Noise music is a genre of music often presented negatively against the definition of music itself. Noise theorists, on the other hand, are keen to disabuse us of this definition. That is, of noise merely as an “unspecified form of ignorance”.1placeholder In Section I, I begin by drawing on Robert Pasnau and Jérôme Dokic to understand what sound is. In Section II, I consider historical accounts of the philosophical treatment of sound. I bring together Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory and Theodore Adorno’s theory of music help us define music as artistic sound. In Section III, I contextualize various understandings of the noise genre, from its place in avant-garde artistic movements more generally to its role in informatics.
I. What is Sound?
Robert Pasnau makes claims about what kinds of entities that sounds are. What is the true object of hearing? Strictly speaking, Pasnau believes that objects have sounds. He juxtaposes his view with the various standard views of sound presented by science: 1) Sound as a quality, not of an object that makes the sound, but of the interaction within the surrounding medium. 2) Sound as the object of hearing, and of sense.2placeholder The first claim makes sound analogous to light, that is, it posits sound as a wave that passes through a medium. Pasnau argues that these two cannot both be simultaneously operative. He caveats the second view, to which sound belongs not to the medium but to the object that produces the sound. In so, he assumes that sounds are features of the external world rather than intrinsic features of our sensory experiences.
Pasnau holds that standard views of sound are incoherent. He wants to say that sounds do make some claim about the object from which they emanate. That is, they contain some positive information that coheres to our experience. To Pasnau, sound is not fundamentally distorted by cases such as echoes.3placeholder The idea that sound is systemically illusory betrays the phenomenological view that we should not let theories determine our descriptions of our lived experience, instead we should let experience determine our theories. This is the phenomenological ‘principle of principles’ – to let originary intuitions be the source of all knowledge and insight.
His challenge to the first view is that it makes most of our standard experiences of sound systematically illusory, what he terms the error theory of perception.4placeholder Such widespread deception seems, on his account, implausible. The metaphysics of an entity is often inextricably linked to the way in which the phenomena is measured, in this case sound is measured using decibels (dB). Decibels are a measurement of intensity, the relative vibrations of the object from which the sound emanates when compared to a standard. This standard has baked in assumptions; it is chosen from a normative ideal of what is considered comfortable listening for the average human ear.
Intensity is commonly thought of as the measure of loudness, yet the actual experience of loudness itself depends on the distance from the source object. We can seemingly offer a naturalistic explanation of volume: sounds seem more intense when one is closer to the origin of the sound because they are more intense.5placeholder But Pasnau rejects this explanation. If sound is analogous to light, we can imagine that the shade of a lamp doesn’t decrease the brightness of the bulb, but only our reception of it. Changing our distance from the source of sound does not change the intensity, but only its loudness. The standard conflation of loudness and intensity exacerbate these confusions. For Pasnau, intensity is an objective feature of sound, and loudness a subjective feature of experience.
Moreover, our use of intensity as a measurement of sounds is arbitrary. Pasnau seems to want a definition of sound that can answer, “how much noise does it make?” without relying on relative measurements.6placeholder Consider a second example, that of the sound vacuum. This would allow a vibrating object without a receptive medium. Because Pasnau wants to emphasize the object from which the sound emanates, he will assert that objects retain their sounds even in a vacuum, we are just not able to experience them. Similar to sound, colors still exist and adhere to their objects even in the dark. It is not as though when we fall asleep in the darkness of night, the paintings on our walls cease to have their colors.7placeholder The inverted vacuum is another example, which imagines a medium without an attendant object, that is, pure compression waves in space, but not emanating from any particular location or object. In Pasnau’s view, this cannot exist.8placeholder
Turning to Dokic’s “Two Ontologies of Sound”, he wants to distinguish between understanding sound as an object or as an event. Under the Unrepeatable Events (UE) conception, sounds are not repeatable. Dokic offers us a more complex picture of sound than Pasnau does. UEs are more strictly temporal events with a demarcated beginning and end. These events produce new sound particulars each time, and distinct events that sound the same are described as two events having similar characteristics.9placeholder The second conception is that of a Repeatable Object (RO). ROs are autonomous material objects not wholly dependent on their material causes. As such, sounds can repeat themselves. RO sounds are also conceived as particulars, not universals. RO sounds are not ordinary space-occupying objects; that is, they lack spatial parts.
