Noise (5)
Megaphonics
Steven Connor
Transmitted BBC Radio 3, 28 February, 1997. 
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The ear is more sensitive to overload than any other organ. The tongue is not damaged by excess of sweetness as the ear is deafened by excess of sound. Though the eye can be damaged when flooded by too much light, the capacity to look away or blink affords it a protection which is unavailable to the ear. The ear is vulnerable, and we are vulnerable through the ear because, as John Hull writes in his memoir of blindness, we cannot `listen away’. The ear resembles the skin in being the organ of exposure and reception. The eye investigates and acquires; the ear and the skin undergo and receive.
Noise, whether employed in its everyday sense, or in the specialised senses of the acoustician or information theorist, means excessive sound; sound as irrelevance, distraction, indigestible, disorganised or chaotic sound.
For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, writing in 1946, the awareness of the vacant anonymity of being, of an abstract, encompassing sense that `there is’, below the sense of conscious existence possessed by the individual self, is an experience of noise, `as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise’. It is `noise returning after every negation of noise. Neither nothingness nor being’. William James evoked the sense of impersonal being in similar terms, when he wrote of the `booming, buzzing confusion’ of the sense of existence without individuality, a phrase whose reference to sound is involuntarily intensified by the many readers who render it as `booming, buzzing confusion’.
Modern people have a deeply ambivalent relation to noise. No culture has produced so much empty, chaotic meaningless sound. For us, horror, meaninglessness, vacancy does not have a shape, it has a sound: white noise. The invention of radio brought with it an encounter with an alternative to the music of the spheres; the sizzling cacophony of the spaces between radio stations. The instability of radio signals, especially before the development of FM broadcasting, has accustomed us to the terrible fragility of the broadcast word, its tendency to drift into or be overcome by noise. What is this noise? It is neither or own, nor nature’s. It is more strange to us than the nonhuman world.
Indeed, the history of transmitted and broadcast sound has been a history of noise abatement – struggle against noise, a struggle for cleanliness. This means a struggle against distortion, deviance, against sibilance, plosiveness, liquidity, breath, the evidence of the body in the word.
The horror of noise is widely shared. We have struggled to limit and contain noise, even though the massive multiplication of our signals keeps on excreting more and more noise, more and more of what is indigestible, meaningless, sonic waste. The word `cacophony’ establishes the relation between noise and excrement; noise is what we cannot take into us, what will poison and destroy us unless we can separate ourselves from it.
(Of course there are times when the grain of the voice is preserved or even simulated: think of the crackling phone line in the report from the war correspondent, which speaks of authenticity and the moment, the clumsy materiality of the live.)
The philosopher David Appelbaum has urged us to hear the body in the voice: to resist the process of noise abatement as it is practised not only by the sound engineer but also by the philosophical tradition which attempts to remove all traces of the voice’s origin in a body.
But we have the capacity to produce noise too. Technologies of amplification allow us to discover sounds previously inaudible to us, the sounds of the stars, and of the foetal heatbeat. But amplification does not give us the natural sounds of our bodies, as they would present themselves to our ears if only our ears were small enough, or could get close enough or were finely- enough adjusted. The noise of the heartbeat or the whooshing of the blood, is the noise made against and in cooperation with the microphone. It is in fact the capturing and magnifying of interference, of the same kind as the pop or hiss or whoosh of badly recorded speech. In other words, at these levels, we hear a special kind of sound: we overhear the microphone listening, breeding with the noises of the body. From the very beginning of the age of automated sound, there has been a fascination with the noises of the body as they are both transmitted and transformed by the apparatus. The noise of the body doubled in the noise of the body of the apparatus. When we speak into a microphone, with a telephone or tape-recorder, some part of us surrenders to, is spoken by the equipment.
