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Noise resonance Technological sound reproduction and the logic of filtering Kromhout, M.J.
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Download date:30 Sep 2021 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 231
Epilogue: Listening for the event | on the possibility of an ‘other music’
6.1 Locating the ‘other music’
Throughout this thesis, I wrote about phonographs and gramophones, magnetic tape recording and analogue-to-digital converters, dual-ended noise reduction and dither, sine waves and Dirac impulses; in short, about chains of recording technologies that affect the sound of their output with each irrepresentable technological filtering operation. Only toward the end, this analysis of the way technology shapes the sound of the media age and resonates with listeners returned to what got me started on these issues in the first place: music. For a thesis that started out as a project about the role of noise in recorded music, that last term has been notably scarce. Nonetheless, I am convinced that the media specific analysis of the role of noise and distortion in sound recording technology developed over the course of these five chapters establishes a theoretical point of departure on the basis of which it will be possible to further the conceptual understanding of the way technologically (re)produced music resonates with listeners in the age of technical media. This is why the final chapter concluded with Kittler's intriguing notion of the ‘other music.’ In the way I read Kittler’s work, the appearance of this concept in his early writings (most notably in “The God of Ears”) and occasionally throughout his oeuvre points to a tentative conceptualisation of the status of sound and music in relation to technical media that has been a constant, but understudied force in his thinking, which never developed into a fully formed argument. For more than 30 years, he told Frank M. Raddatz in a conversation published in 2012, Kittler planned to describe 232 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
how modern [neuzeitliche] music, with the invention of equal temperament and the development of orchestral music, sonata and symphony with it, slowly turned into the kind of music that excited me: Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky. And how, due to technological modifications and innovations, from this ecstatic late Romantic music, there arose the British invasion—the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd and all the other Brit-groups (2012a: 62).110
Such a project, would he have ever pursuit it, might have resulted in a book on the ‘other music,’ but it was eventually abandoned when he, as he concludes these remarks, “encountered the ancient Greek” and began working on what would become his final, largely unfinished, multi-volume project: Musik und Mathematik—a tetralogy in which he set out to rewrite Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte on the basis of the conjoined history of music and mathematics since ancient Greece. Perhaps, the final of the four planned instalments of this grandiose project (tentatively entitled Turing Zeit) would have returned to the issue of the ‘other music’; and perhaps the eventual publication in his Collected Writings of the notes, lectures and interviews currently kept at the German Literature Archive in Marbach will shed some light on this part of the project.111 In the meantime, however, the argument put forward in this thesis
110 “Mein Plan war zu erzählen, wie die neuzeitliche Musik mit der Erfindung der gleichmäßigen Temperatur und damit der Orchestermusik, der Sonate und der Sinfonie langsam bis zu den Musiken führt, die mich begeistert haben: Wagner, Mahler, Strawinsky. Und wie aus dieser ekstatisch spatromantischen̈ Musik durch technische Umstellungen und Innovationen die British Invasion hervorgegangen ist, also die Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd und all die anderen Brit-groups.” 111 According to the website of Wilhelm Fink Verlag, the notes, lectures and interviews on volume III and IV of Musik und Mathematik will be published as volume 11 of the monographs [Monographien] section of Kittler’s Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften) ("Friedrich Kittler. Gesammelte Schriften" 2016). NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 233
is an attempt to turn the notion of the ‘other music’ into a conceptual tool that might help us understand how the music of our time takes shape in between the irrepresentable operations of technical media and the receptive ears of human listeners. Shaped by the filtering operations of technological sound reproduction, the output signal of the reproduction chain triggers the noise resonance between reproduced sounds and its listeners. Characterised by this noise resonance that originates in the irrepresentable moment of technological filtering, the possibility of the ‘other music’ must be understood as a musical modality that defines our contemporary musical culture. Hence, both in conclusion of this thesis and explicitly looking forward toward the possible continuation and deepening of the issues it addresses, I want to ask: what is the other music? Can we hear it? And if so, where?