Consequently, ROs identity conditions mean that sounds can exist as wholes across disparate spatio-temporal moments. Because they are not causally wedded to, and somewhat “autonomous” from, their sources in a way that UEs are not. ROs can have two distinct events in space and time while still being considered existentially as “the same sound” if the source is the same. For the UE conception, the alarm clock that signals a person to wake is a fresh sound particular each morning, and has no causal relation to the sounds of yesterday and tomorrow. The RO conception still understands that the sound must be a particular, but draws a continuity between each instantiation of the alarm due to the fact that it derives from the same source. The RO conception seems to be closer to our naive phenomenological experience of sounds, and better captures experiences such as music.10placeholder
Returning to the case of the alarm clock, we could follow Dokic to imagine four different explanations for the repeating sound; (i) One hears two distinct sounds of (approximately) the same auditory type. (ii) As in (i), but the sound is heard as a sound image, i.e. a representation (possibly a caricature) of the original sound. (iii) One hears only one sound. The second auditory experience is a hallucination (no sound is perceived). (iv) One hears the same sound twice. The first and fourth explanation seems to be aligned with what proponents of UEs would choose.11placeholder The second can be illustrated by a recording of a bell being played from my phone each morning as an alarm clock. In this case, there is a source connecting them which is deemed as the “original” bell. The third seems unlikely as a meaningful explanation and doesn’t align with either the RO or UE conception. Overall, Dokic believes the UE conception to have greater explanatory utility than RO.
II. Music As Artistic Sound
Across his work, Theodore Adorno provides us with various definitions of music. Ontologically, he understands music as “radical endangerment […] there is something enigmatic that is apparent in all music.”12placeholder Metaphysically, he describes it as a “temporal succession of articulated sounds”, emphasizing its similarity to language.13placeholder As with all art, Adorno wants to maintain music’s ability to be incomprehensible and resists absorption into a logical Sachlichkeit or an unmediated subjective framework.14placeholder A brief detour into Kant’s foundational aesthetic theory would aid us in engaging with Adorno’s theory of music. When we apprehend a work of art, we can engage in two types of aesthetic judgments about it: the beautiful and the sublime.
The dynamically sublime is an aesthetic judgement which inspires exciting fear.15placeholder This form of sublimity puts us in relation to nature, and in such, is structurally in tension with itself. Paradigmatic situations of the sublime include the overwhelming immensity of nature, such as cliffsides (“threatening rocks”), the “boundless ocean in a state of tumult” at some secure remove from their danger (i.e. indirectly experienced). This tension takes place in our apprehension of nature, between reason and the imagination. Reason tries to make sense of the immensity before it, and fails to accord the sensible to the ideal. These faculties produce fear as well as joy. These are presentations within the faculty of reason, as opposed to the beautiful, which is a presentation of the concept of the understanding.16placeholder This relation to the infinite is what separates it from other forms of the sublime, as well as relates it to reason. Reason is the faculty which generates those ideas not unifiable through empirical (sensuous) experience, such as God and totality.
Pasnau argues that our thinking of sound should parallel our thinking about colour, not odour. The distinction lies in what information we are able to yield from the sense experience: for sight and hearing, we can yield locational information (it is a locational modality). Taste or touch or smell do not yield such information. For Kant, the green color of the meadows belongs to an objective sensation, as a perception of an object of sense; while pleasantness belongs to subjective sensation by which no object is represented. In this way, pleasantness is beyond sense, much like God or totality. Instead, the feeling has an attendant object of satisfaction, or gratification, by which aesthetic judgements of this kind can only be measured subjectively.17placeholder Gratification implies that we always have a sense of some preconceived purpose when making aesthetic judgements, whether that purpose is utility or a good-in-itself. For Kant all sense experiences, whether color or music, are organized within these distinctions.
The beautiful has a form with boundaries, while the sublime is formless. Kant believed it was the form of beauty, which would arrive through the very replicability and definitiveness of the genre form, that would allow it to become intelligible to us. The infamously clunky translation of Kant’s Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck as “purposiveness-without-purpose” can be better translated as intentionality without teleology or end. The judgement of taste demonstrates a disinterestedness in the “existence of the things” – in metaphysical questions themselves.18placeholder Or as Adorno writes, “Music aims at an intention-less language.”19placeholder A neo-Kantian subjectivization is present in Husserl’s appropriation of intentionality within his own thought. For him, all mental acts are intentional, meaning they have a content that makes them about something – the intentional object. To be without such an end implies a certain remove from temporality, or endlessness. Yet, the form-content distinction which appears in Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason uses time as the “third thing” which mediates our concepts and intuition. For Kant, the content of our intuition as representation is mediated with the conceptual form of our understanding via the categories. This schema is relevant because it applies to our sense of ownership – to what degree my sense intuitions are attributable to myself – over our perceptions, and this seems to be at the heart of Pasnau’s discomfort with the error theory of perception.
