In our most tranquil dreams, peace is almost always accompanied by quiet. Noise annoys. From the slightest rattle or infinitesimal buzz to window-wracking roars and earth-shaking rumbles, we block it, muffle it, or drown it out whenever possible. It is ubiquitous. Try as we might, cacophony is everywhere, and we’re the cause in most cases. Keizer points out that, besides sleeping (for some of us), reading is ironically the quietest thing we do. “Written words were meant to evoke heard speech,” he writes, “and were considered inadequate until they did so, like tea leaves before the addition of hot water.” Reading silently was subversive.
We often speak of noise referring to the opposite of information. In the canonical model of communication conceived in 1949 by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, noise is anything in the system that disrupts the signal or the message being sent.
If you’ve ever tried to talk on a cellphone in a parking garage, find a decent sounding radio station while driving through a fly-over state, or follow up on a trending topic on Twitter, then you know what this kind of noise looks like. Thanks to Shannon and Weaver and their followers, it’s remained a mainstay of communication theory ever since, privileging machines over humans. Well before it was a theoretical metonymy, noise was characterized as “destruction, distortion, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages.” More pointedly, in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali conceives noise as pain, power, error, murder, trauma, and youth—among other things—untempered by language. Noise is wild beyond words.
The two definitions of noise discussed above—one referring to unwanted sounds and the other to the opposite of information—are mixed and mangled in Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond, a book that rebelliously claims to have been written to be read aloud. Yet, he writes, “No mere artefacts of an outmoded oral culture, such oratorical, jurisprudence, pedagogical, managerial, and liturgical acts reflect how people live today, at heart, environed by talk shows, books on tape, televised preaching, cell phones, public address systems, elevator music, and traveling albums on CD, MP3, and iPod.” We live not immersed in noise, but saturated by it. As Aden Evens put it, “To hear is to hear difference,” and noise is indecipherable sameness. But, one person’s music is another’s noise—and vice versa, and age and nostalgia can eventually turn one into the other. In spite of its considerable heft (over 900 pages), Making Noise does not see noise as music’s opposite, nor does it set out for a history of sound, stating that “‘unwanted sound’ resonates across fields, subject everywhere and everywhen to debate, contest, reversal, repetition: to history.”
"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating." — John Cage
The digital file might be infinitely repeatable, but that doesn’t make it infinite. Chirps in the channel, the remainders of incomplete communiqué surround our signals like so much decimal dust, data exhaust. In Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, Peter Krapp finds these anomalies the sites of inspiration and innovation. My friend Dave Allen is fond of saying, “There’s nothing new in digital.” To that end, Krapp traces the etymology of the error in machine languages from analog anomalies in general, and the extremes of two records from 1975, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, up through our current binary blips and bleeps, clicks and clacks—including Christian Marclay‘s multiple noisy artistic forays and Cory Arcangel’s digital synesthesia. This book is about both forms of noise as well, paying due attention to the distortion of digital communication.
"Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same."
— Sam in Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet
Though considered the absence of not only noise but sound altogether, an entity defined by lack, silence is its own swollen signifier. We often find it awkward in social situations, public forums, on the radio. Anywhere we expect the sound of a voice, silence is suspect. “Uncomfortable silences,” Mia Wallace complains in Pulp Fiction, “Why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?” We fill every space with sound. But, as the sultan of silence, John Cage, taught us, “Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.”
"The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence."
— Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
Silence indicates unheard voices. Mladen Dolar writes In Jonathan Sterne's The Sound Studies Reader, “The absence of voices and sounds is hard to endure; complete silence is immediately uncanny, it is like death, while the voice is the first sign of life.” Orfied Laboratories’ Anechoic Chamber, built by Eckel Industries and pictured above, is a foam room within a room, built on i-beams and springs, surrounded by steel. The outer room is encased in foot-thick, concrete walls. There’s a running bet at the lab offering a case of beer to anyone who can stay in it with the lights off for over 45 minutes. In a rather psychological example of what Douglas Kahn calls the “impossible inaudible,” no one’s been able to stay inside for more than half an hour. Its death-like silence makes its Guinness Book of World Records award as “The Quietest Place on Earth” seem sinister.
