an appeal to exhausted ones
and the production and exchange of sound arrangements for the enjoyment and relations of an
immediate community. In what remains, I will consider Attali’s notion of composition before
examining a kind of sound creation that has emerged in the last three decades but remains on the
margins, for fairly obvious reasons. Noise music – or simply “Noise” – I would argue, offers a
means of both the composition that Attali describes, and the critical intervention of concurrent
acoustic phenomena proposed by Aubry.
Although Attali notes that music communicates meaning not by a direct correlation
between particular sounds and a particular signified, but rather, by demonstrating and validating
the possibility of harmony, exchange, and the exclusion it necessitates, he maintains that the
problem facing music is a crisis of meaning directly related to its functioning: the over-efficiency
of its codes; music which was initially comprised of demonstrations of the utility of exclusion and
Weafer 55
exchange has given way to music valued according to its acoustic precision, clarity, quantity and
novelty. In such a cultural environment, the musician who wants to make new music must risk the
stability of a system of production guidelines that endure long enough to communicate anything
other than distress. The two strategies facing the audio cultural producer – prioritizing
meaningless accord or meaningless discord (really, two sides of the same coin) foreshadow, for
Attali, two possible directions for the future of music: “a new dictatorship of representation and
the emplacement of a new dominant code, a universal functionalism” (117), or, “the birth of a
new music beyond existing codes” (117). Attali clearly privileges the latter option, placing his
hope for the future of sound arrangement in an admittedly vague kind of music which he calls
composition. Instead of a return to “ritual dictatorship, the illusion of representation” (134),
composition exists only for the sake of music – for one’s creation of their “own relation with the
world” (134). It is, according to Attali, a “doing for the sake of doing” – a “playing for one’s own
pleasure” (134) instead of for accordance with the dominant codes, and the justification of
existing societal arrangements.
Yet the pleasure of playing, in itself, is not the goal of composition; composition aims to
reclaim the “lived time of production itself” (145). Calling into question the “distinction between
worker and consumer, between doing and destroying” (135) – composition re-evaluates the
“relation to oneself that music makes possible” (142) instead of lending itself to particular
products or outcomes such as “communication with an audience (or) usage by a consumer” (142).
A music which would revivify attention to the lived time of production would cease to be, in
Attali’s words, “a central network” or an “unavoidable monologue” (143), being instead the
starting point of “a relation to the body” and of a consideration of its potential transcendence
(143). Attali describes the power of composition in a passage worth nothing at length:
Exteriority can only disappear in composition, in which the musician plays primarily for
(themselves), outside any operationality, spectacle, or accumulation of value: when
music, extricating itself from the codes of sacrifice, representation and repetition,
Weafer 56
emerges as an activity that is an end in itself, that creates its own code at the same time as
the work. (135)
In contrast to representational music, which was semantically and existentially devalued by its
mechanical repetition, compositional music takes on a distinctly different relationship to
communal meaning and to time. Composition is “no longer made to be represented or stockpiled”
(141); instead, it is the means of “an ongoing quest for the new, immediate communication,
without ritual and always unstable” (141). While the written scores of representation were
facilitated by the printing press, while repetition is a product of recording technology,
“composition is tied to the (musical) instrument” (144) – specifically “to the pleasure in the
instruments, the tools of communication” (135). This taking pleasure is not necessarily devoid of
any meaning, communication or codification, but merely free of previously existing, dominant
codes. Attali stresses that communication doesn’t disappear in composition; instead, the rules
change: composition is a “collective creation rather than an exchange of coded messages” where
codes are created for self expression, and “plugged into” by others as they elaborated (143).
Attali admits that “composition is not easy to conceptualize” (134), and he has difficulty
providing examples of the sound production that has been denied and rejected by “all political
economy up to the present day, even the most radical” (134). The examples he does offer seem
insufficient. Attali mentions Russolo’s proposed arrangements of urban and industrial noises
(136). He describes John Cage’s silent composition 4’33” (1952) as an attempt to “(open) the
door to the concert hall to let the noise of the street in” (136) – a gift of silent time “giving back
the right to speak to people who want to have it” (136). Yet Russolo’s proposed attunement and
arrangement of sounds that are already derivative of mechanical constructions is not particularly
liberating, and Cage’s piece is more like concept art than musical production. Attali’s faith in the
“spontaneity” of free jazz (139) seems particularly misplaced; the fact that this genre is subject
not only to semantic exhaustion by repetition, but also to the systematic exclusion characteristic
of representation is apparent in Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (A Collective Improvisation) (1961):
Weafer 57
a recording which also includes the track “First Take” - a rehearsal of the main track – revealing a
remarkable absence of spontaneity. Attali acknowledges that these musical productions come
short of the composition he describes; they serve less as the creation of new codes than as a
liquidation of the old, as cultural productions which blaspheme against the old codes, announcing
“the intensification of lack in the spectacle” (137). But “blasphemy is not a plan any more than
noise is a code” (137) and these examples fall short of being the creative force of composition
that Attali imagines. Attali seems to have an easier time describing what composition is not; it is
neither a reclamation of ritual music or a revivification of existing codes (134), nor is it the
foundation of a counter cultural musical movement which creates its own codes, distinct in their
contrast to established ways of arranging and evaluating sounds. Instead composition is, at least
in part, sound arrangement that takes the process of code making and development as its subject –
an activity to which Attali ascribes the (still negative) description of “living in the void” (147) or
“admitting the constant presence of the potential for revolution, music, and death” (147).
Russolo merely wanted to celebrate the sounds which result from orderly, mechanical
procedures by further ordering them into musical arrangements. To be subversive, however, one
has to reflect critically on these sounds and arrangements, interrogating the negative features and
contradictions that arise out of the rigid, efficient ordering of machines and machine-like
procedures. While Attali may be able to do this as a critical music theorist, he has admitted
difficulty finding music which does the same thing. The question remains whether people can
produce music that facilitates a significant critical reflection on the state of culture - as cultural
theory does - without being reduced to a parody or a novelty act, or becoming arrogantly and
hopelessly distant from popular experiences and understandings of music and the world.
Although noise – sound that is dissonant for one reason or another – plays a fundamental role in
Attali’s history of music, he may not sufficiently investigate the revealing and reflexive
possibilities that noise offers as an intended product.
