Noise/Music and Representation Systems
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Noise/music and representation systems DOUG VAN NORT Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada E-mail: [email protected] The word ‘noise’ has taken on various meanings throughout sound began to look outward – away from the the course of twentieth-century music. Technology has had autonomous realm of instrumental music and towards direct influence on the presence of noise, as phenomenon and the din of the growing industrial landscape. In 1913, the as concept, both through its newfound ubiquity in modernity Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo wrote his Art of Noises,in and through its use directly in music production – in which he proclaimed: ‘In the 19th Century with the electroacoustics. The creative use of technologies has lead to invention of machines, Noise was born. Today, Noise is new representation systems for music, and noise – considered triumphant and reigns sovereign over the sensibility of as that outside of a given representation – was brought into meaning. This paper examines several moments in which a men . .’ (Russolo 1986: 24–5). For Russolo and other change in representation brought noise into musical Futurists, the motion, speed and power of modern city consideration – leading to a ‘noise music’ for its time before life (and of warfare) rendered all previous forms of simply becoming understood as music. musical expression irrelevant, proclaiming that ‘pure sound . no longer provokes emotion’ (Russolo 1986: 24–5). Their solution was to incorporate the so-called 1. INTRODUCTION noises of technological progress into the fabric of The use of the term ‘noise’ and, further, noise as concept musical composition, most notably through the con- has existed explicitly as a subject of discussion in struction of intonarumori – or noise-intoners. The goal Western music since the beginning of the twentieth was an abstraction of the essential timbral attributes of the industrial soundscape, and yet was mimetic in that century. It has taken on varied (often confounded) ‘. listeners were apparently compelled to understand meanings within the context of electroacoustic music this new music in terms of its direct resemblance to the and recently has come to signify something very actual noises of the modern world’ (Thompson 2002: particular. ‘Electroacoustic’ itself has come to mean 137). everything from the specificity of a genre to any music Regardless of whether this was heard as ‘city’ or whose sound is not possible without electricity and whether it was enjoyed, this objectification of noise as electronics. It is in this latter sense that I use the term industrial soundscape and further abstraction of noise and which sets the context for this discussion, as a through musical representation and mimesis effectively musical contemplation of noise has been tied to both the recuperated ‘noise’ back into a musical framework. use of technology in the direct production of music as While Russolo’s noise was quite fixed in its opposi- well as the burgeoning industrial soundscape of Western tion to music, the noise of Henry Cowell was based in cities at the turn of the century. Both of these conditions acoustics and existed within music: ‘. a noise exists in are inextricably linked to the development and existence the very tone itself of all our musical instruments’ of electroacoustic music, and so too is the notion of (Cowell 2005: 23). He argued that this existence of noise noise as musical outside, leading to the notion of noise in music rendered any music/noise binary irrelevant. as music itself. We’ll consider the im/possibilities of such Though they were present, these aspects of tone existed sonic states by way of a consideration of the various outside of the musical representation of the day, and so usages of ‘noise’ throughout experimental musics of the necessarily acted as background, periphery, residue past century. against which pitch took on meaning. This hidden This is not to say that no one questioned the residue of instrumental tones began to be exposed by appropriateness or even musicality of a sound prior to Vare`se, whose compositions explored these latent modernity – clearly present from Beethoven raising timbres, shaping them into organised sounds. He did discussion surrounding the subjective notion of dis- not live in a vacuum, however, and these works were sonance and its place within music to the tail end of the inspired by his experience of the modern American city1 consonance/dissonance dialectic in Stravinsky’s Rite of – Russolo meets Cowell. Spring, premiered in 1913. However, this same year the question of what constitutes an acceptably musical 1See Thompson 2002 for an interesting discussion of this. Organised Sound 11(2): 173–178 ß 2006 Cambridge University Press. Printed in the United Kingdom. doi: 10.1017/S1355771806001452 174 Doug Van Nort 2. SYMBOL TO SIGNAL spectrum (‘acoustic noise’). This is precisely the noise that Cowell referred to when he discussed the noise To what extent can we consider these sounds to function inherent in every musical tone – the attack portion of a as ‘noise’? The word finds common usage as something bowed string instrument, the ‘breathiness’ of a flute, etc. that is unwanted, but it has become something more – a In the context of signal processing, these sounds are thing that makes no sense in our ordering of the world. treated as residual – as a difference that cannot be If we consider music as sound given order relative to a directly modelled. In the case of the so-called sinusoid + set of codes – as a carrier of meaning, communication, noise model, the sound that cannot be represented expression as defined by these codes – then is noise deterministically as slowly varying sinusoids is instead necessarily ‘extra-musical’? Decades after the Futurists’ represented by a time-varying envelope of white noise, noise manifesto and several years after Cowell cele- determined by the difference between the ideal of the brated noisy tones, John Cage would identify the noise/ model and the real of the signal. Similarly, in source- music dialectic as a new boundary by which we might filter models such as LPC or the channel vocoder, structure our conception of ‘music’: ‘Whereas in the past historically used in speech applications, a noise source the point of disagreement has been between dissonance is acted on by resonant filters that impart a stable, and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, deterministic spectral shape on the sound.2 Interes- between noise and so-called musical sounds’ (Cage tingly enough, Russolo’s intonarumori acted as a sort 1961: 3–4). Cage’s approach differed from the Futurists of source-filter model in that they consisted of a in that he did not look to a source of noise, but rather to vibrating membrane (acting as source) inside a noise as a sense of ‘outside’ – relationally defined by wooden box having a phonograph-like horn attached one’s attention and the process of listening. There was (acting as resonator/filter). Thus the Futurist noise- no attempt at recuperation through a musical repre- boxes were of the same fundamental construction as sentation, but rather an opening up of music to the speech synthesizers, vocoders and later analogue possibility of ‘all-sound’. He looked to the world around synthesizers. The latter three were introduced specifi- him in sound and considered its musicality: ‘Wherever cally as a means of communication and expression, we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, while the former was intending to break from all it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating previous musical order. The difference is that in the … We want to capture and control these sounds, to use time of the Futurists, music and language had long them not as sound effects but as musical instruments . .’ been mediated by symbolic representation, whereas by (Cage 1961: 3). Once again, the desire is to grab hold of the time of the vocoder and synthesizer, recording sounds, bringing them into meaning by imposing a technology allowed sound itself to be given representa- musical ordering – not by reducing it to symbol but by tion. This sonic representation gave rise to models, and ordering the sound itself. Russolo’s noise was something so the acoustic noise of source and residue that was that arose from technologies around him, in contrast to once externalised was given form within the represen- the silence of pre-industrial life, which he then tation as embodied by the tools themselves. transformed into musical pitches – noise made musical. Midway through the twentieth century, Claude Cage’s noise of diffusion and of the periphery was Shannon articulated his theory of communications, always there, but his concept of noise in music was providing another formal definition of noise (‘commu- facilitated by the advent of recording, amplification and nications noise’) as any interference present in a channel transmission – music formed from noise. between sender and receiver that obscures the intended Thus the history of the conceptualisation of noise in message, thus preserving the subjectivity of ‘disturbance’. music, noise as music and music as noise is integrally This again presented a representation upon which tied to the use of technology in the service of music, and communications systems could be modelled. Noise in as such is tied to the parallel development of electro- this context acts on a signal, causing it to lose meaning. acoustic music. It has shifted its true meaning with Aden Evens claims that ‘Physicists have it backwards context, leaving in its wake noise-objects that others when they characterise the formal relationship as one have attempted to commodify and over-aestheticise as where noise modulates signal . it is noise that binds the did the Futurists. To avoid such a situation, in our signal, that serves as medium .