6.2 Music hiding in hardware
Given my strong emphasis on the friction between ideas of perfect fidelity and complete technological reproduction on the one hand and the randomness introduced by the physical cuts of technical filters on the other, one might assume that the ‘other music’ cannot be heard at all, because the irrepresentable moments of physical filtering that produce the transience of reproduced sound cannot be perceived as such. Constituting the irrepressible Real of reproduced sound, these moments only reach our conscious perception through the filtering operations of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which, as I quoted Serres in Chapter Four, are “filtering a meaning, creating a meaning” out of the continuous fuzziness of the Real (1982b: 185). Such a fundamental impossibility to hear the ‘other music’ in itself could be a first possible answer to the question were it might be (or not be) located. If one were to pursue this suggestion, it could be argued that the ‘other music’ hides in the hardware of sound technologies, in the many transmission channels and filtering circuits in between sender and receiver where the noise of the Real interferes with the transmitted signal but disappears once it is stored in the grooves of vinyl records, pits of CDs and the magnetised surfaces of tapes or hard drives through which it becomes 234 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
repeatable over and over and over again. Kittler might have recognised the potentiality of an ‘other music’ in the sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and, above all, Pink Floyd, but he did not hear it, as the sounding music itself can only infinitely tend toward the ‘other music.’ Similarly, he might have recognised this potential in the circuitry of the synthesiser he built (or to anglicise a more suitable German word, ‘bastled’) in the late 1970's, which now rests in the archive in Marbach. Piecing together an electronic musical instrument, Kittler perhaps realised for the first time that technical media that produce, manipulate and reproduce physical sounds all by themselves introduce what he would come to call the ‘other music’ into the basic grid or mainframe of our musical culture.112 Or perhaps—a second suggestion—the ‘other music’ does not hide in the circuitry, but cannot be heard by human ears either. Maybe the sonic singularities of the ‘other music’ can only be recognised by devices that operate on the basis of the same technical filters that were applied by the machines that produced these sounds in the first place. Such is the case with popular smartphone applications like Shazam, designed to ‘recognise’ songs that users record and upload with their smartphone. As I argue more extensively elsewhere, no music or musical parameters are part of Shazam’s operations: the app processes physical sound waves that are recorded by a microphone, turned into digital data, sent to a server, compared with samples in a database, and returned to the user as an artist’s name and a song title.113 Shazam does not ‘hear’ or listen to any music, but analyses data that are fed back (via computer hardware and interface software) to the user. Turned into binary data, the music becomes coded information that can be analysed, synthesised and resynthesised like any other data set, without being dependent on any meaning beyond the logic of binary representations and digital algorithms. What Shazam deals
112 Many thanks to Moritz Hiller for suggesting this idea to me during the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies, Princeton 2016. Significantly, in support of the argument that the ‘other music’ cannot be heard, but only hides in the circuitry of technical (sound) media, Kittler’s synthesiser currently cannot produce any sound; and it is unclear whether it ever actually did ("Apparatus Operandi1" 2012; Gringmuth 2012; Steinfeld 2011). 113 For this analysis of Shazam in relation to Kittler’s concept of the ‘other music’ see Kromhout, 2015. NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 235
with is not addressed to human ears at all. Only at the very last step, when the result of Shazam’s data processing returns to the user, the waves (re)gain their cultural meaning as musical sound. In our technology-saturated world, we are surrounded by devices that shape our sonic environment and listen for the result in ways our ears can never achieve; devices that cut out the biological middleman. Without media that record, store, transmit, produce and manipulate acoustic signals, the sounds of our age would simply not exist, but most of the filtering processes that produce them occur well before the signals reach our ears. We analyse and model these operations and build machines to execute them, but as we cannot perceive them as such, only picking up acoustic traces after the fact, the transient moments of this execution itself are lost to our ears. When it comes to identifying such moments, Shazam is faster, more accurate, and more reliable than any human agent. As co-founder Avery Li- Chun Wang wrote in 2003: Shazam’s “algorithm can pick the correct [one of different versions of a song, MK] even if they are virtually indistinguishable by the human ear” (2003: 7). The proposition that digital audio media have surpassed human hearing, is therefore not only theoretical, but is experienced every day by millions of users. If this is indeed all there is to it, the noise resonance of sound reproduction does not apply to human ears at all. This is what Wolfgang Ernst’s media archaeological reading of sonic media suggests. For Ernst, human hearing and interpretation have become entirely secondary to the technological processes that undercut and surpass and thus determine and shape this hearing and interpretation in the first place. However, keeping with my analysis of “The God of Ears” in Chapter Five, Section 5.4b and Mark Hansen’s suggested ‘rehumanisation’ of Kittler’s intellectual legacy, I claim that the concept of the ‘other music’ runs deeper than these media archaeological accounts. It does not only apply to a class of technological processes to which human senses do not have access. Although the ‘other music’ might be elusive, hard to pin down and contingent by its very nature, I do not subscribe to a reading that renders it fundamentally inaccessible or inaudible. Instead, I suggest that the sonic traces creating the possibility for the ‘other music’ to appear 236 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
produce a musical modality in the sense that, beyond the realm of technologically processed, physical sound waves that the algorithms of Shazam deal with, the experience of the ‘other music’ penetrates the cultural sphere of human signification.