Weafer 58
In the last few decades, a small collection of popular recordings and performances, and a
handful of primarily North American and Japanese artists became categorized as works and
producers of what has been dubbed Noise music. Noise music, or simply “Noise”, refers to audio
production and products that are comprised of sustained dissonance. The dissonance of Noise
consists, in part, of audio emissions that have always accompanied the process of sound
production technologies and apparatuses – sounds traditionally understood and encountered as
interference: hisses and hums, the crackling and wheezing of electronic feedback, echoes and
other indistinct noises. Noise music is also noisy because it involves successions of sound that
clash with existing musical types, genres or styles, and which fail to develop into any style or
genre of their own. The album that initiated the practice of Noise production is, by most popular
accounts, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975) – an album which, upon its release, was
described by Rolling Stone as four sides of “cosmic scrapings”, and “distended buzzing”
(Wolcott 1975). Others attribute London, Ontario’s Nihilist Spasm Band with pioneering a kind
of anti-music that could be well described as Noise – a band who, since 1965 performed with its
own, homemade “noise instruments” (Paes) and whose many live shows and few recordings
sound like a monkey house of squeaks, crashes and silly vocal noises. Sometimes referred to as
“the godfathers of noise” (Paes), The Nihilist Spasm Band are perhaps the most visible Noise
producers, likely due to the band’s inclusion of the non-traditional use of traditional instruments
such as modified guitars, electric kazoos, theremins, and drums, which results in “eruptions” that
are, according to The Chicago Tribune “abrasive, confrontational, exhilarating, humorous, just
about anything but boring” (Reger 2004). The work of the Nihilist Spasm Band is all of these
things, largely because of their choice of sound making apparatuses; in addition to using existing
instruments redesigned to produce sounds that are incongruent with existing musical
arrangements, the band’s inclusion of tonally imprecise, electrified instruments such as kazoos
and theremins emphasizes the acoustic instruments and electric technologies involved in the
production of music, but without necessarily adhering to the tone and rhythm-oriented standards
Weafer 59
of existing systems of evaluation. In conjunction with its name, The Nihilist Spasm Band
produces sound arrangements with no discernable time measurement even when drums are
included in the production.
One band member stresses that while jazz players “start with organized reference of
music and improvise on it…The Nihilist Spasm Band, in contrast, does not improvise. We make
noise and sometimes patterns form from it” (Paes). Another declares that “Music can have all the
conventions it wants. I don't need them. I am part of the audience also when the band performs. I
want to hear things I have not heard before. Do audiences need to be trained in academics of
music before they are allowed to listen?” (Paes). Other members have distanced their work from
any existing musical tradition, including avant-garde music, and free jazz in particular, arguing
that genre labels are part of “the old determinist way of looking at things” (Paes). These
statements reflect a hint of idealism, but not the idealization of precision and efficiency stressed
by Levarie, Russolo, and others; instead, the band’s attempt to create patterns out of noise, seems
to display a somewhat naive faith in chaos’ facilitation of a more “organic” kind of musical
product. But one member’s statement that the band may sound tribal “because we are primitive”
(Paes) reflects the hasty supposition that the Nihilist Spasm Band has succeeded in taking music
back to being a channelization of disruptive noises. I would suggest, however, that the Nihilist
Spasm Band, and Noise artists in general, are not trying, as the ritual musician did, to incorporate
noises so as to weaken fears surrounding the body’s vulnerability. The reason the Nihilist Spasm
Band’s sound can be accurately described as “abrasive and confrontational” is because the sounds
that it produces remain abrasive and confrontational; the band’s noises do not persist long enough
to be ritually included, much less to be demonstrative of emergent, previously unconsidered,
ways of ordering society, so they stay disorderly - meaningless – at least for the most part; when
the nonsense is repeated or exchanged to even the slightest degree, it can demonstrate the
possibility of making patterns, or music – albeit, sloppy music - out of sounds traditionally
Weafer 60
encountered as noise. Still, as one member put it: “Our sounds are neither organized nor pleasant
and therefore, by definition, they’re not music” (Paes).
Consistent with Russolo’s predictions, the Nihilist Spasm Band’s synchronic emissions
of an ever-growing variety of non-traditional sounds result in an auditory product that would be,
for most people, more intense than classical music. But despite the band’s expansion of the
horizons of what can be considered a musical instrument, its activities cannot properly be aligned
with Russolo’s intended use of industrial and urban sounds as found pieces for audio
arrangements. While Russolo wanted to “score and regulate harmonically and rhythmically the
most varied noises” (9), members of the Nihilist Spasm Band don’t want to control and regulate
anything; they don’t attempt to regulate the pitch of potentially dissonant sounds, and although
patterns (supposedly) emerge from their work, the players do not impose any patterns on the
apparatus by using it in a pre-determined way. The band is not making the noise/sound Russolo
proposes; instead, it sustains the dissonance that emerges out of its collective acoustic production
in an activity one member describes as “responding to each other in sort of a conversation of
noise” (Paes). But it is difficult to imagine how such as “conversation” could unfold out of
nonsensical sound. One band member claims that “we can't even accept our own conventions and
we are constantly at war with ourselves and with each other, in an (un)usually amiable way, to
break down combinations and patterns that seem to be becoming too comfortable, repetitive or
redundant” (Paes).
While the Nihilist Spasm Band’s attention to the creative possibility of non-traditional
sounds, and its members’ collective refusal to prioritize sound arrangements liberates its product
from simple distinctions between permissible and inadequately ordered sound, the proposed
“conversation of noise” seems somewhat exclusionary; participation in acoustic production is
limited to those who have specially made noise instruments, reinforcing a long since established
division between the active creation of the performer and the passive reception of the audience.
As one band member put it: “We and a few others have acquired a taste for our succession of
Weafer 61
sounds. So the music is in the ear of the listener” (Paes). The band members’ active evasion of
any kind of distinguishing category also makes their work prone to Attali’s critique of the avantgarde: they may not abandon the practice of codification – using simultaneous or successive
combinations of sounds to refer outside of themselves, communicating and naturalizing some
larger world view – as much as they may be perpetually creating codes that don’t last, sacrificing
the potential for meaning that may lie in noise so as to maintain the distinction between those
whose ears are attuned to the sound, and a much larger group of misunderstanding (and likely,
disinterested) outsiders. Not surprisingly, the band expresses refusal to be related to the music
industry, stating that “If we were to be dependent on the band we would become dependent on the
band’s acceptance and to put ourselves in the position of depending on other people’s approval is
suicidal” (Paes). But the statement that the Nihilist Spasm Band is “a free standing event” (Paes)
seems more than a little idealistic; despite the band members’ collective refusal to accord with
any existing kind of musical production, including and especially their own, the situations in
which the Nihilist Spasm Band emits its noises is not particularly radical. The band’s very
existence is dependent on customary understandings of musical performance and the recording
industry. While its players may not make a living off their performances, while they may deny
any association with any genre (“labels are imposed from the outside” [Paes]), and while much of
their recording material is titled in a self denying way (No Record [1968], No Borders [2001], No
Nihilist Spasm Band [2007]), the Nihilist Spasm Band still has a name with which its sound
producing efforts are associated, and the band still plays shows and records albums. While they
may not be traditional musical instruments, the players’ sound making apparatuses are treated as
musical instruments. As one band member puts it, the Nihilist Spasm Band is “in a sense, a
parody of a conventional band” (Paes); as a parody, the band’s existence allows listeners or
observers to identify the customary aspects of a twentieth century band.
