| Noise music | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | Modernism 20th century classical music Electronic art music Musique concrète Electroacoustic music Performance art Free improvisation |
| Cultural origins | Early 1910s Europe |
| Typical instruments | Varies widely |
| Mainstream popularity | Very underground or academic in early- to mid-20th century, with popularity increasing in the 1970s and 1980s |
| Subgenres | |
| Harsh noise – Power electronics (complete list) |
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| Fusion genres | |
| Death industrial — Noise rock — Power noise — Grindcore — Noise pop — Onkyokei | |
| Regional scenes | |
| Japan | |
Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization. Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals, and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static, hiss and hum, feedback, live machine sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic.[1][2][3]
The Futurist art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada art movement (a prime example being the Antisymphony concert performed on April 30, 1919 in Berlin),[4][5] and later the Surrealist and Fluxus art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones, Yasunao Tone, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, Walter De Maria's Ocean Music, Milan Knížák's Broken Music Composition, early LaMonte Young and Takehisa Kosugi.[6]
Contemporary noise music is often associated with extreme volume and distortion, particularly in the popular music domain with examples such as Jimi Hendrix's use of feedback, Sonic Youth and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.[7] However, many noise musicians are keenly aware of dynamics and build them into their pieces.
Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include works by Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Cornelius Cardew, Theatre of Eternal Music, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Blackhouse, Jean Tinguely's recordings of his sound sculpture (specifically Bascule VII), the music of Hermann Nitsch's Orgien Mysterien Theater, and La Monte Young's bowed gong works from the late 1960s.[8] Genres such as industrial, industrial techno, lo-fi music, black metal and glitch music employ noise-based materials.[9][10][11]
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Luigi Russolo, a futurist artist of the very early 20th century, was perhaps the first noise artist.[12][13] His 1913 manifesto, L'Arte dei Rumori, translated as The Art of Noises, stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining and envisioned noise music as its future replacement. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted. None of his intoning devices have survived, though recently some have been reconstructed and used in performances. Although Russolo's works bear little resemblance to modern noise music, his pioneering creations cannot be overlooked as an essential stage in the evolution of this genre,[14][15] and many artists are now familiar with his manifesto.
At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.[16]
Antonio Russolo, another Italian Futurist composer and Luigi's brother, produced a recording of two works featuring the original Intonarumori. The 1921 made phonograph with works entitled Corale and Serenata, combined conventional orchestral music set against the famous noise machines and is the only surviving sound recording.[17]
An early Dada-related work from 1916 by Marcel Duchamp also worked with noise, but in an almost silent way. His ready-made With Hidden Noise (A Bruit Secret) was a collaborative exercise that created a noise instrument that Duchamp accomplished with Walter Arensberg. What rattles inside when With Hidden Noise is shaken remains a mystery.[18]
In the same period the utilisation of found sound as a musical resource was starting to be explored. An early example is Parade, a performance produced at the Chatelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917, that was conceived by Jean Cocteau, with design by Pablo Picasso, choreography by Leonid Massine, and music by Eric Satie. The extra-musical materials used in the production were referred to as trompe l'oreille sounds by Coctueau and included a dynamo, Morse code machine, sirens, steam engine, airplane motor, and typewriters.[19] Arseny Avraamov's composition Symphony of Factory Sirens involved navy ship sirens and whistles, bus and car horns, factory sirens, cannons, foghorns, artillery guns, machine guns, hydro-airplanes, a specially designed steam-whistle machine creating noisy renderings of Internationale and Marseillaise for a piece conducted by a team using flags and pistols when performed in the city of Baku in 1922.[20] In 1923 Arthur Honegger created Pacific 231, a modernist musical composition that imitates the sound of a steam locomotive.[21] Another example is Ottorino Respighi's 1924 orchestral piece Pines of Rome, which included the phonographic playback of a nightingale recording.[19] Also in 1924 George Antheil created a work entitled Ballet Mécanique with instrumentation that included 16 pianos, 3 airplane propellers, and 7 electric bells. The work was originally conceived as music for the Dada film of the same name, by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, but in 1926 it premiered independently as a concert piece.[22][23]
In 1930 Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch recycled records to create sound montages and in 1936 Edgard Varese experimented with records, playing them backwards, and at varying speeds.[24] Varese had earlier used sirens to create what he called a "continuous flowing curve" of sound that he could not achieve with acoustic instruments. In 1931 Varese's Ionisation for 13 players featured 2 sirens, a lions's roar, and used 37 percussion instruments to create a repertoire of unpitched sounds making it the first musical work to be organized solely on the basis of noise.[25][26] In remarking on Varese's contributions the American composer John Cage stated that Varese had "established the present nature of music" and that he had "moved into the field of sound itself while others were still discriminating 'musical tones' from noises".[27]
