“The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire – we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence."
– Aldous Huxley
Noise is everywhere and on the rise. Since the advent of the post-industrial society, the world has become louder and louder, and noise has invaded our lives more with every passing year. Its logic seems viral, the more noise there is, the more critics, philosophers, and (irony of ironies) anti-noise campaigners add to the hubbub, talking about noise incessantly as though the only response possible in the face of so much noise were to join forces with it. As if to prove the point and make it harder still to retreat from noise into the orderly harmony of music, for so long held to be the opposite of noise, the history of 20th-century western music seems to have followed a similar trajectory, becoming noisier and noisier as time goes on. From Schoenberg to Stravinsky to Russolo to Cage to Hendrix to Merzbow, atonality, dissonance, explosions, coughs, splutters, feedback, distortion, glitch and various shades of noise have done their best to (dis)colour music and to make of it what we had thought it was not. Herein, however, lies a problem, for if noise can become what it is not, what exactly is it?
The question may seem absurd to many. After all, everyone knows what noise is. As Garret Keizer writes, ‘Like Justice Potter Stewart, who famously said that although he could not define obscenity, he knew it when he saw it, most of us feel confident in our ability to identify noise. We know it when we hear it’. Some, however, can be more categorical. For the physicist, noise can be defined as a non-periodic complex sound, in other words, a sound that can be decomposed into a large number of sound waves all of different frequencies that (according to Fourier’s theorem) are not multiples of one basic frequency and which do not therefore enter into harmonic relations with each other. This would not seem to be incompatible, and yet is significantly different from the very common and common sense definitions of noise outlined by Marie-Claire Botte and René Chocholle in their book Le Bruit and which itself draws on an officially sanctioned standard. For them, noise is either “an erratic acoustic vibration which is intermittent or statistically aleatory” or else (or hence?) “any auditory sensation which is disagreeable or uncomfortable”. To the physicist’s mathematical definition, they therefore add a subjective measure, a combination found also in the definition of noise enshrined in Shannon and Weaver’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, the foundational work of traditional communications theory.
Defining communication “in a very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another [including] not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behaviour,” Weaver, in his summary of Shannon’s contributions to communications theory, notes that,
“In the process of being transmitted, it is unfortunately characteristic that certain things are added to the signal which were not intended by the information source. These unwanted additions may be distortions of sound (in telephony, for example) or static (in radio), or distortions in shape or shading of picture (television), or errors in transmission (telegraphy or facsimile), etc. All of these changes in the transmitted signal are called noise.”
Having ascertained that the transmission of all communicational signals contains noise, the problem becomes, for Shannon, to discover the general characteristics of noise and to understand how it affects the accuracy of the message finally received at the destination so as to ascertain how to minimise the undesirable effects of noise and to discover to what extent it is possible to eliminate it. It would be a mistake to extrapolate from this desire to minimise the ‘undesirable’ effects of noise, however, that noise harboured some desirable effects. For Shannon and Weaver, such a possibility is merely a semantic trap to be avoided. As Weaver explains:
“If noise is introduced, then the received message contains certain distortions, certain errors, certain extraneous material, that would certainly lead one to say that the received message exhibits, because of the effects of the noise, an increased uncertainty. But if the uncertainty is increased, the information is increased, and this sounds as though the noise were beneficial! It is generally true that when there is noise, the received signal exhibits greater information – or better, the received signal is selected out of a more varied set than is the transmitted signal. This is a situation which beautifully illustrates the semantic trap into which one can fall if he does not remember that ‘information’ is used here with a special meaning that measures freedom of choice and hence uncertainty as to what choice has been made. It is therefore possible for the word information to have either good or bad connotations. Uncertainty which arises by virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is desirable uncertainty. Uncertainty which arises because of errors or because of the influence of noise, is undesirable uncertainty. It is thus clear where the joker is in saying that the received signal has more information. Some of this information is spurious and undesirable and has been introduced via the noise. To get the useful information in the received signal we must subtract out this spurious portion.”
The problem, of course, as Shannon knew well, is that from an engineering perspective one cannot in fact subtract out this spurious portion, that noise is the ineluctable travelling companion of information.