For the most part, noise is just content for The Nihilist Spasm Band and others like it; the
band’s evasion of any project or utility whatsoever disables any significant account of what noise
Weafer 62
is, where it comes from, or what the results of its emission might be. The intention to make noise
in environments and situations usually occupied by musical arrangements is echoed in the
projects of other performance and recording artists who may be more successful in demonstrating
the significance of noise. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975), an album which is widely
considered to be the popular pioneering of Noise music, was quickly accused of being merely
another example of avant-gardism for its own sake; upon the album’s release, James Wolcott of
Rolling Stone described the album as more boring than progressive, discordant but not
revolutionary:
After a decade of aesthetic outrages, four sides of what sounds like the tubular groaning
of a galactic refrigerator just aren't going to inflame the bourgeoisie (whoever they are) or
repel his fans (since they'll just shrug and wait for the next collection). Lou Reed is
disdainfully unveiling the black hole in his personal universe, but the question is, who's
supposed to flinch? (Wolcott)
If it is just a (failed) attempt at being subversive at the expense of offending particular
groups of people - the admittedly unclear ruling class or Reed’s equally unclear core audience –
then Metal Machine Music would be no more than something “deliberately, intensely boring” as
Wolcott accuses. Wolcott seems to assume that Reed is exceeding the confines of existing codes
only to create new ones, and since the contents of Metal Machine Music range so far from
traditional musical sounds and customary sound arrangements, it cannot reasonably appeal to any
sustained or significant interpretive community. His review suggests that the album’s failure to
keep anyone’s interest can only attest to Reed’s intention to place himself at “the center of
(critical) fire” (Wolcott) in a display of artistic self-destruction; “What's most distressing is the
possibility that Metal Machine Music isn't so much a knife slash at his detractors as perhaps a
blade turned inward” (Wolcott).
But I don’t think that Reed’s album is directed at either his detractors, or at Reed himself;
instead, Metal Machine Music is directed squarely at its listeners. Wolcott stresses that Reed
Weafer 63
admits to never having listened to the entire album, boasting that the record “would clear the
room” (Wolcott). The central theme of the Rolling Stone review is not boredom, but endurance,
Wolcott claiming that listening to the album once was “one of the better feats of endurance in my
life” (Wolcott). Reed’s album imposes itself so heavily on its listeners not only because it consists
almost exclusively of sounds which have become excluded from projects of intentional sound
arrangement, but also because Reed’s noise, unlike Cage’s silence, fails to incorporate the sounds
of the street, overwhelming the airwaves and providing little opportunity for listeners to either
participate or recognize themselves in the audio production. This may be testament to Reed’s
acknowledgment that misunderstanding, if not the outright lack of representation, has become the
commonplace experience of music. Reed is making use of sounds that are dissonant and
disturbing for almost everyone, presenting his listeners with a hyperbolic experience of the
communicative shortcomings of contemporary, repetitive music and the state of repetitive culture
in general: their failure to represent anything despite their volume or quantity. In direct contrast to
the society affirming “organization of controlled panic” (27) that Attali attributes to ritual music,
Reed’s album continually presents its listeners with audio emissions that fail to amount to
anything orderly – noises which fail to arrange themselves into any kind of enduring pattern or
arrangement, even for the most specialized interpretive community. Metal Machine Music may
be a persistent, audio reminder of the meaninglessness that musical arrangements and
communications in general may become once they are repeated ad nauseam. Attention to the
crisis of meaning facing repetitive music and communication in general is avoided when people
use repetition in vain or feigned attempts to represent something, instead of admitting repetition’s
continual failure to do so.
While the Nihilist Spasm Band purposely ignores the customary boundaries qualifying
artistic sound production, using the dissonant sounds emitted by non-traditional instruments to
supposedly expand the range of sounds and sound arrangements that can be performed and
recorded, Metal Machine Music provides a more critical reflection of the media apparatuses and
Weafer 64
systems of sound qualification that accompany and facilitate the music of repetition. Aubry, the
critical theorist, can use machines like the white noise generator as material expressions of how
contemporary society’s prioritization of efficiency and privacy leads to a cultural environment
which is as overwhelming as it is meaningless. The apparatus that Reed draws to his listeners’
attention is the format of long play records released by poplar music artists of his day, and the
larger cultural environment of music production in which records are evaluated; by the mid
nineteen seventies, the record industry and consumers had long since valued avant-garde music as
a means of temporarily revivifying the standardized popular musical landscape. Reed does not
attempt to represent the cycle of noise proliferation in the age of repetitive music as much as he
tries to produce successions of audio emissions that are derived from the culture industry but
don’t necessarily lend legitimacy to it. The way to do this is to record noise: the dissonant sounds
excluded from the codes and arrangements of representational music and which are eventually
silenced with such efficiency that the development of more complex musical phrases is
impossible. If the Nihilist Spasm Band is a parody of a rock band, then Metal Machine Music is a
parody of a cutting edge rock album. But instead of being optimistic about the musical
possibilities offered by audio emissions which exceed the traditional definitions of pleasant,
orderly, and meaningful sound, Reed’s album emphasizes the potential of avant-gardism to be
experienced as meaningless imposition by all but a few, if any, listeners – its potential to be just
more noise.
The acoustic precision and clarity of the message sought after in representation, and
achieved by repetition at the cost of communicative complexity, problematizes Attali’s claims
about music’s potential to reflect cultural frameworks – to function as “a complicated play of
mirrors” (5). Repetitive music promotes many of the same myths naturalized by representational
music – for instance, the myth of a universal experience of order, understanding, and value.
However, representational music, unlike repetitive music, provides with the harmonious
exchanges of its own phrases, the means of publicly demonstrating the possibility of order.
Weafer 65
Although repetitive music does not involve a similar development of complex, universal meaning
as representational music, its existence is dependent on the same assumptions of clear and
progressive communication. But when noise is the intentional product of an auditory project, and
it therefore must be endured, it becomes very difficult for the listener to slip into the fantasy of
representation despite its passing in the cycle of repetition. Like audio or visual static,
intentionally produced noise draws attention to the imperfections of the medium or system; in the
case of Reed’s album, the system being brought to the listeners’ attention is not a machine
associated with communication technology, but the culture of repetition that lends legitimacy to
the avant-garde that is pursued for its own sake. Metal Machine Music is a four sided album,
made by a well known representative of the avant-garde: Reed – an album which, in the end,
amounts to non-traditional sounds so meaningless that it does not even require listening.
Although there is a lot of it available if one wants to hear it, playing the album does nothing to
develop popular music or make it more complex; its vibrations merely amount to a sonic
imposition on those who listen intentionally, and those who overhear.
Attali stresses that because repetitive music is ultimately evaluated according to the
quantity of its repetition, it merely “exists, imposes itself, without seeking to meet the listeners’
demands” (116) – an expression of progress, production, and consumption for their own sake
“even if it destroys the use-value of communication” (116). Reed presents a product which, in its
persistent noisiness, draws attention to the boringness of repetitive music, and the waning power
of the intentionally dissonant avant-garde to revivify audio cultural landscapes. Wolcott states
that “when my turntable mercifully silenced Lou Reed's cosmic scrapings, I felt no anger, no
indignation, not even a sense of time wasted, just mild regret” (1). Here, Reed has successfully
extracted from the reviewer of a leading industry publication, a critique which reflects the
frustrations of the majority of twentieth century critics of popular culture. Reed’s album is
crowded with sounds so excessively dissonant and enduring that its presence interferes with the
clarity of vision – interferes with the myth of representation attributed to the avant-garde as well
Weafer 66
as the mainstream just as black paint or fabric interferes with the invisibility of a pane of glass.
We shouldn’t read Metal Machine Music as self-destructive as much as we should understand it
as self-reflexive – a “knife slash” not aimed at Reed’s identity or reputation as a cultural
producer, but towards the popular audio culture industry. Like Malevich’s lines announcing the
death of painting, Reed’s noises signal the death of complex musical codes – of communication at the hand of popular, repetitive music and culture’s domination of the airwaves.