In her investigation of silence in fiction, Alix Ohlin notes, “Silence, created through ellipsis, white space, and repetition, is another form of erasure; it tells the reader of a pain that is too great to bear, yet must be borne.” just as Susan Sontag writes, “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.” The complaint is often hidden until heard. Breaking the silence is the first step to its resolution. Tara Rodgers’ essay in Sterne’s collection, “Toward a Feminist Historiography of Electronic Music,” also equates silence to a unspoken grievance, quoting poet Adrienne Rich: “The impulse to create begins–often terribly and fearfully–in a tunnel of silence… The first question we might ask a poem is, What kind of voice is breaking the silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?” Similarly, in “The Audio-Visual iPod,” Michael Bull equates it with isolation. Silence makes an uneasy companion.
"Air has so much to say for itself. Sound is just bugged air."
— McKenzie Wark, Dispositions
Bugging the air and bugging the airwaves, sound surrounds us. In his essay, “The Auditory Dimension,” Don Ihde phenomenologically relates hearing to seeing, the silent to the invisible. Rephrasing the age-old, tree-falling-in-the-forest question, he writes, “Does each event of the visible world offer the occasion, even ultimately from a sounding presence of mute objects, for silence to have a voice? Do all things, when fully experienced, also sound forth?”
Tackling the presence of no object, Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format investigates the evolution and epistemology of our prevailing sound format. Originally intended as a way to transfer sound over phone lines, the MP3 has become a case study in the digital reorganization of an industry. “Chances are,” Sterne writes, “if a recording takes a ride on the internet, it will travel in the form of an MP3 file.” Identifying the internet as its native environment, the “dot-mp3” file extension was born on July 14, 1995. “At some point in the late 90s,” says Karlheinz Brandenburg, whose Ph.D. work in 1982 landed him in the middle of the development of the format, “MP3 was technically the best system out there, and at the same time, it was accessible to everybody.” These two aspects gave the MP3 an early foothold, it was patented in 1989, and now every device that plays digital audio files can play one. With the introduction of the first portable MP3-player in 1998, the record industry’s early-eighties nightmares were coming true, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) started its ongoing legal battle against the digital revolution. Once online file-sharing and the iPod came online around the turn of the millennium, the floodgates were open, and music was liberated not only from the dams of physical formats but also physical spaces. What once took rooms of equipment and stacks of physical media to enjoy is now in everyone’s pocket.
"There is a place between voice and presence where information flows." — Rumi
Sharing silence can be the ultimate sign of intimacy. The unspoken solace of a loved one close by manifests a complicit quiet. Mia Wallace continues, “That’s when you know you’ve found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence.”
Amen.
MORE ON THE SCIENCE OF SOUND:
If you’re interested in the joyous noise of hip-hop, cyberpunk, and Afrofuturism, a bunch of my friends and colleagues and I have put together a collection of essays called Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism. Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin, says,
“How does hip-hop fold, spindle, or mutilate time? In what ways does it treat technology as, merely, a foil? Are its notions of the future tensed…or are they tenseless? For Boogie Down Predictions, Roy Christopher's trenchant anthology, he's assembled a cluster of curious interlocutors. Here, in their hands, the culture has been intently examined, as though studying for microfractures in a fusion reactor. The result may not only be one of the most unique collections on hip-hop yet produced, but, even more, and of maximum value, a novel set of questions.”
[Cover Art by Savage Pencil.]
Boogie Down Predictions is coming soon from Strange Attractor, but it's available for preorder from the outlet of your choice! Please preorder it if you can! Preorders set in motion all kinds of good stuff for books and their creators.
If you're still not convinced, here are more details, including the table of contents, back-cover blurbs, and a nice review from The Wire Magazine. The list of contributors on this thing includes Ytasha L. Womack, Kodwo Eshun, Tiffany E. Barber, Kembrew McLeod, Dave Tompkins, Steven Shaviro, Labtekwon, Juice Aleem, Aram Sinnreich, DJ Foodstamp, Erik Steinskog, and many others. Hold tight!
MORE NOISE:
[Dead Precedents with the hands from Run the Jewels' RTJ3. Photo by Tim Saccenti.]
In the past three years, over a thousand of you have picked up a copy of my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future from Repeater Books. I just wanted to extend a special shout out: Thank you!
If you haven't gotten yours and are curious, you can find out more on my website or the recent three-year anniversary newsletter.
THREE NEW BOOKS:
Also, in case you haven't snagged them yet, I have three (3!) new books out:
Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes (from punctum books)
Fender the Fall (a sci-fi novella from Alien Buddha Press)
Abandoned Accounts (poetry collection from First Cut)
As always, thank your for reading, responding, and sharing! You are appreciated.
Hope you're well,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com