This is the Hegelian freedom of the noise scene: it's too late, so you have to force yourself to be free, even though it's confusing. The real problem is that all freedom begins in confusion.
As soon as we enter the field of noise, we will find many interesting but questionable phenomena. A significant portion of experienced listeners came prepared, with earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones. The musicians in the field are always in a hurry to assemble synthesizers, and instruments are never readily available here. There is no distinction between the front and back of the stage, and the musicians leave the stage and disappear into the audience after the performance, becoming part of the audience. All this implies to us that the noise scene cannot be explained by listening because it does not have a musical structure, a beautiful melody, or even the general rules of performance. In fact, the noise performer is actively opening the "black box" of sound production to the public: there is no mystery in it (inspiration, inspiration, sublime spirit, etc.), and the performer is not a genius who is skilled enough to produce amazing melodies (noise performers gain the anonymity of the modern public in this respect, while also deliberately exposing their own musical privacy).
So, let's imagine a craftsman from out of town who is in danger of being driven away at any moment on the streets of a city with an omelette stall. Sometimes, however, it is not an omelet, but garbage and excrement from the flow of electricity and the transmission of information. If you can imagine the process of manipulating sound in this way, then you can imagine a noisy labor site: a scene where you can openly display your labor.
Noise as a culture
This manipulation and fiddling with sound, like an unformed egg cake spread out and rolled up on an iron plate, is exactly what the Italian futurist Luigi Rusolo saw about the manipulation of noise: noise, an audible thing, is artificial and can be manipulated. There is no doubt that noise became a concept in the sense of listening that began with this avant-garde. In his view, in a modern metropolis, the ears are more focused than the eyes, because "we will increase the pleasure of the senses by distinguishing the gurgling sounds of water, air and gas in metal pipes". This is what he calls the everyday and universal nature of noise. From music to noise, this evolution is inseparable from the explosion of machines in human work. "Whether in a noisy big city or in the quiet countryside of yesteryear, today's machines create so many different noises that pure sound no longer resonates with any emotion because it is so small and monotonous." Contrary to the Luddists, pioneers like Russolo did not agree with the exploitation of workers by machines, and that machines should not be smashed, but should be used to create more crazy auditory experiences.
However, it is not the experience of the big city that dominates our understanding of noise: it is not something that is naturally present in social life. In other words, when people listen to noise, they are not as sure as if they had dug a stone out of the ground and played with it in their hands. According to general acoustic theory, noise has been one of the constant elements of the soundscape since the birth of the world of sound and the world of hearing, and one of the major problems of modern cities is to reduce noise. Ultimately, noise must be represented as discrete values so that a set of standards can be developed for sound. On the other hand, in Claude Shannon's information theory, noise forms part of the channel, and if information wants to be transmitted, it must face the loss of noise to it. Noise is thus included in the thermodynamic problem: noise is the inevitable increase in entropy.
Not to mention, in the earliest performances identified as noise, the performers often refused to be considered noise. Later, through a kind of cybernetic feedback, noise performers began to revise their position in a reflexive way (especially in the case of Japanese noise): noise as a culture was created, and this creation was the product of the interaction between the performer and the public, i.e., noise was second-order and self-reflexive. Thus, it is easy to understand many of the phenomena in the history of music: why many times amateurs with little listening experience and experienced classical music lovers have diametrically opposed evaluations. Is the sound of cannons in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture noise? As far as the whole piece is concerned, it is undoubtedly classical music with a strong national sensibility. And what about John Cage, the pioneer of Fluxus? What about the specific music of Varèse and the auditory space of Xenakis? What about Stockhausen's Helikopter Streichquartett? In pop music, the use of noise is clearly more self-conscious: without distortion, there is no rock music (distortion reverses the signal-to-noise ratio in the form of an inverse: noise is here re-integrated as a reinvention of the guitar tone). Or rather, noise simply became a musical element, as in the Beatles' use of the sound of airplanes taking off and landing as part of the song's prelude to "Back in the USSR." Free jazz, if you've never heard this kind of music at all, you must think it's just noise, it's terrible. As the famous Japanese free jazz musician Kaoru Abe said, his saxophone is the cannon that blows the audience away.
But sadly, neither John Cage nor Varèse are making noise, and they have no intention of making noise. For Cage, there is only a dialectic of sound and silence (note: he uses a dialectic of a very oriental sense: good and bad are good; I said both the positive and the negative, and I was right...... ), while sound refers directly to the object itself in which it is made: for example, the piano he shows on stage with various objects inserted. For Varèse and others, sound no longer has a referent, sound is an empty signifier, and all they are trying to do is exhaust the possibilities of sound. Xenakis, Le Corbusier's assistant, is concerned with the relationship between sound and architectural space, and he seeks to shape new sensory experiences in this way. With Sir Liberty, the situation is even more nuanced. We can compare John Coltrane and Kaoru Abe, and fans generally say that the former is "something" and the latter is "nothing", and we won't go into some of the discussions about free jazz and improvisation. But in short, free jazz is easy to dismiss as noise because it is completely outside the institutional framework of classical music.
However, noise is not first and foremost a matter for the senses, nor is it just a sound experiment (of course, as Shunji Mikawa, a member of the noise group "Extraordinary Stage", says, noise is by no means noise music, and there is no such thing as noise music). Or, in a slightly pedantic way, noise can also be musically traced back to the "no wave" that originated in New York. Groups such as Sonic Youth are literally announcing through no wave that if you want to make music, you don't need music theory and technique, just pick up an instrument and start making sound. In any case, noise is first and foremost an avant-garde position: to make all the music and sounds of the past obsolete. It is only in this sense that we can understand why noise is synonymous with futurism in Rusolo.
Use noise to make all music and sounds old
Of course, the technical aspects of noise cannot be overlooked. From this point of view, a synthesizer that is continuously powered by an electric current is indeed an extremely important tool. Using a cybernetic system that employs Boolean networks, the synthesizer can even become a musician, and the noise, with the participation of other human musicians, takes on the form of free jazz. However, noise is also a misappropriation of technical materials: random assembly and rough fabrication of various electronic components is the norm (and it is often not excluded to buy cheap electronics as parts of DIY synthesizers). This presents a picture of the end times: the technological system has been destroyed, modernity remains, but it is already a corpse (yes, if the spirit is externalized to bones, as phrenology believes, then the voice must be reduced to a corpse here). (Produced by the "Thought Workshop" of the social science newspaper, the full text can be found in the social science newspaper and its official website)