Whereas the Nihilist Spasm Band produces dissonant sounds for the sake of novelty, and
Reed, with Metal Machine Music, uses noises to draw attention to the limitations of a
meaningless popular audio cultural environment that Attali describes as “repetition”, others –
including, and perhaps epitomized by Japan’s Masami Akita, who has been producing albums
under the project name “Merzbow” since 1980’s Metal Acoustic Music - produce and record noise
in order to renew conversations about the ways that music, and audio culture in general, is
produced, evaluated, and experienced, signaling possible directions for the future of intentional
sound arrangement. The sound of Merzbow is more difficult to describe than that of the Nihilist
Spasm Band. This is partly because Akita does not limit his product to either the vibrations of
intentionally altered or non-traditional instruments, or the interruptive static, hisses, hums, and
pops arising out of the techniques and devices of sound recording and playback; Merzbow
recordings and performances (the latter beginning in 1989 [Hensley]) encompass sounds ranging
from the emissions of industrial machines and media technologies, to sounds made by traditional
instruments like electric guitars. But an account of Merzbow, like an account of Reed’s Metal
Machine Music, is not sufficed by a list of sounds; like Reed’s album, Akita’s entire career as
“Merzbow” displays an attempt to focus its listeners on a particular category of sounds: sounds
which exceed the familiar, qualifying boundaries of distinct tones, established harmonies, and
existing musical arrangements – noises. Critical theorists and professional music reviewers have
stressed that Merzbow “consists of the debris of music, of sound” (Hegarty, “Full With Noise” 7),
that “he makes art out of noise – sonic garbage” (Jarrett 1). These same people stress, however,
Weafer 67
that Merzbow does not amount to a mere act of “rebellious barbarianism” (Levarie 30); as one
reviewer puts it, Akita’s recordings “are like primers on how to (intentionally produce and record
noise) without merely appealing to shock value or cheapjack, sonic terrorist aesthetics” (Jarrett 1)
– the activity of the “sonic terrorist” being reminiscent of the ways in which the noise of
repetition, and machines like the white noise generator impose their emissions on all
unsuspecting, and likely disinterested, others within earshot.
In contrast, “Akita uses noise to do more than just blast people out of their complacency”
(Jarrett 1). A reviewer of Merzbow’s Amlux (2002) implies that Merzbow is merely an attempt at
redefining music amidst a standardized music industry, asking “why do we still assume that the
only things we can safely call ‘music’ are akin to what we hear on the radio in four-minute
bursts?” (Jarret 1). Contrary to this reviewer, I would argue that the recordings and performances
attributed to Merzbow are not intended to redefine music for perceptive listeners or the larger
community that hears it. Instead of being different for the sake of being different, Akita’s career
as Merzbow, like Reed’s project of Metal Machine Music, is an attempt to make use of noise, a
shifting but immutable category of sound of which everyone has a commonly disruptive
experience; Merzbow foregrounds the form and dynamics of noise in order to draw attention to
the processes and systems of evaluation, habits, cycles, and trains of thought that are both
characteristic of noise and central to the question of contemporary audio culture’s repetition,
privatization, and meaninglessness. Focusing on Merzbow in particular, Paul Hegarty (2001,
2006) has examined the problems inherent to the intentional production of noise. For Hegarty, the
consistency with which Merzbow locates and reveals the excess of existing sound arrangements,
and the degree to which he allows noise to endure, result in a demonstration of noise’s most
fundamental quality: its profound failure. In addition to inspiring critical reflection on
contemporary audio culture, noise, presented by Akita as the failure of sound, also provides a
means of imaging music’s development beyond the precision and accord that leads to repetition,
as well as audio production’s potential announcement and demonstration of emergent
Weafer 68
relationships between individuals and their shared cultural environments. While Reed’s recording
of Noise may evoke reactions that are ironically similar to those evoked by twentieth-century
popular music, Merzbow Noise, spanning hundreds of Merzbow releases (Tausig, “Taste” 1),
demonstrates in its own form and dynamics, the primary shortcoming of contemporary, repetitive
music: its inability to develop into complex, meaningful arrangements of sound. Noise – a
category of sound characterized as much by its exceeding of the boundaries of meaningful sound
as by its excessive volume – like the shifting frontier of novelty pursued by the producers of
repetitive music - is always in flux; the dissonance of a particular noise fades as the public adjusts
to it. But unlike the old, familiar, repeated arrangements of sounds, Merzbow doesn’t claim to
represent anything; while segments of Merzbow are often given titles, Akita has stated that the
titles are “merely selected to mean nothing” (Hegarty, “Full With Noise” 8). With Merzbow,
Akita presents a continuously accumulating archive of the scattered excess of existing audio
arrangements and systems of evaluation. However Noise, being noise, must fail to have any
exemplary productions, recorded or otherwise. The paradox of intentional noise production is best
articulated by Hegarty, who notes that “as the exclusion is brought under control (e.g. by ears
adjusting to a performance, or by getting some familiarity with a recording) noise fades” (“Noise
Music” 1). Hegarty points out that “noise cannot be a utility and still be noise” (2); while noise
“signals the failing of sense and structure…in doing so (noise) becomes incorporated as nonnoise” (1). If it is to be the content of acoustic production, then noise “must endlessly be
resuscitated, to be killed again, over and over” (1).
It is in its persistent failure to stabilize that Hegarty situates the critical power of noise; it
is the function of noise to fail and when noise is produced intentionally, it fails twice: “noise fails
to be noise, even, as, hopefully it fails too in being music, and this is its condition” (2). Arguing
that the moment of noise as “always just a suspension between these failures” (1) – a “circuiting
of failure” (1) - Hegarty stresses that this double failure “is the only fleeting success noise can
have” (2). While Rasch notes how noise complements the intended message, serving as the ever-
Weafer 69
renewable source of new communication, Hegarty stresses that noise, on its own, does not let
systems of meaning come into structure (“Full With Noise” 6); Noise’s failure to be meaningful,
even by way of being noise, is not a failure due to some problem with how particular sounds or
particular noises are being produced. Instead, Hegarty stresses, noise must fail because failure is
“an operator of noise” (“Noise Music” 2); noise, unlike other kinds of excess, is always too much
– “noise is excess as the working of excess (not just the excessive product)” (“Full With Noise”
6). Hegarty argues that the existing theoretical accounts of noise - including Attali’s history of
music in addition to the common avoidance of thinking about what noise is so as not to rob noise
of its radical nature - are examples of what he calls “strong” theories of noise” - theories that
focus on the subversive potential of violently loud sounds. In contrast, Hegarty proposes a
“weak” theory of noise which focuses on its inherent failure. I would stress that it is such an
investigation of noise’s perpetual failure which most adequately reveals noise’s existence as a
process, procedure, or happening. For Hegarty, the excess by which noise is characterized “is not
quantitative, ‘louder’, ‘harsher’, ‘more shocking’…excess is waste, not a surplus: it only is in its
being spent” (“Noise Music” 2). When noise is understood as a process instead of a product, it
becomes difficult to produce and package noise for novelty’s sake - difficult to stockpile noise.