Noise, then, increased at an exponential rate throughout the twentieth century and became more than ever both ineluctable and undesirable. When filtered through noise in this way, the history of the twentieth century, from both a social, artistic and scientific perspective, can then sometimes look like the story of a dog who, having become aware of its tail, tries to run away from it.
This is not to say that noise is a uniquely twentieth century phenomenon, far from it, but it is to suggest that the increase in certain forms of noise has brought it to our attention in a more insistent way in the twentieth century and beyond than was the case previously – which in turn has led to the self-generative logic mentioned above as more noise leads to more noise. This capacity to insist upon us once noticed would indeed seem to be one of the peculiar properties of noise. Prochnik proposes a definition of noise ‘as sound that you can’t get a distance on – sound that gets inside your head and won’t go away’, and this is the case even at relatively low decibel levels since once one notices a noise, it seems to preoccupy us disproportionately. Whilst this may then go some way towards explaining why it is that we might wish to attenuate or eradicate it, why the dog would wish to run away from its tail, the absurdity of that proposition in this allegory should be enough to indicate the folly of this course of action.
When one does turn one’s attention to noise, however, giving in to its insistence, another problem quickly becomes apparent that may, once again, push us away from it. For whilst noise may seem like an eminently unproblematic term, concept or phenomenon when one does not really attend to it – and, as claimed here, we spend most of our time attempting not to attend to it – as soon as one does stop to think about what noise actually is, one quickly realises that its meanings and definitions are highly subjective and unstable. Even in Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, whilst there may appear to be an objective certainty in the formulae that show how, given the ineradicability of noise, information can be transmitted reliably through a noisy channel, the decision as to what constitutes noise in the signal and what constitutes its information is a necessarily subjective matter that assumes the absolute intentionality of the originary emitter to be the only defining characteristic of the information that needs to be considered. And if noise then becomes nothing but a matter of personal choice, it is hard to say precisely what it is and to what it might be applied as a descriptor.
This somewhat bipolar aspect of noise is apparent in many of the recent studies of noise, whether these are interested in noise itself as an object of study or else as something to be eradicated. Bart Kosko puts it most succinctly when he writes, “Noise has two parts. The first has to do with the head and the second with the heart.” Garret Keizer, for his part, forms a title out of noise’s impossible contradictions and double binds, calling his book The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want. What is more, in his chapter of that same name, he titles his subsections, respectively: ‘Noise is Easy to Define’ and ‘Noise is Not so Easy to Define’; ‘Noise is Objective’ and ‘Noise is Subjective’; ‘Noise is New’ and ‘Noise is Old’; and finally, ‘Noise is Meaningless’ and ‘Noise is Seldom without Meaning’.
Adopting the different strategy of all-inclusiveness, the sheer scale of Hillel Schwartz’s recent magnum opus Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond is in itself testament to the vast range of meanings that have been attributed to noise and the number of sites that it has inhabited or that have produced it. His survey ultimately can bring no consensus as to what noise is in a definitive sense, however, and on the penultimate page of his book he writes:
“Timeless and untimely, noise is the noisiest of concepts, abundantly self-contradictory. Profligate. It compels us at every stage to reorganise, take our lives up a notch; or it does us in, deafening us to our relations, obligations. Noise must be what we were waiting for all along, an encounter with the chaotic that loosens the lug-nuts of routine. Or, grating and incessant, it sends us over the edge. Sound and unsound, something or other. Bound up with bone and tissue, with solids, liquids, gases, and plasmas, with the tactile and cortical, with the chthonic and the cosmic, all those vibrations that are soundmusicnoise have been historically re-cognised from era to era, within a cultural logic as nonlinear as the coils of the hairs of our inner ears. Distinctions between sound and noise, or noise and music, or music and sound, can only be provisional – not because they are matters of taste but because they are matters of history and histrionics: of what becomes audible through time and how the acoustics are staged, in auditoria or bedrooms, in laboratories or courtrooms.”
Whilst all of this might appear to be incontrovertible, and whilst it would seem that noise must forever remain only ever a kind of portmanteau word on which we can hang the referent of our choice depending on temporal, geographical, cultural or disciplinary context, there nonetheless remains the possibility of finding across all of these contradictions and shifting meanings some consistency, of asserting, like Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, that we recognise noise when we hear it (or, indeed, see it) but find it hard to say precisely what it is.
Extract from Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise, by Greg Hainge, 2013, Bloomsbury.