6.3 I hear a new world
Kittler heard the ‘other music’ or at least recognised its contours in the same set of examples over and over again: “from Wagner to Hendrix,” he said in 2008 in “Preparing the Arrival of the Gods,” “from Hendrix to Waters, it is the same music” (2015b: 104). Anticipated by the ‘acoustic effects’ of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerken, which I described in Chapter Five, hi-fi stereo recordings of the ringing feedback of Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar or the cosmic echoes on early Pink Floyd records are defined by the logic of filtering that underpins the age of technical media. As Kittler describes the sounds that began to emerge from jukeboxes in the 1960s: “an echo that lasts for ten seconds and keeps returning,” a cosmic echo, “cannot be implemented anywhere on earth. One needs magnetic tape to play [with] the cosmos—here and now” (2005: 25).114 The operations of technical media produce sounds from beyond. Technologies that initially only reproduced acoustic events subsequently began to produce sounds that break with the basic laws of physics and could have only originated in these machines. As the transient moments of physical filtering that produce these sounds are lost to our ears, the ‘other music’ appears when their sonic traces resonate this transience in our ears. They resonated, for instance, in the ears of sixties record producer Joe Meek, who met a tragic end when he shot his landlady and himself only a few months prior to the Summer of Love in February 1967. Seven years earlier, in 1960, Meek recorded an album that was only released in full in 1991. It is called I Hear A New World and consists of thirty-three minutes of spaced-out sound effects, excessive reverb, weirdly pitched vocals and
114 “Ein Echo, das zehn Sekunden lang anhält und immer wiederkehrt […]. Nirgendwo auf Erden lasst sich das implementieren, dazu braucht man ein Tonband, dann aber können wir den Weltraum spielen - hier und jetzt.” NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 237
heavily treated instrumentation: a close sonic equivalent to science fiction. “I hear a new world calling me,” the singer sings on the title track, “How can I tell them what's in store for me?” (Meek 1991). Meek heard the calling of another world ringing with the music of the future and the music of space, and used all the technology available to him to put it to tape. This is music that could have only been created by means of that technology; and it still sounds as simultaneously real and otherworldly—in time and out-of- time—fifty years after it was first recorded. Does this mean that, in Eno’s words, using “the studio as a compositional tool” is the key toward creating an ‘other music’ (Eno 1983)? Is all recorded music thereby classifiable as ‘other music’? If so, ‘other music’ would be nothing but a different name for what is commonly called ‘sound’; a term that, as musicologist Paul Théberge writes, has taken on a peculiar material character that cannot be separated either from the 'music’ or, more importantly, from the sound recording as the dominant medium of reproduction” (1997: 191). However, this is not what I want to argue either. What Kittler may have heard while listening to Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and what Joe Meek may have heard and tried to capture as well were the traces of a musical event, the possibilities of which came into being over the course of the development of sound recording technology but which are not a feature of sound reproduction per se. “The event,” says Derrida, “is that which goes very quickly; there can be an event only when it’s not expected” (2007: 443). The possibility of the occurrence of the event called the ‘other music’ relies on a shift of musical agency from human agents toward technical media that produce and reproduce non-symbolic, physical signals. These signals are produced in the physical real, but their moment of production, the moment of filtering, remains fundamentally inaccessible; and because these moments of production are purely transient and thus constitute the sonic Real of technological sound, they remain irrepresentable as such. The random, noisy, transient traces of these moments, however, sonically resonate with listeners and can sometimes suddenly (like a shock, like a strike of lighting) hit upon unexpecting ears. Some of these traces are hardwired in the information stored on the recording medium, but they do not originate in the recording process only. 238 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
They are produced throughout the entirety of the recording chain. From first input to final output, from the first sound played and recorded in some recording studio to the moment of its playback through speakers or headphones directed at the listener. The entire chain of technological sound (re)production produces what Kittler calls “a single and positive feedback between sound and the listener’s ear” (2015a: 13). Within this feedback chain, sonic traces of physical filtering operations can produce the singularity of the present in the repetition of the past, triggering our aesthetic sense in unexpected ways, ways that draw us in and hit us in the gut. As is well known, feedback can be instrumentalised and put to good use, but only up to a certain level and only with the risk of, as Serres writes of Orpheus’ masking strategy cited in Chapter Two, falling into noise: feedback can also cause a short circuit breakdown and ear-splitting cacophony.115 Hence, creating the possibility of the ‘other music’ to appear might imply letting go of control, taking the risk of exploring the unknown and let machines do the work.
