Noise music (or simply noise) is a subgenre of experimental music that is characterised by its use of unwanted noise as a primary musical element. The genre has roots in early 20th century avant-garde music, but later drew influence from industrial and electronic music. It is characterized by a rejection of conventional music theory and traditional song structures, often featuring little or no melody, rhythm, or harmony. This type of music tends to challenge the conventional distinction between musical and non-musical sound.[4]

"Noise as music" originated as an avant-garde music style in the 1910s through the work of Luigi Russolo, an Italian Futurist who published the manifesto The Art of Noises in 1913. Elements of noise music were later explored by artists in the Dada and Fluxus movements, as well as through electroacoustic music, modern classical and musique concrète. Composers such as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and James Tenney would explicitly use the term "noise" to describe some of their experimental practices. During the 1960s and 1970s, compositions such as Robert Ashley's "The Wolfman" (1964) and Pauline Oliveros's "A Little Noise In The System" (1967) were among the earliest examples of contemporary noise music,[5] while works by non-academic artists such as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music were influential for later noise artists.[6][7]

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of industrial music and commercial synthesizers, encouraged non-musicians to experiment with strictly noise-oriented styles, leading to genres such as power electronics, coined by the English group Whitehouse,[8] as well as post-industrial styles like dark ambient, death industrial and power noise.[9][10] The 1980s cassette underground would facilitate most of these releases. In Japan, the Japanoise scene, which stemmed out of the Kansai no wave movement, produced several influential noise acts such as Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hanatarash, C.C.C.C., and Incapacitants, who, together with American and European noise artists the Haters, Daniel Menche, Vomir, and Richard Ramirez, contributed to the emergence of harsh noise and harsh noise wall into the 1990s.[11][12]

During the 2000s and 2010s, the American noise underground, drawing from the Brooklyn noise scene, blended kosmische Musik, progressive electronic, ambient, drone and new age into a style known as post-noise. The movement had been catalyzed by the Skaters, a group formed by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark in 2004. Artists included Oneohtrix Point Never, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, Laurel Halo, Sun Araw, Yellow Swans, and Emeralds.

Etymology

According to Danish noise and music theorist Torben Sangild, no single definition of noise in music is possible. Sangild instead provides three basic definitions of noise: a musical acoustics definition, a second communicative definition based on distortion or disturbance of a communicative signal, and a third definition based in subjectivity (what is noise to one person can be meaningful to another; what was considered unpleasant sound yesterday is not today).[13]

White noise
10 second sample of white noise.
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In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution.[14] In electronics, noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as 'snow' on a degraded television or video image.[15] In signal processing or computing, it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density.[16] In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies.[17][18]

According to Murray Schafer, there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, and a disturbance in any signaling system (such as static on a telephone).[19] Definitions regarding what is considered noise, relative to music, have changed over time.[20] Ben Watson, in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution, points out that Ludwig van Beethoven's Grosse Fuge (1825) "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven's publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately.[21]

In the 1920s, the French composer Edgard Varèse was influenced by the ideals of New York Dada associated via Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia's magazine 391. He conceived of the elements of his music in terms of sound-masses. This resulted in his compositions Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Intégrales of the early 1920s.[22] Varèse declared that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question "What is music but organized noises?"[23]

In attempting to define noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, and Theodor Adorno and, through their work, traces the history of "noise". He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted", "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th-century concert-hall music. Hegarty contends that John Cage's composition 4'33", in which an audience and performer sit through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music.[24][25]

Characteristics

Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noise mentioned below and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways.[26]

Noise music can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques, physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings, field recording, computer-generated noise, noise produced by stochastic processes, and other randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion, feedback, static, hiss and hum. There may also be emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy, continuous pieces. More generally noise music may contain aspects such as improvisation, extended technique, cacophony and indeterminacy. In many instances, conventional use of melody, harmony, rhythm, or pulse is dispensed with.[27][28][29][30]

In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by naïve art, some contemporary digital art noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge, and vinyl records.[31] Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++ software used in creating the viral symphOny by Joseph Nechvatal).[32][33]

Contemporary noise music is often associated with extreme volume and distortion, as well as computerized sounds and 8+kHz sine waves.[34][35][36][37][38]

History

Pre-20th century

Medieval charivari
Depiction of charivari, early 14th century (from the Roman de Fauvel)

During the 14th century, the charivari, a European and North American folk custom designed to shame a member of the community, made use of a mock parade aimed to make as much noise as possible by beating on pots and pans or anything that came to hand, these parades were often referred to as "rough music".[39][40] By the 19th century, the classical period led to one of the earliest examples of non-musical sounds being used in contemporary western music such as Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (1813), which included sounds of muskets and cannons to represent battle. Later, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880) went further by writing real cannon fire directly into the score.[41][42]

1910s–1930s: Early noise music

Luigi Russolo c. 1916

French composer Carol-Bérard born in 1885 was a pupil of Isaac Albéniz. Bérard studied and was influenced by primitive music and instruments. During the late 1900s, he experimented with noises as music, developed a notation system for them, and wrote on the challenges of instrumenting noise music. In 1910, Bérard composed a Symphony of Mechanical Force. His work made the connection between music and noise publicly visible years before Futurism.[41]

By 1913, Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo wrote his manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises,[43] stating that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds: "We must break this restricted circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds".[43] Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. Works entitled Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a City) and Convegno d'aeroplani e d'automobili (The Meeting of Aeroplanes and Automobiles) were both performed for the first time in 1914.[44]

A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to contemporary noise music, his efforts helped to introduce noise as an intentional musical aesthetic and broaden the perception of traditionally unwanted sound as an artistic medium.[45][46]

Luigi Russolo and his assistant Ugo Piatti in their Milan studio in 1913 with the Intonarumori (noise machines)

Antonio Russolo, Luigi's brother and fellow Italian Futurist composer, produced a recording of two works featuring the original intonarumori. The 1921 made phonograph with works entitled Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines and is the only surviving sound recording.[48]

The Dada art movement's Antisymphony concert performed on April 30, 1919, in Berlin would also be an early influence and progenitor of noise music.[49][50][51] The Dada-related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp also worked with noise, but in an almost silent way. One of the found object Readymades of Marcel Duchamp, A Bruit Secret (With Hidden Noise), was a collaborative work that created a noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg.[52] What rattles inside when A Bruit Secret is shaken remains a mystery.[53]

Found sound

In the same period the utilisation of found sound as a musical resource was starting to be explored. In 1931, Edgard Varèse's Ionisation for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lion's roar, and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise.[54][55] In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage stated that Varese had "established the present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises".[56]

In an essay written in 1937, Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical materials[57] and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called noise, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Essentially, Cage made no distinction, in his view all sounds have the potential to be used creatively. His aim was to capture and control elements of the sonic environment and employ a method of sound organisation, a term borrowed from Varese, to bring meaning to the sound materials.[58] Cage began in 1939 to create a series of works that explored his stated aims, the first being Imaginary Landscape #1 for instruments including two variable speed turntables with frequency recordings.[59]

I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.

— John Cage The Future of Music: Credo (1937)