In an essay written in 1937, Cage expressed an interest in using extra-musical materials[28] and came to distinguish between found sounds, which he called noise, and musical sounds, examples of which included: rain, static between radio channels, and "a truck at fifty miles per hour". Essentially, Cage made no distinction, in his view all sounds have the potential to be used creatively. His aim was to capture and control elements of the sonic environment and employ a method of sound organisation, a term borrowed from Varese, to bring meaning to the sound materials.[29] Cage began in 1939 to create a series of works that explored his stated aims, the first being Imaginary Landscape #1 for instruments including two variable speed turntables with frequency recordings.[30]
In 1961 James Tenney composed Analogue #1: Noise Study (for tape) using computer synthesized noise and Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (for tape) by sampling and manipulating a famous Elvis Presley recording.[31]
In 1932 Bauhaus artists László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Fischinger and Paul Arma experiment with modifying the physical contents of record grooves.[31]
Under the influence of Henry Cowell in San Francisco in the late 1940s,[32] Lou Harrison and John Cage began composing music for junk (waste) percussion ensembles, scouring junkyards and Chinatown antique shops for appropriately tuned brake drums, flower pots, gongs, and more. In Europe, during the late 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète to refer to the peculiar nature of sounds on tape, separated from the source that generated them initially.[33] The first of Schaeffer's Cinq Études de bruits, or Five Noise Etudes, consisted of transformed locomotive sounds.[34] Following this, both in Europe and America, other modernist and postmodernist art music composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Pierre Henry, Iannis Xenakis, La Monte Young, and David Tudor, composed significant electronic, vocal, and instrumental works.[35] In late 1947 Antonin Artaud recorded Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of god), an audio piece full of the seemingly random cacophony of xylophonic sounds mixed with various percussive elements, mixed with the noise of alarming human cries, screams, grunts, onomatopoeia, and glossolalia.[36][37] In 1949, Nouveau Réalisme artist Yves Klein wrote The Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony, conceived 1947–1948), a 40-minute orchestral piece that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord (followed by a 20-minute silence)[38] – showing how the sound of one drone could make music. Also in 1949, Pierre Boulez befriended John Cage, who was visiting Paris to do research on the music of Erik Satie. John Cage had been pushing music in even more startling directions during the war years, writing for prepared piano, junkyard percussion, and electronic gadgetry.[39]
In 1951 Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4, a work for twelve radio receivers, was premiered in New York. Performance of the composition necessitated the use of a score that contained indications for various wavelengths, durations, and dynamic levels, all of which had been determined using chance operations.[40][41] A year later in 1952, Cage applied his aleatoric methods to tape-based composition. Also in 1952, Karlheinz Stockhausen completed a modest musique concrète student piece entitled Etude. Cage's work resulted in his famous work Williams Mix, which was made up of some six hundred tape fragments arranged according to the demands of the I Ching. Cage's early radical phase reached its height that summer of 1952, when he unveiled the first art "happening" at Black Mountain College, and 4'33", the so-called controversial "silent piece". The premiere of 4'33" was performed by David Tudor. The audience saw him sit at the piano, and close the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he opened the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he closed the lid. And after a period of time, he opened the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon: that there is no such thing as silence. Noise is always happening that makes musical sound.[42] In 1957 Edgard Varèse created on tape an extended piece of electronic music using noises created by scraping, thumping and blowing entitled Poème électronique.[43][44]
In 1960, John Cage completed his noise composition Cartridge Music for phono cartridges with foreign objects replacing the 'stylus' and small sounds amplified contact microphones. Also in 1960, Nam June Paik composed Fluxusobjekt for fixed tape and hand-controlled tape playback head.[35] On May 8, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object. These recordings made use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with a vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover, the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the sounds being recorded.[45] Canada's Nihilist Spasm Band, the world's longest-running noise act, was formed in 1965 in London, Ontario and continues to perform and record to this day, having survived to work with many of the newer generation which they themselves had influenced, such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Jojo Hiroshige of Hijokaidan. In 1967 Musica Elettronica Viva, a live acoustic/electronic improvisational group formed in Rome, made a recording entitled SpaceCraft [46] using contact microphones on such "non-musical" objects as panes of glass and motor oil cans that was recorded at the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin.[47] At the end of the sixties, they took part in the collective noise action called Lo Zoo initiated by the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto.