Hegarty’s insistence that noise is a process, a being spent, liberates noise from the two-faceted
fate of being either sound that is devalued by the dominant frameworks for musical evaluation
and excluded from music production, or the dissonant sound that is pursued by the music-maker
interested in distinguishing themselves from like-minded others. Noise, understood as audio
emission that fails to be anything, doesn’t offer sound arrangers even one moment when it can be
used as a working part of a more complex project or organization.
Hegarty states that noise serves as an audible means of “expanding (the) universe of
sensation” (1): “the immanence of the world presenting itself, and we should not (because we
cannot) escape it” (1). Like the incidental background information that, Rasch notes, is usually
understood as interference with or interruption of a particular communicative signal or message,
Weafer 70
noise cannot be cancelled out, short of diminishing the others with whom one shares a
communicative environment. Rasch proposes that it is noise in communication - empirical
variations and various misunderstandings - which allows complex systems (various
understandings) to arise in the midst of a simple system (the intended meaning). Whether noise
arises in communication in general or the audio culture industry in particular, noise cannot be
escaped; it can only be dismissed, drowned out, added to, or endured. Apparent in the cycle of
noise facilitated by the white noise machine and initiated by the myth of the wholly independent
subject, attempts to dismiss or drown out noise merely cover noise over with more noise.
Apparent in the interactions between Poe’s speaker and the bird, noise cannot initiate meaningful
communication – whether we consider noise to be the bird’s repetitive utterance, or the speaker’s
insistence that it mean something. Noise fails to be meaningful; if meaning is thrust upon it, the
result is merely a battle of the wills of the participants - an exchange of monologues and wishful
projects of one’s own control, self-sufficient control over the situation. Although acknowledging
noise’s existence, and dealing with noise strategically or critically cannot erase or obliterate noise
– cannot stop noise from existing - Rasch reminds us that we can choose to address noise in a
way that may benefit an understanding of communication and noise’s place in it; considered
critically, noise evokes the question of “what the function of noise in the social world of human
communication may be” (Rasch 65).
When noise is allowed and made to persist instead of being dismissed as interference and
silenced, when a community of listeners is made to endure the dissonant sound of noise, noise
itself becomes the object of study. When noise is, precisely “where it cannot be – music”
(Hegarty, “Full With Noise” 3), the performance or recording starts to be about its own form and
dynamics. Reed’s Metal Machine Music sheds light on aspects of the noise of repetition by
evoking criticisms that apply to repetitive music as a whole. The intentional avoidance of existing
kinds of musical arrangement practiced by artists like the Nihilist Spasm Band serve as
hyperbolic examples of a procedure that is similar to that practiced by the avant-garde in
Weafer 71
repetition: the perpetual fluctuation of the systems by which acoustic production is evaluated, and
the resulting impermanence of any particular method of evaluation. But Merzbow Noise
highlights existing ways of producing and evaluating music all the while drawing attention to
their limitations. Unlike sounds that are designed to be meaningful but fail due to repetition’s
exhaustion of referential precision or the avant-garde’s privatization of it, noise that is produced
intentionally, noise that asserts itself against the existing prohibitions placed on it and in contrast
to existing musical arrangements, can avoid becoming part of the cycle of noise accumulation.
Just as a focus on the noise emerging in acts of communication complicates the communication
beyond the message intended by the speaker, Noise never settles into a definitive meaning or
significance; Noise can’t be claimed and used by one specific party in order to reassert their
individuality while imposing on others, halting any potential conversation. Just as the critical
theorist interrogates conflict and assumes difference in communication “even where difference
does not immediately present itself” (Rasch 30), the best Noise artist produces a relatively
universal dissonance that persists even when it seems that patterns are emerging from it. For
Hegarty, if the Noise producer is to fully exploit the universal experience of dissonance, capital
“N” Noise should be a constant circuiting of the failure of noise – a constant movement through
an endlessly unfolding horizon of discordant, disorderly sounds. For Hegarty, Akita’s acoustic
production sustains itself as a common experience of dissonance that must be endured – a
noisiness that will not become less noisy for anyone. While Merzbow never amounts to (and
never claims to be) a conversation of noise or a communication of any kind, its failure to do so
may initiate new discussions about noise and music, without allowing individuals to succumb to
distinction and claim newly emergent noises as an assertion of individuality or specialized
knowledge.
Reviewers of Merzbow albums, however, focus less on the process of making noise
persist – locating, interrogating and, at the appropriate time, abandoning particular dissonant
sounds - than they focus on the individual responsible for the Noise. The project title “Merzbow”
Weafer 72
is often used interchangeably with the name of its sole creative force, Masami Akita, and the
audio production of which Merzbow consists is often attributed to an attempt to neatly embody
the avant-garde; one review of Akita’s Merzbeat (2002) stresses Akita’s virtually unavoidable
relationship with popular music: “Japanese abstract legend Merzbow (Masami Akita) is forever
being judged in relation to the mainstream. Fans and critics enjoy Merzbow not only for his
consistently groundbreaking experiments in sound, but also for the contrast to fluffy, predictable
pop which his music has been made to embody.” (Tausig, “Noise With a Beat” 1). The reviewer,
however, hesitates to identify Akita’s work in terms of mainstream music noting that Merzbow
has been made to embody the opposite of fluffy, predictable pod “because such status was
bestowed upon Merzbow by people who are not themselves Merzbow” (Tausig 1), adding that
although “without question the music merits this…Akita, for his part has always insisted that he
is less concerned with reacting to the mainstream than with making a fresh artistic statement” (1).
I would suggest that Akita’s “fresh artistic statement”, so to speak, is signaled, only in part, by
Merzbow’s sound: Noise whose noisiness is maintained because the dissonant sounds Akita
chooses to produce are abandoned the moment they start to become part of an arrangement or
communication. Akita’s treatment of noise – an acceptance of its failure to represent anything and
its incapacity to assist anyone in distinguishing themselves – avoids the consumer’s treatment of
dissonant, disorderly sound as a spicy ingredient for a special kind of musical performance or
audio recording, shifting the attention of the fan, critic or theorist back to the temporally distinct
activity and experience of a particular noise’s production and consumption. Akita recognizes, and
Merzbow demonstrates, that noise cannot be repeated and stockpiled; recordings become familiar
leftovers, sounds whose noisiness has been done to death – proof of noisemaking activity, but not
the all-inclusive, final expression of anything, noise included. Instead of robbing noises of their
noisiness by arranging or repeating them, instead of settling for existing or emergent
arrangements of sound, Merzbow demonstrates the potential for new kinds of engagements with
these new kinds of audio production.