How objects become logically subordinated to concepts in our judgement is the story of the transcendental deduction of apperception. Judgements of taste, that is aesthetical judgements, are singular judgements. This rose is beautiful. We cannot then say “roses in general are beautiful” because aesthetic judgements do not follow the rules of inductive logic. No one person can make another recognize its beauty.20placeholder If music is understood as artistic sound, then Kant’s claims align with the idea that music is an unrepeatable event rather than an object.
The autonomous artwork, across the history of aesthetics, is understood as a prescriptive ideal, meant to reveal “authentically lived time.” 21placeholder Adorno’s critique of modern music amounts to the charge of inauthenticity. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno addresses the autonomy of art in dialogue with Marxists. For them, bourgeois art conceived of itself as autonomous in that it did not exist in relation to its public utility.22placeholder It was able to exist as the unrestrained self-referentiality of art pour l’art, art for art’s sake. Instead, Marxists wanted art to be committed to a political ideal. Adorno rejects both the reduction of art to agitprop or art pour l’art, arguing not for the autonomy of art in any metaphysical sense, but in its ability to act autonomously from the needs of society, and only as such can it develop an aesthetic quality particular to it.
If we recall the RO conception of sound, the emphasis remains on its ability to be autonomous from its first causes. Under this conception, in which sounds maintain their autonomy, we can perform a Husserlian bracketing that Pierre Shaeffer called “reduced listening.” This involves listening to sound “for its own sake, by removing its real or supposed source and the meaning it may convey.”23placeholder In reduced listening, sounds are “secondary objects”, response-dependent entities informed by the phenomenological experience of sounds. When hearing a melody, we do not experience one note at a time. Instead, we experience what Husserl terms retending and protending. Consciousness mediates our experience through the simultaneous impression of the now, the retention of the previous moment (retention) and the anticipation of the future moment (protending). Consider Husserl’s description of melody from On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time:
“When a melody sounds, for example, the individual tone does not utterly disappear with the cessation of the stimulus or of the neural movement it excites. When the new tone is sounding, the preceding tone has not disappeared without leaving a trace. If it had, we would be quite incapable of noticing the relations among the successive tones; in each moment we would have a tone, or perhaps an empty pause in the interval between the sounding of two notes, but never the representation of a melody. On the other hand, the abiding of the tone-representations in consciousness does not settle the matter. If they were to remain unmodified, then instead of a melody we would have a chord of simultaneous tones, or rather a disharmonious tangle of sound, as if we had struck simultaneously all the notes that had previously sounded.”24placeholder
The issue imposed by melody is that of succession. In order to perceive a melody at all, we must have a relation between notes. The suspension in the present required to identify notes as autonomous parts of the melody runs counter to a mereological essentialism that would require them to be always thought together. In the present moment after the melody is finished, the transcending consciousness is able to experience it through the act of protending-original impression-protending, all three required as one whole.25placeholder The transcending consciousness is responsible for conferring succession to our modes of listening.
Melody probes the indeterminate boundaries which can exist between metaphysics and phenomenology, and similar issues arise in Adorno’s writing on Beethoven. Here he identifies a compositional tension between measure and rhythm. Rhythm can be understood in this context as musical-time. Beethoven was composing around the invention of the metronome and was responsible for rationalizing the chronometric in music. Chromaticism is a musical form that deviates from the Western standard scale and utilizes all notes available in the sonic spectrum. In 1953, the musicologist Curt Sachs probed the question “What is rhythm?” and found that there was no generally accepted definition.26placeholder Beethoven’s use of metronomic tempo marks his attempt to define rhythm. Other types of musical listening are presented in Adorno’s “On The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”. A certain style of listening is attributed to commodity music – paradigmatically embodied in the leitmotiv. The leitmotiv and its inception as advertisement – its purpose is intended to be remembered – allows an unreflective nominalism which is unbecoming for music as a socially-determined art form.27placeholder For Adorno, the reception of music is just as salient as its production, and the conditions of modernity risk the disintegration of its semiotic value.
