Eth Noise! Ethnomusicology

Noise music is a term used to describe varieties of avant-garde music and sound art that may use elements such as cacophony, dissonance, atonality, noise, indeterminacy, and repetition in their realization.

Noise music can feature distortion, various types of acoustically or electronically generated noise, randomly produced electronic signals, and non-traditional musical instruments. Noise music may also incorporate manipulated recordings, static, hiss and hum, feedback, live machine sounds, custom noise software, circuit bent instruments, and non-musical vocal elements that push noise towards the ecstatic.[1] The Futurist art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada art movement, and later the Surrealist and Fluxus art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones, George Brecht, Wolf Vostell, LaMonte Young and Takehisa Kosugi.[2]

During the early 1900s a number of art music practitioners began exploring atonality. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg proposed the incorporation of harmonic systems that were, at the time, considered dissonant. This lead to the development of twelve tone technique and serialism.[3] In his book 1910: the Emancipation of Dissonance Thomas J. Harrison suggests that this development might be described as a metanarrative to justify the so called dionysian pleasures of atonal noise.[4]

Contemporary noise music is often associated with excessive volume and distortion, particularly in the popular music domain with examples such as Boys Noize, Jimi Hendrix’s use of feedback, Nine Inch Nails and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.[5]

Other examples of music that contain noise based features include works by Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Theatre of Eternal Music, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Jean Tinguely's recordings of his sound sculpture (specifically Bascule VII'), the music of Hermann Nitsch’s Orgien Mysterien Theater, and La Monte Young’s bowed gong works from the late 1960s. Genres such as industrial, industrial techno, and glitch music exploit noise based materials.[6]