Fuck This Noise: A Defense of Noise Music
“Turn it down; it’s just noise pollution!”
I started learning classical piano at a very young age and didn’t listen to much else past the Romantic period. My parents were never music fanatics; they had bought a Bang & Olufsen hi-fi system, but it broke down within one month, and they never bothered to replace it. So it sat in the same place in our living rooms, an ornament cluttering the increasingly small apartments that we kept moving to.
In the brief moments where we drove from the Kowloon peninsula to Lantau Island or Hong Kong Island, my mother would pop in a CD or tune into a radio station. There, we would listen to Cantonese and Mandarin pop singers like Eason Chan, Joey Yung, and Leehom Wang. But my mother’s favorite musician was Beyond, a rock band whose music defined Hong Kong and Asia in the ’80s and ’90s. The lead singer, Wong Ka Kui, was touted as the face of a new generation. Unfortunately, his career was cut short when he died during a stage accident in Japan in 1993. To this day, Beyond’s music is immortalized in protests, their lyrics a cry for freedom and revolution.
I was drawn to the loudness of their music. The distorted guitar solos with a classic 4/4 kick-snare pattern was a welcome respite from the synth-heavy sound of 2000s Hong Kong pop and Chopin’s hypnotic but sleep-inducing nocturnes (which I guess, given their names, is to be expected).
From there, I began exploring Western rock music. The first non-Chinese song I ever heard (Christian hymns notwithstanding) was “The Pretender” by Foo Fighters. Between frontman Dave Grohl’s strained vocals and drummer Taylor Hawkins’ brutal bashing of the snare, there was something magical about how noisy the song was.
As my music taste developed, my toes dipped into heavier territory. It started with the rock of Green Day and Three Days Grace, then into the metal likes of Slipknot and System of a Down, before landing in various subgenres of metal by Dream Theater, Nightwish, and Trivium.
When I began experimenting with loud music, I would listen using the cheap store-bought earphones that I plugged diligently into my black/orange Sony Ericsson W995. I would sit in a corner and pluck the imaginary strings of a guitar I did not know how to play.
At that time, my father had just had his stroke, and the world was dark and lonely for a 13-year-old who felt powerless. But when those earphones were in, I was playing lead guitar next to Matthew Bellamy. Though the audio quality could only be described as tinny, the energy was unwavering.
The more comfortable I grew with the music, the louder I wanted it to be, so I graduated to a little speaker set I had in my bedroom. By then, we had moved to an apartment that was much smaller than the one I had grown up in. The speaker set in my bedroom might as well have been placed in the middle of the living room.
My mother did not appreciate metal’s harshness. In my father’s absence from the office, she had to work until late at night, and the City of Evil album wasn’t necessarily relaxing music. So as I welcomed her home with Bat Country blaring from the speakers, she would yell.
“Turn it off; it’s just noise pollution!”
”Noise pollution” as a descriptor stands out to me because I continue to be a vehement supporter of metal music. I believe its musical, melodic, and technical qualities require a higher point of entry as an audience member, in the same way that we think of jazz as a more sophisticated musical form.
I’m additionally interested because if metal is considered “noise,” then what of noise music?
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Before we begin, a quick experiment. Here is a set of seven audio files of the same music piece with distortion and noise gradually added to each track.
At which point would you consider it noise and not music?
Imagine plucking a string on a guitar. As your finger connects with the string, it builds tension, which is then released when your finger leaves the string. Since the string is anchored on both ends, it begins to vibrate back and forth, and the vibrations push the air at a certain rate. That is frequency, which determines how high or low any given sound is. The faster the vibration, the higher the sound. Slower, lower.
Image 1: The frequency graph of a triangular wave, one of the more basic periodic waveforms. The x-axis denotes the frequency and the y-axis denotes the loudness of the sound.
Now imagine plucking all the frets and all the strings on a guitar at exactly the same time. You would get quite the warbled tone that you would probably describe as “noise” and “what the fuck was that?”.
In simple technicality, noise happens when all frequencies vibrate at exactly the same amplitude. In description, it’s the snowy fuzz sound you hear when you tune into a disconnected TV or radio channel.
Image 2: The frequency graph of white noise
How we appreciate music is shaped very much by our cultural understanding of music. There are particular sounds that may sound “off” to people from a Western cultural tradition that may sound perfectly fine to people who grew up exposed to the music of the Arabic maqāmāt. We may listen to “On The Floor” by Ice JJ Fish and have wildly different opinions about the quality of his music, but we would logically still categorize his songs as music. That’s because there is a social consensus of what music is, due to the presence of a recognizable tone, as seen in Image 1.
Noise music is a genre of music that challenges that consensus. The term “noise music” refers primarily to the societal definition of noise, although technical applications do involve atonal frequencies of musical noise and its variants. Through the use of heavily distorted audio signals and techniques that incorporate non-musical instruments like power tools, field recordings, and electronic feedback, noise musicians investigate the boundaries of what music is.
One such musician is Merzbow (メルツバウ in Japanese), a noise project founded by Masami Akita in 1979. Merzbow began when Akita sought to redefine music: “I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill.' I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative.”
Here’s a quick sample of Merzbow’s music; I would suggest lowering the volume.
At this point, dear reader, I can feel your apprehension. Maybe you didn’t see the warning and had a proper jump scare. Maybe you’re thinking, “Fuck this noise,” and intend the pun.
Well, I applaud the punnery (albeit half-heartedly because you stole it from my title). But I also urge you to stick around, because by the end of this article, I hope to convince you to open your heart to noise music.
