Noise music

Noise music (also known as noise) is a subgenre of experimental music that is characterised by its use of unwanted noise as a primary musical element. The genre has roots in early 20th century avant-garde music, but later drew influence from industrial music. It is characterized by a rejection of conventional music theory and traditional song structures, often featuring little or no melody, rhythm, or harmony. This type of music tends to challenge the conventional distinction between musical and non-musical sound.

"Noise as music" originated as an avant-garde music style in the 1910s through the work of Luigi Russolo an Italian Futurist, who published the manifesto The Art of Noises in 1913. Elements of noise music were later explored by artists in the Dada and Fluxus movements, as well as through electroacoustic music, modern classical and musique concrète. Composers such as John Cage, Edgard Varèse and James Tenney would explicitly use the term "noise" to describe some of their experimental practices. During the 1960s and 1970s, compositions such as Robert Ashley's "The Wolfman" (1964) and Pauline Oliveros "A Little Noise In The System" (1967) were among the earliest examples of contemporary noise music. While works by non-academic artists such as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music were influential for later noise artists.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the emergence of industrial music and commercial synthesizers, encouraged non-musicians to experiment with strictly noise-oriented styles, leading to genres such as power electronics, coined by English noise act Whitehouse, as well as post-industrial styles like dark ambient, death industrial and power noise. In Japan, the Japanoise scene which stemmed out of the Kansai no wave movement, produced several influential noise acts such as Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hanatarash, C.C.C.C. and Incapacitants, who, together with American and European noise artists the Haters, Daniel Menche, Vomir and Richard Ramirez, contributed to the emergence of harsh noise and harsh noise wall into the 1990s and 2000s.

According to Danish noise and music theorist Torben Sangild, no single definition of noise in music is possible. Sangild instead provides three basic definitions of noise: a musical acoustics definition, a second communicative definition based on distortion or disturbance of a communicative signal, and a third definition based in subjectivity (what is noise to one person can be meaningful to another; what was considered unpleasant sound yesterday is not today).

In common use, the word noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. 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. 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. 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.

According to Murray Schafer there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, and a disturbance in any signaling system (such as static on a telephone). Definitions regarding what is considered noise, relative to music, have changed 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.

In the 1920s, the French composer Edgard Varèse was influenced by the ideals of New York Dada associated via Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia's magazine 391. He conceived of the elements of his music in terms of sound-masses. This resulted in his compositions Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Intégrales of the early 1920s. Varèse declared that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question: "What is music but organized noises?"

In attempting to define 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 John Cage's composition 4'33", in which an audience and performer sit through four and a half minutes of "silence" (Cage 1973), 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.