Since the very beginnings of the century, the vacant or excremental noise of modern life has also been seen as otherworldly, as full of presence and potential. Composers have sought to turn noise into music. The great drive of the musical avant-garde in the twentieth century has been towards the liberation and autonomisation of noise from the formalisations of musical sound. Perhaps the great initiator of this tradition, which runs through the work of Edgard Varèe, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez and John Cage was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who called, in his manifesto of March 1913, for an art of noises which would liberate the musical possibilities of noise in general, especially the diverse and unsynthesisable complexity of sound in the city:
The ear of the Eighteenth Century man would not have been able to withstand the inharmonious intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestra (with three times as many performers as that of the orchestra of his time). But our ear takes pleasure in it, since it is already educated to modern life, so prodigal in different noises. Nevertheless, our ear is not satisfied and calls for ever greater acoustical emotions.
Noise…arriving confused and irregular from the irregular confusion of life, is never revealed to us entirely and always holds innumerable surprises. We are certain, then, that by selecting, coordinating, and controlling all the noises, we will enrich mankind with a new and unsuspected pleasure of the senses. Although the characteristic of noise is that of reminding us brutally of life, the Art of Noises should not limit itself to an [pp] imitative reproduction. It will achieve its greatest emotional power in acoustical enjoyment itself, which the inspiration of the artist will know how to draw from the combining of noises.
Contemporary composers and performers work not only to score and orchestrate nonmusical sounds, giving meaning to the meaningless sonic debris of the world, but also to listen and respond to noise itself, without neutralising or transforming it; working with feedback, distortion, accident, overload. These kinds of noise are literally unearthly in that they have never been heard before and even remain unhearable. Feedback is a wholly mechanical sound. It results from a sound being heard, transmitted, heard and retransmitted, to the point where the original sound is entirely lost, replaced by the sound of the sound, or the sound of the machine hearing itself.
Often composers have turned to the human voice, attempting to separate it from the world of ordinary verbal exchanges, and solicit from it by mechanical means, some other, more unworldly kind of utterance. In Steve Reich’s Come Out, the voice is returned by mechanical manipulation to its rawly physical condition: removed from its source, made artificial, and yet also made more unbearably hearable as a voice.
Noise afflicts us because it seems inhuman. If sound has a unique capacity to hold us together, or restore us to ourselves, noise has always been associated with the danger of derangement of dissolution. The psychoanalyst William Niederland spoke of the experience of `auditory extinction’ among some of his patients.
Perhaps the attraction of noise for many contemporary composers and performers is that noise enlarges and transforms hearing. Noise is sound stripped of interpretability, which is to say of audibility. Intense noise cannot be heard, or merely heard. Such noise forces hearing to spill across into the other senses: we do not merely apprehend noise, we undergo it; shaken and scattered, we become ourselves noised, or noisy. We start to hear with our skin and skull and teeth. Noise is the jeopardy of the ego. Curiously, noise shares this capacity to scatter and redistribute the senses with intensely pleasurable sound. Sacred sounds, chants and shamanic dronings, attempt to discover the principles of noise within music, the capacities for noise within the human body. Noise is a transforming ordeal of the ear.
The composer John Cage spoke of an art of noises which would disclose and let be the noises of the world. Contemporary composers by contrast seem hungry to humanise, or orchestrate the noises of the world. Sampling allows a composer to manipulate any noise into melody or pulsation, and to assemble noises into complex and beautiful configurations. Our epoch is one in which we seem to need to rehumanise noise by hearing it as voice. We make noise our own by making out its unsuspected song. But perhaps we are also learning to hear noise as voice without thinking of it as human. Don Ihde speaks for this new desire to hear the voiced character of the world:
all sounds are in a broad sense “voices,” the voices of things, of others, of the gods, and of myself…A phenomenology of sound and voice moves…toward full significance, toward a listening to the voiced character of the sounds of the World…
Just as there are voiceless words, there are wordless voices, the voices of things which are a wordless speaking…The voice of each thing bespeaks something of its per-sona.
Perhaps the attempt to turn noise into music can be seen as an ecological maneouvre, an attempt to conserve and recycle what would otherwise be mere auditory pollution, waste, excrement, cacophony. The fascination with noise may be seen as a refusal of our culture’s tightening obsession with the excision of waste and inefficiency and distortion of all kinds, whether in education, economics, mass media or acoustics. The fascination with noise is the faith in low fidelity. Perhaps we are learning again to hear the voice of the inhuman, the divine, or sacred, or less-than-human, in that most unexpected source, our own noise.