… Where better to imagine ontological riches in the raw? … Where better to lose wayward thoughts, attempts to lose thought altogether (if only to give it a rest), and find thoughts where none existed? Where better to find damn near anything?
This is from Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn (1999). In addition to being interesting in its own right, see if you don’t find this analogous to photography which, outside the most visually sterilized “sound studio,” must always deal with visual noise — whether ignore it, resist it, exploit it, or embrace it:
Sound saturates the arts of this century, and its importance becomes evident if we can hear past the presumption of mute visuality within art history, past the matter of music that excludes references to the world, past the voice that is already its own source of existence, past the phonetic task-mastering of writing, and past what we might see as hearing. None of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence, and the traditionally auditive arts grow to sound quite different when included in an array of auditive practices. The century becomes more mellifluous and raucous through historiographic listening, just that much more animated with the inclusion of the hitherto muffled regions of the sensorium. Yet these sounds do not exist merely to sonorize the historical scene; they are also a means through which to investigate issues of cultural history and theory, including those that have been around for some time, existing behind the peripheral vision and selective audition of established fields of study. Indeed, many issues have not been addressed precisely because they have not been heard.
… By sound I mean sounds, voices, and aurality – all that might fall within or touch on auditive phenomena, whether this involves actual sonic or auditive events or ideas about sound or listening; sounds actually heard or heard in myth, idea, or implication; sounds heard by everyone or imagined by one person alone; or sounds as they fuse with the sensorium as a whole.
… To hear past the historical insignificance assigned to sounds, we need to hear more than their sonic or phonic content. We need to know where they might touch the ground, momentarily perhaps, even as they dissipate in air. The terms significant sounds and significant noises are used in the first part of the book — not to differentiate these sounds and noises from insignificant or meaningless ones but to counter long-standing habits of imagining that sounds transcend or escape meaning or that sounds elude sociality despite the fact they are made, heard, imagined, and thought by humans.
… the present writing has flowed from work initially undertaken in the mid-1980s at the World Music Program at Wesleyan University, where I studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivila. Wesleyan, because of its association with John Cage, was one of the few places in the United States where one could study music by first asking about the composition of sound prior to composition with sound, whereas almost everywhere else the nature of sound remained unproblematic, with attention paid instead to how it might be organized. The former admitted the possibility of attention to the sounds of the world, whereas the latter was restricted to a set of analytical and practical conventions. On undertaking an investigation into what the avant-garde meant by sound, I was surprised to find that it was repeatedly recuperated into musical sound. There was an historical unwillingness to allow certain characteristics of sound into compositional practice that contradicted the transgressive rhetoric of noise and the emancipatory claims of openness to the world of sound, among other positions. The banishment of these characteristics was due primarily to the fact that they signified. Through their banishment, they became the new noises; but unlike the old noises, they brought the world with them.
… Wherever they might occur among the arts, noises — interchangeably soundful and figurative, loud, disruptive, confusing, inconsistent, turbulent, chaotic, unwanted, nauseous, injurious — and noises silenced, suppressed, sought after, and celebrated always pertain to a complex of sources, motives, strategies, gestures, grammars, contexts, and so on. As such, they become significant.
… Of all the emphatic sounds of modernism, noise is the most common and the most productively counterproductive.
History does not give way to these storms of genesis and autodestruction; it is only what is made of noise, of the history of noise, that must explain itself in the face of the possibility that there is no such thing as noise. Noise in the avant-garde was linked to the sounds of military combat, the specter and incursion of technology and industrialism, the forms of popular culture and public demonstrations, nature and the sounds of other species, religious and occult activities, psychosis and drug-induced experiences, the music and languages of cultures outside reigning cultures of European society, and the sounds of the domestic sphere gendered female in contrast to the male face of the noisy parts of the avant-garde. With so much attendant on noise it quickly becomes evident that noises are too significant to be noises. We know they are noises in the first place because they exist where they shouldn’t or they don’t make sense when they should. But here too in knowing this we already know too much for noise to exist. But noise does indeed exist, and trying to define it in a unifying manner across the range of contexts will only invite noise on itself. Suppressing noise only contributes to its tenacity and detracts from investigating the complex means through which noise itself is suppressed, while celebrating noise easily becomes a tactic within the suppression of something else.
True, noise has performed admirably. Where better to set the ear loose to hear and feel unexpected licks than on the complexity and unpredictability called noise? Where better to imagine ontological riches in the raw? What better way to test authoritarian tolerance than with a raucous rage or arresting ridicule, and how better to bring attention to things without bringing things to attention? Where better to lose wayward thoughts, attempts to lose thought altogether (if only to give it a rest), and find thoughts where none existed? Where better to find damn near anything?
-Julie