In the naive view of a performance, we hear the music as it actually occurs in front of us. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the “inner ear” is one that reconstructs the sound, in which we raise the music to ideality in order to apprehend it. In identifying music, we discover its “autonomous time.”28placeholder While this may reflect our experiences of music, many philosophers would be critical of such a high degree of subjectivization. The implication here is that there is no direct experience of music. But as Dokic contends, this doesn’t motivate an ontology of sounds as independent objects, “The shift from reduced listening to [ecological audition] is a shift of attention rather than any ontological conversion.”29placeholder The metaphysical question that remains is whether sounds can be considered autonomous from the material objects that produce them. Husserl echoed the view of Democritus, who also conceived of objects of the senses as existing “by convention rather than in reality”.30placeholder Similarly, Galileo believed that sounds ‘have no real existence save in us’. In this sense, they insist on avoiding the metaphysical questions of sound altogether. It’s precisely this bracketing that noise theorists will reject.
III. Noise As A Genre Of Music
Noise is often conceptualized as a statistical model of understanding, and this is tied to its meaning as a genre of music. Claude Shannon was among the first to develop the idea of noise as information entropy. Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer publishing in the 1940s, described as the “father of the information age.’ If we understand noise as spurious information, Cecile Malaspina’s claim in An Epistemology of Noise comes to the fore. She claims that within a scientific understanding of noise there are contradictory definitions. As the field was emerging, noise was described within mathematical and cybernetic conceptualizations as the opposite of information. Curiously, information can be defined in two diametrically opposed ways: “information entropy” and the “negation of entropy”. Moreover, information entropy is described as a positive “measure of one’s freedom of choice.” Freedom of choice is contrasted by complete redundancy, that is, if a bit of information is completely predictable it can be said to contain no new information. This also means that more information correlates to more uncertainty.31placeholder The negation of entropy, or as the physicist Leon Brillouin puts it, negentropy, is by contrast the idea that information reduces the available freedom of choice and is thereby a measure of its degree of organization.
Developed out of the same zeitgeist that Shannon was publishing his theoretical frameworks, Pierre Shaeffer was in France, developing an avant-garde compositional movement and the most notable precursor to the genre of noise — musique concrète. This genre is identified for using “sound collage”, stitching together found noises that include anything from human voice, to birdsong and clocks. Its theoretical foundation was acousmatic listening, a derivation of what the Greek philosopher Pythagoras would submit his pupils to.32placeholder Acousmatic sound recalls the Husserlian epoche, in that we bracket out extraneous hermeneutics and attempt to experience sound without preconceived bias of form. What might differentiate the purpose of musique concrète from other conceptions of noise music is that it attempts to take non-musical instruments and raise it to the level and form of music, while other definitions of noise attempt to maintain a Brechtian verfremdungseffekt (alienating effect) that never allows the audience to attain full immersion. Today, noise encompasses the entire range of performance and improvisational art techniques, which are used to maintain this distance, as outlined by the artist Mattin
“…spiking space (organising the furniture in unconventional ways), introducing a ‘human sampler’ (sampling and repeating things that have been said in the space), glitching the voice (malfunctioning discourse), anti-social realism (collapsing the impotence of changing the social conventions in the general sense), ungrounding the situation (tearing apart these social conventions), going fragile (sharing deep insecurities and doubts, and daring together (doing the ungrounding collectively).”33placeholder
Barry Esson describes a noise concert as “engendering a sense of peril”, evoking the danger of the Kantian sublime.34placeholder Mattin’s own composition Social Dissonance attempts to present and reconstruct social relations through the sonic. His “score” retains no formal qualities of a musical score, instead providing various instructions for the audience participating in the performance. These include “Projecting Thoughts: Say outloud what you think other people are thinking” and “Articulate tension: try to articulate the tension of the room in language and measure it”.35placeholder Mattin was prompted by John Cage’s 4’33” (1952), a composition which instructs musicians not to play their instruments for the duration of the performance.
In 4’33”, contextual sound becomes foreground and the understanding of music as intentional sound is erased. In effect, Cage wants to disabuse us of the possibility of silence. Similar to musique concrète, Cage was attempting to evoke in the listener a kind of unmediated pure sound – mimicking the effect of an anechoic chamber – and in such, he desired to produce neutrality, that is, “sounds in themselves.”36placeholder To the contrary, Mattin refuses this neutrality as a false one, and strives with his own score to impose the question on the audience: how is the first-person perspective produced socially? The political resonances of Cage’s anarchic libertarianism and Mattin’s Marxism clearly inflect each of their works.