Weafer 73
The new kind of audio culture that Merzbow may herald is demonstrated in Akita’s
treatment of the Noise producer’s identity. Merzbow puts serious pressure on the relation between
a sound producer and their products – traditionally, a relation between an individual musician or
group of musicians and their performances or recordings. Merzbow has enjoyed a quarter century
existence, throughout which Akita, alone and with others, has directed the creation of sound with
constant care to avoid or abandon noises that have become too orderly or familiar and less
dissonant – less noisy - as a result. The reviewer of A Taste of Merzbow (2002) notes that Akita
explores and develops the noise-making capabilities of his chosen instruments - which are “not
limited by the constraints of factory settings” (Tausig, “A Taste of Noise” 1) - all in order to
make “a personal statement in sound” (1). I would suggest that the personal, artistic statement
that is made with Merzbow is a statement about – or, more accurately, a demonstration of how the problems faced by contemporary popular music and Noise alike - their failure to represent
anything or develop into complexity - reveal new, unanticipated and unexplored avenues for a
more popular and inclusive kind creative audio production. Just as Akita’s project initiates a
reconsideration of the spectrum of settings providing sounds that can be included in noise,
Merzbow also initiates a reconsideration of the role and identity of the sound producer – and the
noise artist in particular. By making and sustaining audio emissions that are dissonant because
they are excluded from the dominant musical arrangements and outside of the standard range of
permissible sounds, and by naming the project Merzbow for everyone to recognize but for no one
to appropriate at the cost of excluding others, Merzbow serves as a gesture towards the inclusive,
community-oriented experience that sound production can be. Merzbow does not comprise any
particular collection of noises, but rather, any sounds that range beyond existing frameworks of
evaluation; that which constitutes Noise must change as the noises themselves assume even the
vaguest form of arrangement. Likewise, the idea or character unifying the quarter century long
project of Noise designated to be “Merzbow” is equally unstable and imprecise. The name of
Akita’s project initially seems to refer to a person, yet it refers to nobody in particular; if it serves
Weafer 74
any purpose, it is to confuse the issue of who is responsible for the Noise. While this gesture of
continuity fails to be anything more than a gesture, it highlights a new complication of the
relation between a creative audio product or production and those responsible for the particular
arrangements (or lack thereof) of which it consists; like giving titles to segments of noise that
can’t possibly represent something, naming the project in its entirety, gesturing towards some
unifying intention behind all of the failing, ontologically imprecise and referentially exhausted
sounds that can be emitted, merely draws attention to its lack of meaning.
The uncertainty as to who is responsible for the Noise that Merzbow is, is not a problem
with how Merzbow functions as creative acoustic production - not a kink in Akita’s plan - any
more than noise’s failure to be sound or noise is due to a problem with how a particular noise, or
how particular noises are produced. Just as music’s ontological failure is “an operator of noise”
(Hegarty “Noise Music” 2) the imprecision of to whom Merzbow should be attributed, the unclarity as to who is ultimately responsible for the Noise allows Merzbow to serve a critical role;
the lack of a definitive producer provides for the consumer of Noise a moment of hesitation to
reflect on the habit of attributing Noise – of attributing any intentional acoustic production - to an
individual or a select group of people. Attributing the noisiness of Noise to one or a few
producers and going so far as to offer a name, implying that we can congeal or encapsulate an
acoustic production that continually exceeds any order, makes it seem ridiculous that noise could
be based on one intention, produced by one person instead of being the byproduct of popular
arrangements of music and commonly held systems of evaluating it - and all their accompanying
mythologies. Akita recognizes that he can’t use noise to take distinctive ground – to produce
distinct and enduring representations that will reflect on him personally, or allow listeners to use
the music to project something about themselves - because noise never settles; instead, its
constant failure to represent anything or even to maintain its own noisiness serves as an
unavoidable, hyperbolic reflection of the contemporary, repetitive audio culture’s failure to
Weafer 75
provide the new, lasting, increasingly complex arrangements of sound necessary to represent or
communicate anything.
Obviously, there are other ways to provide a critique of popular culture, and Noise music
may not be the only creative project that reflects the problems with the frameworks and
procedures of contemporary culture or the only kind of sound arrangement to be composed of
sounds which exceed the boundaries of existing frameworks of evaluation. But just as the white
noise machine is particularly emblematic of a cultural environment in which communication has
become a cycle of individuals imposing stagnant, repetitive, exhausted messages on other, nonunderstanding, individuals, Noise is particular useful for demonstrating the universal,
inexhaustible potential for misunderstanding. Akita’s virtual abandonment of the precedence
given to the producer’s identity draws attention to how noise is a process; the cycle of failure that
Noise represents is never complete, always in full swing – perpetually available to be experienced
by anyone - its noisiness derived not only from the particular noise emitted at any given moment,
but also, from the way a particular noise is replaced with another when its noisiness fails.
Attali stresses that instead of functioning to communicate something beyond itself or
being consumed as a product, the sound arrangement he calls composition reclaims the time and
experience of musical production itself (142). It is worth considering whether Akita might – or
whether he could – embody the producer of composition: the person whose production calls into
question the “distinction between worker and consumer, between doing and destroying” (135),
serving as a reconsideration of the “relation to oneself that music makes possible” (142). Granted,
Noise avoids being the “central network” or “unavoidable monologue” (143) that Attali attributes
to repetition. Because it is something whose essential characteristic of dissonance requires
constant refiguring and development into unfamiliar territory, Noise avoids being a mere
demonstration of the popular adherence or reaction to a dominant code. But it is counter intuitive
to recognize in noise “the birth of a new music beyond existing codes” (117). Definitively, noise
is not music; Noise must fail to be music. Clearly the producer of Noise does not “play for their
Weafer 76
own pleasure” as Attali describes the composer to do (134); Noise is dissonant, and it has to
remain so if it is to continue being noise. While the project of Merzbow, like Reed’s Metal
Machine Music and the music of the Nihilist Spasm Band, may not be enjoyed by its listeners as
much as it is endured, Akita’s project recalls Attali’s description of the composer breaking the
existing rules of music – those based on the exclusion of disorderly, unharmonious, interruptive
noise – making “an ever possible suicide” (Attali 143) the only form of death demonstrated in
music. Music originally incorporated the noises reminiscent of the biological reality of death,
robbing them of their menace, eventually silenced unharmonious sounds providing
representations of order, and, most recently, rid itself of unintentional sounds while
simultaneously depriving itself of any significant variation or complexity. Merzbow, however,
demonstrates another possible reaction to the threatening imposition of dissonant, disorderly
sounds. Noise is included in Merzbow, but because Merzbow, unlike ritual music and in direct
contrast to the music of representation or repetition, consists of noise exclusively, noise becomes
a means of abandoning the role which has become that of the music producer: one who excludes
noise, who perpetuates the status quo (whether intentionally or not) in order to present the
possibility, however idealistic, of an individual’s, or a society’s, total control over their
environment – even if that environment is of their own construction. In the Noise that Merzbow
is, the stability of the producer’s own, unique identity unravels alongside the abandonment of any
pre-existing or emergent arrangements of sound and systems of its evaluation. This figurative
suicide of the Noise artist is apparent in a description of Merzbow offered by Hegarty, who states
that “Merzbow does not want to live in a house full of crap, or outside it, neither does it want to
live in a new crappy house: it wants to knock down the house it lives in, to live in it. Even this is
too much, though; Merzbow actually wants to find a rundown house made up of broken stuff, and
break it. Over and over” (“Full With Noise” 7).