I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.—John Cage The Future of Music: Credo (1937)
The art critic Rosalind Krauss argued that by 1968 artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, and Richard Serra had "entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist."[48] Sound art found itself in the same condition, but with an added emphasis on distribution.[49] Antiform process art became the terms used to describe this post-modern post-industrial culture and the process by which it is made.[50] Serious art music responded to this conjuncture in terms of intense noise, for example the La Monte Young Fluxus composition 89 VI 8 C. 1:42–1:52 AM Paris Encore from Poem For Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. Young's composition Two Sounds (1960) was composed for amplified percussion and window panes and his Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches (1960) used the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor.
In the 1970s, the concept of art itself expanded and groups like Survival Research Laboratories, Borbetomagus and Elliott Sharp embraced and extended the most dissonant and least approachable aspects of these musical/spatial concepts. Around the same time, the first postmodern wave of industrial noise music appeared with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and NON (aka Boyd Rice).[51] These cassette culture releases often featured zany tape editing, stark percussion and repetitive loops distorted to the point where they may degrade into harsh noise.[52] In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial noise groups like Current 93, Hafler Trio, Throbbing Gristle, Coil, Laibach, Steven Stapleton, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Smegma, Nurse with Wound, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Haters, and The New Blockaders performed industrial noise music mixing loud metal percussion, guitars, and unconventional "instruments" (such as jackhammers and bones) in elaborate stage performances. These industrial artists experimented with varying degrees of noise production techniques.[53] Interest in the use of shortwave radio also developed at this time, particularly evident in the recordings and live performances of John Duncan. Other postmodern art movements influential to postindustrial noise art are Conceptual Art and the Neo-Dada use of techniques such as assemblage, montage, bricolage, and appropriation. Bands like Test Dept, Clock DVA, Factrix, Autopsia, Nocturnal Emissions, Whitehouse, Severed Heads, Sutcliffe Jügend, and SPK soon followed.
The sudden post-industrial affordability of home cassette recording technology in the 1970s, combined with the simultaneous influence of punk rock, established the no wave aesthetic, and instigated what is commonly referred to as noise music today.[54]
The entry of recorded noise into popular rock music can be traced to Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track of The Beatles' 1966 studio album Revolver. Credited as a Lennon–McCartney song, it was written primarily by John Lennon. The track included looped tape effects. For the track Paul McCartney supplied a bag of ¼-inch audio tape loops he had made at home after listening to Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge. By disabling the erase head of a tape recorder and then spooling a continuous loop of tape through the machine while recording, the tape would constantly overdub itself, creating a saturation effect, a technique also used in musique concrète. The tape could also be induced to go faster and slower. McCartney encouraged the other Beatles to use the same effects and create their own loops.[55] After experimentation on their own, the various Beatles supplied a total of "30 or so" tape loops to George Martin, who selected 16 for use on the song.[56] Each loop was about six seconds long.[56] The tape loops were played on BTR3 tape machines located in various studios of the Abbey Road building[57] and controlled by EMI technicians in studio two at Abbey Road.[58][59] Each machine was monitored by one technician, who had to keep a pencil within each loop to maintain tension.[56] The four Beatles controlled the faders of the mixing console while Martin varied the stereo panning and Geoff Emerick watched the meters.[60][61] Eight of the tapes were used at one time, changed halfway through the song.[60] The tapes were made (like most of the other loops) by superimposition and acceleration (0:07).[62][63] According to Martin, the finished mix of the tape loops cannot be repeated because of the complex and random way in which they were laid over the music.[64]
Salient to this use of noise is Pet Sounds, the eleventh studio album by the American rock band The Beach Boys, released in 1966 on Capitol Records. In it Brian Wilson wove together elaborate layers of vocal harmonies, coupled with sound effects and unconventional instruments such as bicycle bells, buzzing organs, Electro-Theremin, dog whistles, trains, Coca-Cola cans and barking dogs, along with the more usual keyboards and guitars.[65][66][67]
Most notable in this vein is Revolution 9, a track produced in 1968 by The Beatles for The White Album. It made sole use of sound collage, credited to Lennon–McCartney, but created primarily by John Lennon with assistance from George Harrison and Yoko Ono. Lennon said he was trying to paint a picture of a revolution using sound.[68] The composition is similar to the avant-garde Fluxus style of Ono as well as the musique concrète works of composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.
