the art of noise // Frank J. Oteri and Paul D. Miller interview

These readings (for process and evidence) go right back to the idea of modernism//postmodernism for me.

In The Art of Noise, Russolo puts forward a futurist manifesto, promoting the acceptance of noise as music. I somewhat agree with him--we should be more engaged with the sounds we make--but don't really like his attitude so much, which is very insistent and focused on dominance and the "man-made" being better than the "natural". This is a very nice complement for the visual art that was going on at the time in terms of re-evaluating what art (painting, espeically) could and should be. Like art, noise is now accepted as music as with noise bands. In an epoch of post-modernism, anything is art (whether it be visual or aural).

I found it interesting in the interview that one of the people said that we are at a point today of "information overload." If anything can qualify as music (or art), then my response is:

we must choose. we must choose what information we put into the world. we must choose what images we put into the world. we must choose what sounds we put into the world. we must take responsibility for our effect on the world, which means we must choose.

I personally have a lot of trouble with choice--choosing sounds and images--because there are so many. Multiplicity is almost too easy to achieve now a days, but making meaning out of that multiplicity requires choice. I also don't have trouble choosing some things. Sometimes I'll listen to the same song for literally days or weeks. Sometimes I choose to not listen to any music for periods of time as well. I repeat words in my head that way. I crave visual images that way, too.

My own interests in sound run along lines of language (how different sounds convey different meanings, and how these are universally accepted across cultures in many cases), and ideas of resonance and string theory (harmonics and dissonance), which is related to how we make meaning out of sounds. I found it really interesting in the interview that one person said that noise is anything de-coherent, a signal that is decayed or something non-understandable. We do understand sound though in a physical and instinctual way, and language is based off of that. An unpleasant noise stems from it being related to a warning, of not joining with, of dissonance, of stay away from that. A pleasant noise stems from something being okay, of wanting to join with, of harmony, of being comfortable. We can train ourselves to be comfortable with anything, even dissonance, as Russolo has shown us.