When the role of musicians, and artists writ large, was to raise themselves to a formal ideal which reflected a natural order codified and legitimated by God, the meaning of art was not measured in relation to freedom of expression. Leibniz, for example, believed music was “an expression of the universal harmony which God brought into the world.”37placeholder A similar conceit was present in what composers term crossrelations or false relations, a relation between notes popular in the late Elizabethan era that produce a sour dissonant noise. Crossrelations expressed diabolus en musica (Latin, the devil in music) and were to be avoided as heresy.38placeholder Shaeffer was inspired by an earlier precursor, the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who published the manifesto The Art of Noises in 1916. As a counter-cultural movement, futurists rejected the harmonic, taste, custom and embraced the triumph of technology, youth, daring, militarism, and madness. Thus emerged a conflation between this new freedom of expression and jingoist sentiments, leading some to credit futurism for contributing to the rise of Italian fascism.39placeholder
Noise can be best understood as serving the role that Kant believed appropriate to the dynamic sublime. Interventions from Shaeffer to Cage to Mattin attempt to maintain a formlessness which Kant attributed to the sublime. When considering that God is “present in the storm”, Kant contrasts the experience of religious sublimity, that is, one of “subjection, abasement, powerlessness” with the dynamically sublime. Kant finds this kind of fear excessive and inappropriate – unable to confer respect – and instead emphasizes a “calm contemplation” and “free judgement” for one to employ when apprehending the divine.40placeholder The sublime sets us up to properly esteem or respect God. Similarly, the noise genre can be harnessed to serve two functions. First, to set up the proper conditions for a new form of esteem. Second, following Mattin, it can serve as a means of social critique.
The measurement of noise as freedom of choice represents an interlocking symbolic shift in our mode of thinking that invokes the conditions for noise to become intelligible as art or music. Adorno’s notion of autonomy in art, the development and codification of “freedom of expression” as a virtue, and Malaspina’s freedom of choice conjure a critical awareness of power as a force necessary for our reception of art, and constitute the layers of hermeneutic agency we can preserve even in the most simple receptions of silence.
Malaspina, Cecile, An Epistemology of Noise, 74
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 309
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 312
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 315
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 319
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 320
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 321
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 323
Dokic, Jérôme, “Two Ontologies of Sound” The Monist, vol. 90, no. 3, 391
Dokic, Jérôme, “Two Ontologies of Sound” The Monist, vol. 90, no. 3, 392
Dokic, Jérôme, “Two Ontologies of Sound” The Monist, vol. 90, no. 3, 394
Theodore Adorno, Adorno: Essays on Music, “The Relationship of Philosophy and Music”, 137
Wesley Phillips, Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger, 16
Adorno, T. W., & Hullot-Kentor, R. (1997). Aesthetic Theory (G. Adorno & R. Tiedemann, Eds.). University of Minnesota Press, 118
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §28
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §23
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §3-4
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §2
Phillips, Wesley, Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger, 20
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §8
Phillips, Wesley, Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger, 93
Adorno, T. W., & Hullot-Kentor, R. (1997). Aesthetic Theory (G. Adorno & R. Tiedemann, Eds.). University of Minnesota Press, 225
Dokic, Jérôme, “Two Ontologies of Sound” The Monist, vol. 90, no. 3, 393
Husserl, Edmond, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Springer Dordrecht (1999), 11
Husserl, Edmond, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Springer Dordrecht (1999), 29
Phillips, Wesley, Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger, 94
Phillips, Wesley, Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger, 54
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, The Relevance Of The Beautiful, 44
Dokic, Jérôme, “Two Ontologies of Sound” (2007), The Monist, vol. 90, no. 3, 394
Pasnau, Robert, “What Is Sound”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 49 Issue 196, July 1999, 310
Malaspina, Cecile, An Epistemology of Noise, 16
Beard, D. (2019). Acousomatic Listening and A Critical Awareness of Place. International Journal of Listening, 33(3), 129–132.
Mattin, Social Dissonance, 164
Mattin, Social Dissonance, 165
Mattin, Social Dissonance, 211
Mattin, Social Dissonance, 19-20
Phillips, Wesley, Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger, 19
The Harvard Dictionary of Music: Fourth Edition (2003), ed. Don Michael Randel, 239
Dashan, Jad, “How Italian Futurism Influenced the Rise of Fascism”.
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, §28