Lennon followed up this experiment with even more explicit noise music recordings, the first being Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins, an avant-garde recording by John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1968 consisting of repeating tape loops as Lennon plays different instruments such as piano, organ, and drums with sound effects (including reverb, delay and distortion), changes tapes and plays other recordings, and converses with Ono, who vocalises ad-lib in response to the sounds.[69] They followed this recording with another noise recording in 1969 entitled Unfinished Music No.2: Life with the Lions. Beatles member George Harrison also made released a noise/musique concrète recording in 1969, entitled Electronic Sound. Previously, Freak Out!, the debut album by The Mothers of Invention (released June 27, 1966 on Verve Records) had also made use of avant-garde sound collages - as did their later 1970 Weasels Ripped My Flesh title track - particularly the 1966 track The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet. This track is said to resemble Carnival of Light,[70] an unreleased experimental piece by The Beatles, recorded on 5 January 1967 after the vocal overdubbing sessions for the song Penny Lane. Carnival of Light was created for The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave, an art event held at the Roundhouse Theatre on 28 January and 4 February 1967.[71] Carnival of Light has not yet appeared on any official Beatles release.
Lou Reed's double LP, Metal Machine Music (1975) is an early, well-known example of commercial studio noise music[72] that the music critic Lester Bangs has called the "greatest album ever made in the history of the human eardrum".[73] It has also been cited as one of the "worst albums of all time".[74] Reed was well aware of the drone music of La Monte Young.[75][76] Young's Theater of Eternal Music was a minimal music noise group in the mid-60s with John Cale, Marian Zazeela, Henry Flynt, Angus Maclise, Tony Conrad, and others.[77] The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification had influenced Cale's subsequent contribution to The Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback.[78] Cale and Conrad have released noise music recordings they made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with Young).[79]
The aptly named noise rock fuses rock to noise, usually with recognizable "rock" instrumentation, but with greater use of distortion and electronic effects, varying degrees of atonality, improvisation, and white noise. One notable band of this genre is Sonic Youth who took inspiration from the No Wave composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham (himself a student of LaMonte Young).[80] Marc Masters, in his book on the No Wave, points out that aggressively innovative early dark noise groups like Mars and DNA drew on punk rock, avant-garde minimalism and performance art.[81] Important in this noise trajectory are the nine nights of noise music called Noise Fest that was organized by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in the NYC art space White Columns in June 1981[82][83] followed by the Speed Trials noise rock series organized by Live Skull members in May 1983.
