Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us.
Noise has the power to bring us back to life. On the other hand, sound, foreign to life,
always a musical, outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no
more than an overly familiar face does our eye. Noise, gushing confusely and irregu-
larly out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store innumerable sur-
prises for our benefit. We feel certain that in selecting and coordinating all noises we
will enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not suspect.
- Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise (1913)
Music or Noise?
Webster's dictionary defines music as "an agreeable sound." Contrarily, noise is defined as sound that "lacks agreeable musical quality or is noticeably unpleasant." Fair enough. That which is agreeable to the ear = music. That which is unagreeable to the ear = noise. Accordingly, the oft-used term noise music seems a bit of an oxymoron. Are we talking about noisy music, musical noise, neither or both? Many musicians whose performances challenge or expand harmonic, rhythmic or timbral conventions, while noticeably displaying something of a musical intent or essence, might wince when they receive the possibly pejorative "Nice noise!" after a show. On the other hand, someone bent on pulverizing any semblance of euphony in their world may bristle when told that one likes their "music." As with so many terms, the definitions of music, noise, noise music and the like all depend on who uses the term, the context in which they use the term and, in some cases, their intent in so using the term.
The Music of Sound
In The Republic, Plato has Socrates say that "musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful." The idea that one's soul, character or community is affected by or reflected in one's sonic environment is ubiquitous in myths and philosophies from time immemorial. Hsün Tzu, a Chinese philosopher roughly contemporary with Plato said that "Music embodies an unchanging harmony, while rites represent unalterable reason. Music unites that which is the same; rites distinguish that which is different; and through the combination of rites and music the human heart is governed." Much later, in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Friedrich Nietzsche expounds upon the same subject, making a clear distinction between the orderly Apollonian and the chaotic Dionysian and the necessity of their dialectic relationship for human survival. Shortly after Nietzsche's passing, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, in his Art of Noise proclaimed that:
"First of all, musical art looked for the soft and limpid purity of sound. Then it amalgamated different sounds, intent upon caressing the ear with suave harmonies. Nowadays musical art aims at the shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, 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. "
Russolo's reasoning echoes the philosophers already mentioned, heralding, however, a materialist shift accompanying the onset of industrialization. The relationship between sound and spirit remained (at least as much as spirit remained), but the music of the future would be governed, as would the souls of its listeners, by environmental machinery rather than any well-tempered daemon. The harmony of the gears was born of the mass reification of the human spirit through industrial labor. As humans exchanged Being for belongings, the sound of music became the music of sound or in some cases, just sound.
The Machine in the Ghost
Whether one still believes in the soul and that humans have free will (not that the two are necessarily conjoined), or sides with some form of materialist determinism, it can't be denied that human behavior has evolved with and, in great part, from technology. For instance, do humans use computers to transfer information or vice versa? It's hard to say whether we're doing the driving or if the machine is on autopilot. Furthermore, is it possible that reification has run its course to the extent that machines themselves have absorbed the human spirit and that we humans, deprived of our ὄντος are cadaverous husks, a series of performative habits and stimulus responses, haunted by our transfered ψυχή? Perhaps the future belongs to the intelligent artifice rather than artificial intelligence. Perhaps the machine, literally material made human, haunts the ghost, ironically human now made material. If so, that the spirit of music has left us for our objectified selves and that we have developed a taste, a need even, for the cacophonous and clamorous not only in music, but culture and politics as well, should be no surprise.
It is here that the engaged subject who listens becomes the distracted object who simply hears and, perhaps, responds. However, as energy is neither created nor destroyed, neither is spirit or, for lack of a better term, essence. Even in the most random succession of noises, musical structures exist. Some, like Russolo, might say that the cosmic indeterminism the rational agent experiences inwardly as determinism, or an effective lack of agency, is itself an enriching and liberating force in the realm of musical expression as well as those of culture and politics. 20th century composers like John Cage and Iannis Xenakis incorporated chance operations into their aesthetic processes, reaping many innovative thoughts and sounds from their acquiescence to the dictates of fate. As subject becomes object, object takes on the attributes of subject, including the subject's creative agency. Sound expresses itself. Music makes itself.
The Rorschach Taste
Whether music or noise, a sound is a sound. What a sound means to an individual is ever more subjective in light of the synthesis of manmade sounds with those predating industry. This synthesis is, of course, the spirit of the times, a spirit disembodied and alchemically transfered, a reflection which has become the image it once mirrored. To some, the washing machine might be as compelling a soloist as Casals. There is less qualitative consensus about what one means by words like music or noise. Accordingly, the term noise music, though seemingly favorable, is ambiguous and without critical utility. Musical taste is a tautologous Rorschach test where doctor and patient are one. Music could become a pejorative as noise becomes a praise. Given the confused interplay between humanoid subjects turned objects in relation to something approaching an elephantitis of Baudrillard's hyperreal, it's impossible, even for the speaker, to determine what one means when they say, "Nice noise!" Given the way that distinctions like inner and outer as well as the subjective and objective have interpermeated one another, who's to say that one day, people won't huddle into concert halls to listen to a consort of trash compactors while Julliard students haul bags of classical scores to the dump. As the hourglass of cultural history approaches it's turn to historical culture, whether you're trying to make music or noise, whatever someone says about it, just take it as a compliment. You deserve it!