6. dwelling on noise
Weafer 77
Hegarty’s figurative illustration of Merzbow as a person who digests their dwelling place
illustrates how Noise - Merzbow in particular - is more than the idealization and inclusion of
nontraditional, dissonant, disorderly sound that is so appealing to hipsters and anarchists;
Merzbow’s audio production does not range beyond existing musical arrangements so as to assert
anyone’s uniqueness or individuality, nor is Merzbow an example of the ritual inclusion of
violently loud or physically disruptive sounds. Sounds that exceed customary arrangements and
regulations are not included in Merzbow in order for them to become less dissonant any more
than they are excluded so dissonance can be silenced; instead, Merzbow consists of noise so that
form, dynamics and stakes of dissonance itself can be popularly experienced and publicly
interrogated. The constant process of replacing newly familiar or orderly sounds with noise – of
emitting and exhausting noises, breaking down noises into other noises – ensures the producer
has no place to dwell – no figurative space of identity to occupy and to potentially prioritize over
the lived experience of their sound production. Merzbow Noise forces the listener or critic to reevaluate the distinction and stability of the producer’s identity, as well as their own roles as
listeners and critics, alongside their re-evaluation of the role of dissonance in intentional audio
production. Merzbow demonstrates that while the producer of acoustic arrangements may be
responsible for the particular vibrations they choose to produce, they are not personally
responsible for the conditions by which the particular sounds are understood and experienced as
pleasant and meaningful – or in the case of Noise, dissonant and meaningless. Merzbow’s noises
publicly expose the fact that customary sound arrangements and systems of their evaluation are
upheld by a widespread acknowledgment of, and agreement upon, their importance - that all
listeners are responsible for sound being sound, and noise being noise.
While Merzbow, and Noise more generally, rarely demonstrate attempts at reclaiming the
musical ritual, Merzbow does reflect an attempt to make acoustic production something with the
same degree of immediacy as ritual music. Ritual music is about itself; the musical ritual is about
the very process of including particularly troubling noises so as to lessen their dissonance and
Weafer 78
imposition. As Attali informs us, when the active inclusion of that which is threatening gave way
to representations of imagined order by excluding unharmonious sounds, music began to refer
outside itself - music began to be about something other than the event of its production. Instead
of developing further, referring outside of itself in order to be critical of itself, music became
about particular individuals or small, exclusive groups who perform and evaluate music for less
knowledgeable others, eventually amounting to strings of novel sounds that repeat to such a
degree that they communicate very little. No longer about actual shared experiences or the world,
music can no longer inspire co-operative projects of imagining and ordering the world; instead,
popular music merely provides a means of supposedly asserting individuality, while really just
imposing meaningless, distracting sounds on others. In contrast, Noise addresses the procedures
and systems of sound production, arrangement, and evaluation themselves; projects of noise
endurance such as Merzbow illustrate that qualities like harmony, arrangement, dissonance and
disorder are products and byproducts of categories imposed on the audio world – qualities that are
derived from historical circumstances but not intrinsic to the vibrations themselves. Above all,
intentionally sustained noise illustrates that these qualities are not permanent; at any given point
in the continually unfolding project of Merzbow, noises included in sound production lose their
dissonance and fail to be noise. Merzbow consists of noises so as to engage in what noise forces
to the surface: shared experiences of the boundaries and shortcomings of existing procedures and
systems.
As I have stressed above, when it is endured instead of avoided, noise very quickly
solicits, for those who’ll listen, at least three critiques of itself – critiques that are also applicable
to more familiar forms of music: noise demonstrates how the exclusion of particular sounds
places limitations on who can participate; noise, composed of sounds which are less than familiar,
fails to develop into complex relations with other dissonant, unfamiliar sounds just as the overly
familiar arrangements of repetitive music fail to develop into complex arrangements; and, shared
experiences of noise – which means most experiences of noise - demonstrate that everyone is
Weafer 79
responsible for adhering to and maintaining the systems of sound evaluation that construct sounds
as sufficiently ordered, pleasant and meaningful, or disorderly, dissonant, and interruptive. The
acknowledgement that every participant in contemporary audio culture – whether a production
technician or a consumer with technocratic tendencies – is responsible for the procedures and
frameworks by which music is created, evaluated and stagnated invites every listener to
acknowledge their responsibility for the noise that culture can amount to whether or not they
produce noise intentionally. Just as the noise arising in conversation – the interference of
circumstance and empirical variation – exhibits the universal availability of the “experience of the
alien and the possibility of misunderstanding” (Rasch 68), Noise such as Merzbow draws
attention to sounds that are universally experienced as dissonant, publicly emphasizing every
individual’s participation in the systems by which music is produced and evaluated, and which
eventually allow music to become stagnant, repetitive, meaningless, and imposing. In addition to
initiating a public, critical reflection on the existing ways in which music is managed and
organized, Noise provides an opportunity for every individual to take responsibility for their
participation in the cycle of noise accumulation and to recognize their possibility of participating
in sound production and consumption in other ways. Noise presents the possibility of cultural
production – of audio cultural production specifically – that is made despite and against the
standardized and exhausted ways of making and evaluating sounds and music in particular.
While the popular cultural landscape is overrun, if not saturated, with producers who
include dissonant, disorderly sounds in their products and productions – producers who may not
hesitate to abandon noises once they become too ordered, agreeable, or predictable, Noise such as
Merzbow – audio production which maintains its dissonance at any cost – turn sites usually
dedicated to the consumption of repetitive music into opportunities to critically consider the
procedures and systems of evaluation that promote and sustain a cultural environment that has
amounted to repetitive chatter. The intentional production of noise breaks “at all cost from the
restrictive circle of pure sounds” (Russolo 6), one of the costs being that Noise can never just be –
Weafer 80
can never represent or totally encapsulate - the new ways of evaluating and arranging sounds that
it proclaims. While there is critical potential in drawing attention to mechanical articulations of
the most efficient systems of sound control –machines emphasize particular practices, procedures,
and systems of evaluation that constitute particular kinds of audio culture – the machines of the
culture industry, being extensions of particular systems of production and evaluation, can only
demonstrate the shortcomings of existing models and procedures. But when particular dissonant
sounds – particular noises – are perpetually replaced with other dissonant sounds as they become
too familiar, arranged or pleasant, the audio production fails to represent anything, and the
listener’s attention is turned to the standards and practices that govern, and the challenges and
possibilities facing contemporary music and its noise alike. For Attali, music is important beyond
its own paradigm because it illustrates particular frameworks of arrangement and organization
that apply to other aspects of culture, exploring “much faster than reality can, the entire range of
possibilities” in any given system of rules and prohibitions (11); he argues that music speaks to
existent and emergent economic arrangements in particular. In light of Attali’s argument that
music is a “credible metaphor” for reality (5), it is worth considering what kind of organizations
existing elsewhere – perhaps, what kind of society or material arrangements – may be heralded by
noise. It is particularly difficult to provide an answer to this question because, as already noted,
noise cannot represent anything – noise cannot have any kind of utility – and still be noise. Yet
Noise in general, if not existing noises – the way it functions by failing (Hegarty) – reflects
procedures and cycles that exist elsewhere, albeit, not forms of industry or rules of economic
exchange. Instead, Noise reflects and emphasizes the developments in audio culture – in music –
that reduce it to meaningless repetition – strategies such as the avant-garde’s perpetual
abandonment of familiar sounds and sound arrangements. The dissonance that Noise embodies
for everyone emphasizes publicly the universality by which systems of sound evaluation are
exercised and maintained. As noise fades, as it is repeated and the listener becomes accustomed
Weafer 81
to it, Noise provides a public, virtually universal demonstration of the possible development of
culture production beyond and despite the existing systems of production and evaluation.