Since the early 1980s,[84] Japan has produced a significant output of characteristically harsh bands, sometimes referred to under the portmanteau Japanoise, with perhaps the most well known being Merzbow (pseudonym for the Japanese noise artist Masami Akita who himself was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters's Merz art project of psychological collage).[85][86] Another notable example is the electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose member Ryuichi Sakamoto stated that their "concept when making music is that there is no border between music and noise."[87] Other key Japanese noise artists include Hijokaidan, Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants, KK Null, Yamazaki Maso’s Masonna, Solmania, K2, The Gerogerigegege and Hanatarash.[86][88] Nick Cain of The Wire identifies the "primacy of Japanese Noise artists like Merzbow, Hijokaidan and Incapacitants" as one the of the major developments in noise music since 1990.[89]
Following the wake of industrial noise, noise rock, no wave, and harsh noise, there has been a flood of noise musicians whose ambient, microsound, or glitch-based work is often subtler to the ear.[90] Kim Cascone refers to this development as a postdigital movement and describes it as an "aesthetic of failure."[91] Some of this music has seen wide distribution thanks to peer-to-peer file sharing services and netlabels offering free releases. Goodman characterizes this widespread outpouring of free noise based media as a "noise virus."[92]
Post-industrial noise artists from the late 20th and early 21st centuries include Nicolas Collins, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, Psyclones, The Haters, Boyd Rice, Pole, Stephen Vitiello, If, Bwana, PBK, Howard Stelzer, Chris Douglas a.k.a. O.S.T., Aube, Andrew Deutsch, Leif Elggren, Robin Rimbaud, Alva Noto, Oval, Boards of Canada, DJ Spooky, Florian Hecker, Farmers Manual, Negativland, Thanasis Kaproulias, Fennesz, Pan Sonic, Yasunao Tone, Pavel Zhagun, Arcane Device, Francisco López, Kommissar Hjuler und Frau, Bryan Lewis Saunders, and others.[49][93] In 2009 noise was said to be trending heavily with "lo-fi" acts such as Wavves and Times New Viking.[94]
Richie Hawtin, Jan Jelinek, Ricardo Villalobos, Decomposed Subsonic, Trentemøller, and other Minimal techno and Microhouse DJs have been using noise elements such as buzz, hum, and clicks as sonic flavor since the early 1990s.[95]
Various definitions of noise music shift over time. Ben Watson, in his article Noise as Permanent Revolution, points out that Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (1825) “sounded like noise” to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven’s publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately.[96]
In defining noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites the work of noted cultural critics Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille and Theodor Adorno and through their work traces the history of "noise". He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted," "lacking skill, not being appropriate" and "a threatening emptiness". He traces these trends starting with 18th century concert hall music. Hegarty contends that it is John Cage's composition 4'33", in which an audience sits through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), that represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, "noise music", as with 4'33", is that music made up of incidental sounds that represent perfectly the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played musical notes) and undesirable "noise" that make up all noise music from Erik Satie to NON to Glenn Branca.
Writer Douglas Kahn, in his work Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999), discusses the use of noise as a medium and explores the ideas of Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.
In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali explores the relationship between noise music and the future of society. He indicates that noise in music is a predictor of social change and demonstrates how noise acts as the subconscious of society – validating and testing new social and political realities.[97]
Like much of modern and contemporary art, noise music takes characteristics of the perceived negative traits of noise mentioned below and uses them in aesthetic and imaginative ways.[98]
In music, dissonance is the quality of sounds which seems "unstable", and has an aural "need" to "resolve" to a "stable" consonance.[99] Despite the fact that words like "unpleasant" and "grating" are often used to describe the sound of harsh dissonance, in fact all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music which is perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance.[99]
In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution.[100] In electronics noise can refer to the electronic signal corresponding to acoustic noise (in an audio system) or the electronic signal corresponding to the (visual) noise commonly seen as 'snow' on a degraded television or video image.[101] In signal processing or computing it can be considered data without meaning; that is, data that is not being used to transmit a signal, but is simply produced as an unwanted by-product of other activities. Noise can block, distort, or change the meaning of a message in both human and electronic communication. White noise is a random signal (or process) with a flat power spectral density.[102] In other words, the signal contains equal power within a fixed bandwidth at any center frequency. White noise is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies.[103]
In much the same way the early modernists were inspired by naïve art, some contemporary digital art noise musicians are excited by the archaic audio technologies such as wire-recorders, the 8-track cartridge, and vinyl records.[104] Many artists not only build their own noise-generating devices, but even their own specialized recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++ software used in creating the viral symphOny by Joseph Nechvatal).[105][106]
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