6.4 Hearing an ‘other music’
In the early 1950s, Belgian composer Karel Goeyvaerts and his German colleague Karlheinz Stockhausen kept a correspondence in which they discussed the possibility of a music made from pure sine waves. They wanted to produce, Stockhausen recalls, “pure, controllable sounds without the subjective emotional influence of ‘interpreters’” (1971: 649). As musicologist Richard Toop describes in an article on “Stockhausen and the Sine-Wave,” both composers were devout Catholics and considered the “notion of purity” so perfectly captured by the ideal sine wave to be “not just musical, but theological” (1979: 383). Without disrupting attacks and decays, sine waves and Fourier series seem to approximate divine perfection; a representation of heavenly harmony. Although Stockhausen, as Toop concludes on the basis of the correspondence, remained
115 “Jimi Hendrix,” Kittler writes in “Lightning and Series – Event and Thunder,” “only needed to hold his electric guitar as close as possible to his good old nonlinear Marshall amplifier until guitar and amplifier exploded in an endless rumble of thunder” (2006a: 71). NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 239
ambivalent toward the idea of composing with nothing but sine waves and eventually sought to combine them with other electronic and instrumental sounds, Goeyvaerts stuck to it and developed the idea of “dead sounds”: “sounds which would have absolutely no unpredictable ‘inner life,’ but would be identical at any moment in time, and therefore detached from time itself” (1979: 386). As musicologist Herman Sabbe explains it, by technologically erasing “all these impulses” introduced by the attack and decay of sound, Goeyvaerts tried to create music that could “lift the sense of time” (1994: 76). Using magnetic tape to create the most static sounds possible, the “dead tones” of Nr. 4 met Dode Tonen (N°.4 with Dead Tones) (1952) minimalises sonic transience to approximate the characterless immortality of ideal sine waves (Goeyvaerts 1998). At the outset of the age of magnetic recording, in the years leading up to what Kittler calls the “media explosion” of the 1960s that produced the spaced-out sounds of Joe Meek’s ‘new world,’ Goeyvaerts’ composition for dead tones constitutes what Sabbe calls “the most radical pretension of totality and positivity ever” (Sabbe 2005: 244). This attempt to make music with ideal filters can be seen as a final, inevitably doomed, attempt to wield total control over musical sound by transcending the material basis of sound production and media technology. Goeyvaerts’ theological program notwithstanding, I argue it is not in how the piece succeeds in these goals, but in how it fails to achieve the eternal stasis of the domain of the ideal filter that it hints at the promise of a new sonic world. Infinitely tending toward one extreme of the uncertainty principle, Goeyvaerts’ dead tones aspire for the clarity suggested by the mathematical operations of Fourier analysis; a clarity that, as I argued in Chapter Four, goes beyond the transience of earthly life altogether and indeed reaches for the heavens, but, as the argument continued in Chapter Five, a clarity that also brings into ever sharper focus the impossibility to achieve eternal stasis and heavenly purity. The traces of the material production of sound signals, the moment of physical filtering, always already disrupt the purity; if only because sounds simply cannot go on for ever, but have to start and stop, thereby introducing, as I 240 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
quoted Wiener in Chapter Three, alterations of the frequency composition that “may be small,” but are still “very real” (1976: 544-545). Exactly this tension between clarity and diffusion, between sharpness and fuzziness, between the ideal of perfect reproduction and moments of physical filtering, create a possibility of the ‘other music’ to appear: sounds that shimmer in the moonlight, but, as moonlight itself is only a reflection of the light of sun, also beam further into the dark universe that lies beyond. There is no perfect formula for striking this possibility called ‘other music,’ no unequivocal answer to Serres’ question as to “how much noise is necessary?” On the other extreme of the uncertainty principle, as far removed from Goeyvaerts’ dead tones as possible, the vast musical output of Japanese noise artists like Masami Akita, alias Merzbow, for example on the album Pulse Demon, consists of a succession of near infinitesimal impulses that tend toward pure white noise, creating a continuous sonic difference that