Am I asking you to buy the next noise music album or attend occasionally violent concerts (which make mosh pits look like libraries)? No—unless you wish to. But I am hoping that you will listen to noise music occasionally.
So let’s press on with a hypothetical.
It’s a lazy weekend morning. You’re on the street listening to the cars go by. Nearby, there’s a store with those electronic bells that ring when the door opens. Maybe there’s a neighbor’s dog, barking occasionally, and some birds chirping. Depending on where you live, feel free to add more imaginary animals.
A dump truck rolls up right next to a huge trashcan, then backs up. You hear it beep.
Does it annoy you? Is it noise?
If your answer is no, it’s not noise, then you can skip right ahead.
If your answer is yes, then I ask: why is it noise? Is it the unwelcoming nature of the sound? In that case, would you consider the cars or the store bell noise? Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s not naturally produced. So are the barks and the other animals’ sounds noise?
Or maybe it’s too loud. All right, so if you stood from a distance and heard the beeping, would you consider it noise?
Maybe it’s too high-pitched. Okay, so if the dump trucks were playing this audio instead, would it still be noise?
Maybe you still think it’s noise. What if we placed it in a slightly different context?
Is this music now?
Sure, maybe it’s music because we added musical context. Let us, for the sake of argument, make a temporary definition: that noise is any sound that has no musical context. Okay then, now let’s listen to a famous experimental music track.
Is it music? Okay, it’s not music; it’s just silence. Well, is silence noise?
In practice, musicians have included non-musical instruments in their compositions for centuries. From Tchaikovsky’s cannons in his “1812 Overture” or Finneas’ texting and lighter sampling in his production for Billie Eilish, to Flume’s sampling of a lazerbeam in “How To Build A Relationship” (featuring JPEGMAFIA, an artist that is at the forefront of glitch-hop) to Poppy’s use of an alarm at the beginning of “Concrete,” the marriage of music and noise has stuck around.
But maybe you’re thinking, the music is still the bulk of it, therefore we can consider it music.
Valid, so let’s flip it around. What are you listening to below?
Chances are you’ll have recognized it as Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” But the sounds were generated with pure noise, so how did you recognize it?
“We Will Rock You” has arguably one of the most recognizable rhythms in all of music history. Rhythm is an integral part of music, and so it is by no mistake that you connected the dots.
All right, so noise, if placed in the context of rhythm, can be considered music. In that case, let’s revisit the dump truck.
Some of you said it was noise. But there’s a rhythm. Is it music now that we focus on the rhythm? Has it always been music?
Let’s go back to the previous experiment. At which point would you consider it music?
The relationship between music and noise continues to be debated and researched, and the specific artistic context of music, noise, and silence further complicates the discourse. For example, music was used in early cinema to cover up the noise from both the audience and the projectors, and notions of silence in film have been further divided into baseline silence (i.e., soundscape), which takes into consideration the narrative of the diegesis and absolute silence (i.e., absence of audio).
The truth is, after all that writing, you could still hear that dump truck and categorize it as noise. Or you could’ve heard it from the beginning and said it sounded like a sound effect from an 808 drum pad.
But what intrigues me is that it could conceivably actually be a sound effect. And that brings me to the point of this essay.
A genre specifies the particular traditions of a type of music but also the technical approach to music. Noise music is no different. Given the mercurial definition of noise, the approaches that spring forth range from La Monte Young’s raga-like vocalizations and James Tenney’s ambient computer synthesized sound to the industrial found sounds of Nocturnal Emissions. Even in this current Postscript issue, we have a varying degree of interpretation of what noise music is, from LOVTRE’s "Desert" to Godefroy Dronsart’s work.
In the age of streaming, where music is recommended through algorithms, we are encouraged to push our musical boundaries in exploring new artists, genres, and languages. What noise music does is push our boundaries in appreciating the complexity of music and noise. Noise may have been the antithesis of music, but now it is just another instrument.
In fact, you may already have more exposure to noise music tendencies than you think. If you put on white noise machines, or the ambient sounds of a café while you work, or do Zoom accountability sessions (I am literally writing this to my friend’s sounds of her office), then you’re already well on your way to listening to noise music. Our listening habits are opening up to experience audio outside music; noise music just allows for a more intentional framing of what exists beyond.
So turn it up, it’s noise pollution.
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Further recommendations of noise musicians/albums to look into, ranging from ambient to harsh:
References:
Pouncey, Edwin (August 2000). "Consumed by Noise". The Wire. No. 198.
Brown, Royal S. (1994) Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music.
Sonnenschein, David (2001). Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema.
Garreth Chan is the multimedia editor of Postscript Magazine. He is a transdisciplinary artist from Hong Kong, focusing on the intersection of sound, text, and video. He holds a BA in Music and Sociology from NYU Abu Dhabi.
Garreth worked at She Films as a film colorist and audio engineer before deciding to explore as a freelancer. His work in film and theater has premiered in Amman, New York, London, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and Budapest, among others.
He is most interested in notions of silence and the mundane.
Artwork by Rocco Fiumara
Having graduated from the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Rocco Fiumara now carries out graphic and editorial illustration activities, cultivating his passion for the free expression in art. His interests in architecture and painting; design and social styles; the border areas and contamination between the arts and society; and relationships between the artistic cultures of the world have grown over the past few years.
Fiumara’s artistic research is also constantly open on a technical level, passing from typically manual to digital work. In his compositions, the sense of movement prevails, intended as a metaphor for the becoming of reality.