Noise and Meaning

JMM – The Journal of Music and Meaning, vol.2, 2004, section 4 – printout. Original article URL: http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=2.4 This article contains music examples and links to other Internet resources. Both are only available from the original online article. [Refer to this article by section numbers, not by page number] Torben Sangild Noise - Three Musical Gestures - Expressionist, Introvert and Minimal Noise 4.1. Gesture and Noise The question of the meaning of noise in music has no simple answer. One of the difficulties in developing an aesthetics of noise (Sangild, 2003) has been the fact that noise endows different musical contexts with different expressive qualities, even within one musical genre. Noise in music is usually an element in an overall musical gesture and takes its meaning in relation to this gesture. This does not mean, of course, that noise can express anything. Noise adds specific meanings to the gesture in which it partakes – disorder, chaos, blurriness and fuzziness - ultimately a decentering of subjectivity. It is important to acknowledge the differences between specific gestures as well as the shared features. This essay contributes analyses of three distinct employments of noise - an expressionist, an introvert and a minimal - showing how they differ essentially in expressive qualities. First, let me explain briefly what is meant by the words “gesture” and “noise.” Gesture A gesture is a movement that has a certain character and meaning. This meaning can be more or less culturally coded. The gesture as musical expression is the way the music “behaves” or moves, and is connected with the body perceiving it. The perceiving body does not have to move or act in order to sense the gestural character of the music. The movement or the quality of the gesture is felt as a disposition or an encounter. Music can be heavy or light, mechanical or organic, calm or restless, blurry or sharp regarding focus, etc. In terms of energy, a gesture can have increasing intensity, decreasing intensity or be constant. Gesture can be regarded on different levels: as a detail in a specific piece of music, as the overall movement of the piece or as a feature of a whole style.1 Gestures are, in a certain sense, objective. The attitude towards the gesture is the subjective part.2 Noise Noise has three independent but overlapping definitions, which I have developed elsewhere (Sangild, 2003, 10-16). Acoustically, noises are impure and irregular sounds; communicative noise is that which distorts or disturbs the signal to be communicated; subjectively, noise designates unpleasant sounds.3 1 Wilson Coker (Coker, 1972, 10-23) coins the concept of musical gesture based on a sociological communication theory. The musical gesture is distinguished from the sign in that it does something rather than tell or show something (This does not mean, of course, that there is no semiotic aspect of music as well. In fact, a large part of Coker’s book is devoted to Peircian semiotics). We meet the gesture with an individual attitude defining our reaction to the gesture. The interaction of gesture and attitude forms the aesthetic experience. Richard Middleton (Middleton, 1993) has sketched how the idea of musical gesture can be an important part in a musical analysis breaking free of the ties and concepts of traditional formal analysis. Gestures exist on all levels of the music, every drum beat, every sound is a gesture in itself (with a certain envelope) and is part of a larger gesture. Describing the music through analysis of gestures enables us to point to the way music behaves and is registered, bodily and emotionally. How would this music behave if it were a body? Which physical and dynamic qualities would this music be endowed with if it were a thing? Questions like these are tacitly implied in the method of describing and analyzing music as a gesture. The gesture is not the only semantic aspect of music. There are semiotic, conceptual, and contextual aspects adding to the overall meaning of music. Also in my analyses below these aspects play a part, even as I here focus on the gestural meaning. Analyzing music as gesture is thus not a naturalistic approach. The meanings of gestures are culturally and historically coded as well as institutionally filtered. The advantage of speaking about music and meaning in terms of gesture is that the phenomenological aspects of music can be analyzed while the musical object retains its primacy. Primacy is not accorded to the artist, not to the receiver as a psychological subjectivity (nor as a stastistical average), but rather to the music as a sounding object with meaning perceived through bodily experience. This meaning may not be stable or simple, and no analysis using concepts and metaphors will be final. This is a basic hermeneutical condition. 2 I have argued in my dissertation, “Objective Sensibility” (Sangild, 2004c), that aesthetic objectivity is not about finding universal, ahistorical, independent constants, and that objectivity is a question of the character of the object as mediated through subjectivity. The philosophical background for this argument can be found in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne and especially in the subject-object dialectics of Theodor W. Adorno. The gesture is objective in the sense that it is expressed by the music (the phenomenological and coded object). It is always an object-as-potentially-perceived. The gesture is registered by the sensorium of the perceiver. The subjective response, on the other hand, is a reaction to a gesture rather than a perception of it. The maelstrom of noise as described below is a gesture and the potential ecstatic reaction is the subjective response. The important thing is to acknowledge that music has gestural qualities that cannot merely be dismissed as subjective responses. 3 A paraphrasing of Sangild 2002a 5-8 will serve to clarify these definitions: Etymologically, the term "noise" in different Western languages (støj, bruit, Geräusch, larm etc.) refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension, and to powerful sound phenomena in nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. The English word "noise" comes from latin “nausea”, meaning seasickness and disgust (as the English “nausea”). The German Geräusch is derived from rauschen (the rushing of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication), thus pointing towards some of the aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music. The following descriptions and analyses are genre relative. The overall genre of the analyses of noise below is rock music. As has often been pointed out (Green, 1988, 33- 34; Moore, 1993, 167-170) meaning in music is related to genres and styles (and the related types of listening competence) that constitute a background against which the A. Acoustic noise In the field of acoustics the concept of noise is in principle purely physically defined. Noises are sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones. To name different kinds of noise, synaesthetic metaphors are derived from the spectrum of color so that 'white noise' is a signal ideally containing all of the audible frequencies at the same time, like an untuned radio. A signal in which certain frequencies are preferred to others is thus called "colored noise," ranging from "violet noise" (a bias on the high frequencies) to "purple noise" (a bias on the low frequencies). B. Communicative noise In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for instance, which is now ubiquitous in rock music, was originally an overload of the amplifier, causing it to fray the sound. In the early sixties, guitarists began to deliberately construct this distortion by fiddling with the amplifiers, and soon the industry marketed pedals with names like "fuzztone," "overdrive", and "distortion" as an easy way to obtain the same effect. In the same way electronica artists work with different sorts of overloads of the devices, or they deliberately induce errors with unpredictable results. One of the methods is giving the midi too many signals for it to handle, resulting in an uncontrollable musical output. Another technique is the obvious one of creating distortion by overloading a digital amplifier. When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise. C. Subjective noise "Unpleasant sounds" – this is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition. There are few general rules as to which sounds are unpleasant (the higher the frequency and the louder the sound, the more unpleasant it feels); it is to a great extent a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and cultural-historical situation. An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise, but is nonetheless not considered unpleasant and irritating. We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound, whereas radio noise (even if we were to hear it as indistinguishable from the sea) is normally considered a disturbance.

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