overloads our senses with acoustic information (Merzbow 1998). In between these sonic extremes that reach for the heavens by electronically approximating (but never actually producing) pure sine waves, or create dense and highly complex sound spectra that approximate (but never actually are) pure white noise, a continuum of noises and distortions cling to sound signals that travel along the reproduction chain. Subtle and near inaudible or harsh and almost overtaking the signal itself, this noise of sound reproduction shapes the music in ways that cannot be completely controlled nor predicted. Six years after the otherworldly sounds of Joe Meek’s ‘new world’ came the four Californian minutes of “Good Vibrations” that Brian Wilson pieced together out of more than ninety hours of tape recordings in 1966 (Beach Boys 1994). Kittler recognized the ‘other music’ in the dreamy sound effects of Pink Floyd’s aptly names “Echoes” in 1971 and the hi- fidelity sonic splendour of their “Great Gig In The Sky” in 1973, but around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Stevie Wonder also began programming otherworldly sounds on his synthesisers, which he used to great effect on albums like Talking Book and Innervisions (Pink Floyd 2001a; Pink Floyd 2001b; Wonder 1986; Wonder 1990). Toward the end of the decade, the possibilities for such techno-sonic explorations had become almost limitless and people like Brian Eno explored the full potential of the NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 241
“studio as compositional tool,” for instance on David Bowie’s Low in 1977 or his own Music For Airports in 1978 (Eno 1990; Bowie 1999). By the 1980s, the Fairlight synthesiser sampled and sequenced digital sounds on albums like Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love from 1985 (1995). The Synclavier melody at the start of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” which sounded a few years earlier in 1982, might as well be regarded as the opening gong for the digital age (2008). The music in these examples takes the technological possibility of creating unforeseeable, unthinkable, unimaginable acoustic events to its logical conclusion by showcasing rich spectral sonorities that aspire, like the heartbeat on The Dark Side of the Moon, to ring forever. They are presenced over and over again in all their spectral clarity every time the record spins. As with Goeyvaerts’ dead tones, however, it is exactly due to the contingent traces of their material production by irrepresentable filtering operations and thus to the extent in which they do not belong to the present but also signify the past, that these sounds can trigger the emergence of an ‘other music.’ On the other side of the spectrum and in contrast to the sonic clarity of pop musical splendour, Lou Reed explored the noise spectrum created by the accidental, contingent, erroneous processes at the heart of technological filtering operations on the hour-hour long feedback assault called Metal Machine Music, released in 1975. In its wake, in the late seventies and early eighties, bands like Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten began to use and record all the hums, buzzes, feedback, overdrive, distortion and tape saturation produced of technological sound reproduction on albums like The Second Annual Report and Kollaps (Throbbing Gristle 2011; Einstürzende Neubauten 2003). 116 Hip-hop sampling, the synthetic sounds of electronic dance music, distorted rock guitars, lo-fi recording strategies, the musical use of digital glitches, the Autotune-effect: these are all strategies that take the irrepresentable cut of technical filters as the starting point for sonic invention, thereby producing
116 I already mentioned my bachelor thesis on the work of Einstürzende Neubauten in the introduction (Kromhout 2006). Furthermore, I discussed the relation between the role of noise and its relation to sound reproduction technology in the work of Throbbing Gristle in Kromhout 2011. 242 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