Although repetitive music’s failure to provide increasingly complex and enduring ways
of ordering the world is revealed eventually, likely in retrospect, this failure is rarely revealed in
the time it takes to listen to a musical phrase, song, or album; an analysis of repetition’s failure to
represent anything would have to span several years if it is to reveal repetitive music’s countless,
but similar assertions of individuality and the resulting cycle of white noise accumulation. But
just as music, according to Attali, can outline and engage the accepted rules of society and the
dominant economic organizations much quicker than larger material circumstances can, I would
suggest that Noise can illustrate the form and dynamics of repetitive music, and their
shortcomings, in a matter of a few minutes; the perpetual cycle of noise production, and the
failure that both plagues and operates it, ensure that noise – apparent as newly discovered
dissonant sounds – can be tuned into by anyone, at any given moment in its workings. While no
particular noise or collection of noises can ever be the final and best example of the new musical
arrangements whose possibility it demonstrates, when noise is maintained, it cannot be ignored.
Merzbow evokes for Hegarty an image of the noise producer - not the image of any particular
identity, but a personification of the process that noisemaking cannot cease to be. It is the image
of someone who manages to dwell in noise – amidst sounds beyond existing standards and
practices - by refusing to settle for any particular noisy sound: someone who works toward the
always outstanding potential of sound creations and arrangements that differ from, and develop
free of, traditional arrangements of sound, and existing systems of its evaluation, but not by
simply ignoring, refusing, or avoiding them; Merzbow, as Hegarty imagines her, or him, moves
beyond existing standards and practices as the critical theorist would: by cutting into them, by
breaking them down.
Noise such as Merzbow illustrates that the process of noise production can operate like a
self-perpetuating machine – not a machine which requires the accumulation of more machines
Weafer 82
like itself, but a machine whose continual process always has direction because it is continually
working through the differences it finds in itself – in its own frameworks, procedures and
products. Grinding against the status quo as well as any emergent patterns and frameworks of
evaluation, never settling into any kind of final arrangement or message, Noise such as Merzbow
continually reveals the potential derailment of musical repetition and the cycle of white noise
accumulation. It serves as a perpetually available reminder of the potential for critical
intervention into the cultural systems and procedures that shape experience – the potential for
communities who are in many ways impacted by the activities of producing and consuming
cultural forms to re-evaluate existing and emergent ways of arranging and evaluating the world
just as readily as one may produce and arrange sounds which are rarely emitted intentionally.
With Noise, acoustic production – usually a project aimed at according with existing frameworks
- becomes an activity of reflection on cultural production itself – a dwelling not only on the
sounds and sound arrangements that acoustic production has already made possible, but also on
the possible sounds, arrangements, and frameworks of evaluation that are usually ignored and
may have yet to be imagined.
Notes:
1. For Attali, the medieval jongleur, or minstrel, was the primary producer of music before capitalism, their
performances effecting “a permanent circulation between popular music and (private) court music” (14). Attali
describes the writer of early capitalist, classical music as a “rentier” (10): someone who profits financially by allowing
others to use their creations while retaining the title of ownership. In contrast, the producer of late capitalist, repetitive
music is, according to Attali, a “molder” (40) whose product is not valued according to its quality, but according to the
quantity of castings it provides; the creator of repetitive music “produces the mold from which an industry is built”
(40).
Works Cited
Abumrad, Jad. “Radiolab: Musical Language.” WNYC.org. 21 April 2006. 20
May 2007 < http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21>.
Weafer 83
Adorno, Theodore. “On Popular Music.” A Critical Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. Anthony
Easthope and Kate McGowan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.
211-223.
---. “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” October 55.1 (1990): 56-61.
Attali, Jacques. Noise: the political economy of music. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Aubry, Timothy. “White Noise Generation.” Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of
Women, Gender, and Culture 12.1-2 (Fall 2000-Spring 2001):148-73.
Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London; New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Hegarty, Paul. “Editorial: Noise Music.” The Semiotic Review of Books 16.1-2
(2006): 1-5.
---. “Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music.” Ctheory.net.
18 Nov. 2001. 10 Mar. 2007 <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=314>.
Hensley, Chad. “The Beauty of Noise: An interview with Masami Akita of
Merzbow.” EsoTerra. No. 8 (1999). 1 April. 2006
<http://www.esoterra.org/merzbow.htm>.
Hoggart, Richard. ´The Full Rich Life & The Never Mass Art: Sex in Shiny
Packets.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 3/E. Ed. John Storey.
Prentice Hall, 2006. 26-31.
Jarrett, Keith. “Disc of the Week: Amlux Merzbow.” Thegline.com. (2006).
16 April. 2007 <http://www.thegline.com/disc-of-the-week/2006/
09-22-2006.htm>.
Levarie, Sigmund. “Noise.” Critical Inquiry 4.1 (1977): 21-31.
Loy, Mina. “Brancusi’s Golden Bird.” 1922. 25 May 2007
<http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_2_05/
Weafer 84
brancusi_golden_bird_05.pdf>.
Merzbow. Metal Acoustic Music. Lowest Music and Arts, 1980.
Morgenson, Don. “Excessive noise can be the worst kind of pollution.”
Kitchener-Waterloo Record 12 June 2007: A1
Paes, Rui. “The Nihilist Spasm Band: The Godfathers of Noise.” NSB. 2002. Nihilist
Spasm Band. 10 Mar. 2007. <http://www3.sympatico.ca/pratten/NSB/>.
Perry, Nathan W. “Signal versus Noise in the Evoked Potential.” Science: New
Series 153.3739 (1966): 1022.
Phelan, Peggy. "The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction."
Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge,
1993.
Rasch, William. “Injecting Noise into System: Hermeneutics and the Necessity
of Misunderstanding.” SubStance 21.67 (1992): 61-76.
Reger, Rick. “Chicago Tribune/The A List.” NSB. 2004. Nihilist
Spasm Band. 10 Mar. 2007. <http://www3.sympatico.ca/pratten/NSB/>.
Reed, Lou. Metal Machine Music. RCA, 1975.
Russolo, Luigi. The art of noises (futurist manifesto, 1913). Trans. Robert Filliou. UBU
Classics, 2004.
Sangild, Torben. “Noise - Three Musical Gestures.” The Journal of Music and
Meaning. 2.4 (2004). 1 June 2004
<http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=2.4>.
Tausig, Ben. “Noise With a Beat.” Dusted Reviews. 20 Oct. 2002. 1 May
2007 <http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/404>.
---.“The Taste of Noise.” Dusted Reviews. 1 Aug. 2002. 1 May 2007
<http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/300>.
Weafer 85
Weiss, Allen S. Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of
Lyrical Nostalgia. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Wernick, Andrew. Promotional culture: Advertising and ideology in late capitalism.
Britain: Biddles Ltd, 1991.
Wolcott, James. “Album Reviews: Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music.” Rolling
Stone 14 Aug 1975. 10 May 2007 <http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/loureed/
albums/album/189177/review/5944875>.