music that consistently and explicitly negates the myth of perfect fidelity and sonically emphasises the transience and finitude of all signals.117 However, like the splendour of hi-fi recordings evokes its own opposite, exactly because of the sonic singularity of sounds shaped by the irrepresentable moments of physical filtering, their negation of representational clarity also produces something else: each time these transient traces of filtering operations are presenced by loudspeakers and repeated over and over again, they gain in significance and begin to shine all the brighter. It would therefore be wrong to think of these examples as inherent opposites that tend toward both extremes of the uncertainty principle—the clarity of the sine wave and the instantaneity of the Dirac impulse, the thunder or the lightning. Rather, I suggest they represent two sides of the same coin, located at different points in the noise continuum. What they show together is that the possibility of a noise resonance of sound reproduction to create the sonic conditions for the ‘other music’ to appear is not restricted to specific musical genres. It can, but not necessarily does, appear in all technologically (re)produced music. “The song sleeps in the machine,” sings Einstürzende Neubauten frontman Blixa Bargeld (1997: 126).118 This song is Kittler’s “song from beyond mankind” and it can be awoken each time someone presses play. Its conditions appear when the contingencies of technical media meet the organised sound we call music, but they are perhaps most apparent, most nakedly unconcealed in some forms of contemporary electronic music. By virtue of digital sound technology, providing what Kittler calls the first viable “language for sound,” this music leaves the connection with non- mediated or so-called natural or acoustic sound behind entirely and wakes the vast reservoir of songs that sleep in the machine (2013a: 40). The grainy sound textures construed out of vinyl samples and analogue synthesisers on Music Has the Right to Children by British duo
117 On the aesthetics of sampling, see De La Motte-Haber 2000 or Rodgers 2003. On the affective sound of the machine in electronic music production, see Maresch, 2003. On glitch music, see Hainge, 2007. On guitar distortion, see Poss, 1998. On the aesthetics of lo fi recording methods, see Kromhout, 2012. On the use of auto-tune, see Marshall, 2014. 118 “Das Lied schläft in der Maschine.” NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE 243
Boards of Canada, for example, invokes the clear melancholic pull of pastness courtesy of the cuts of technical filters (Boards of Canada 1998). All characteristics of these sounds evoke the many channels they passed before flowing from the speakers. At the same time, however, they clearly resonate in the here and now, with the full sonic depth and spectral richness of physical, singular sounds. One could argue that these sounds speak of nothing but sound, but it might be more accurate to say they speak of filters. By emphasising there is no way to tell what these sounds are or how they came to be, they speak of the logic of filtering that invokes the still darker presence of the media age. Hence, the message of the synthesiser is and is not the synthesiser. In the dense, scattered and often heavily distorted sound worlds on the recent album Mutant by Venezuelan musician Arca or the fittingly titled Sirens by Chilean-American artist Nicolas Jaar, one hears in the most literal sense of the word, the traces of the entire analogue and digital circuitry that produced this music (Arca 2015; Jaar 2016). This music of digital ticks and glitches, low basses and whirling clouds of synthesiser chords consists entirely of the non-symbolic sound of technological (re)production, shaped by the noisy traces of irrepresentable filtering operations. Often drenched in layers of heavy reverb that infuse the listener with a sense of sonic dread, such music is as much borne from the complete malleability of sound as it is borne from the fundamental irrepresentability of its moment of production. It therefore continuously brings into sharper focus, as all technical media do, that which is irrepresentable and slips from our control.119 Ultimately, oscillating between the dream of perpetuating the magic and halt time and the attempt to create a new and unpredictable sonic presence—between uncanny sine-like purity and the noisy materiality of transmission channels—the noise resonance of the ‘other music’ thereby emphasises that the future remains, as Kittler has Roger Waters say at the close of “The God Of Ears,” “in the lap of the fucking gods” (2015a: 16). As a modality of technologically (re)produced music, to which some music, some musicians and some composers aspire, the noise
119 On the concept of sonic dread, see Goodman 2010. 244 NOISE RESONANCE | EPILOGUE
resonance of sound reproduction brings the event called the ‘other music’ into being. By listening for its resonance, being open for the potentiality of lightning to strike and something to stick out of the continuous flow or stream of background music that surrounds us every day, I hear a new world calling me.