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Part Four
The ear hasn't yet digested the listening change
introduced with the complexity of noise, or so it
seems. The centrality of tone and "consonance,"
always meant as represented by certain verticalities
felt as "natural"
149 despite the so many examples we can have
from different cultures, is or seems to be still
unquestioned by most of the listeners. Noise seems
to be still encaged within the "associative"
paradigm, within a descriptive and propositional
notion of sound exposure, where the referential
sign, the "image" associated with a "noise,"
pertains to the most commonplace modality of "naturalistic"
listening.
150 In this sense the listener has been growing
more and more of a "reader," in relation
to music, having actually to do with something else
than sound, as Schaeffer pointed out: «to
rely on the original associations would have been
to create not music but literature.»
151 So that the "occasionally hypothetical"
liberation of noise into sound, is more than often
of a cosmetic breed. Noise, devoid of its substance,
is used for its applied, dramatical effects on a
superficially seen listener's psychology; something
closer to a psychodrama, than to music itself.
Noise "needs" its own structural world, because
its complex structural spectrum, i.e. the dynamics and
the morphology of its unfolding, is inherent to the
material condition of the sound-source (the "noise-source").
Not realizing it, would simply mean denying to noise
its nature of sound, relegating it again within the
realm of signs, of metahistorical signs and signs of
signs. Metamusic as metaphysics...
Noise is structure per sé, as sound is,
152 and as such it canalizes the forms it pertains
to.
153 Noise is a cultural artifact, as sound is.
As cultural artifacts, sounds and noises have to
be considered congruent with and homoeomorphous
to their sources.
154 As such they are historically determined
artifacts, which semantic realm is culturally oriented,
embodying consequences and world views due to inherent
morphostructural characteristics.
155 They should be analyzed, utilized, articulated
and organized following their properties, not imposing
to them principles pertaining to other artifactual
categories and stems. In this sense histories, themselves
cultural artifacts, are producers of noise, of unstable
forms. Noise is a serious thing.
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notes:
149 the octave, fourth and fifth (we could say from Pythagoras onward),
and then all the related features of a diatonic system
(including third and sixth), basically; but now also those of
microtonal systems as well...
back
150 or also impressionistic and romantic as well. Unfortunately
the cinematographic culture, with the soundtrack principles
(and stereotypes), seems to have emphasized exactly these associative
and metaphoric paradigms, especially employing
certain sonic modes and procedures to dramatize the visual.
back
151 see Hodgkinson, 1987. back
152 this division between sound and noise,
which of course I don't recognize as such, has been used here
only to better describe the processual placement of "noise"
within the histories of musics.
back
153 or so it should be, when not tamed through epicurean and hedonistic
categories.
back
154 i.e. to all the "music instruments" we know, from
those of the western orchestra, for example, to any other musical
instrument of any culture, to any possible object or "natural"
phenomenon used as a sound-source.
back
155 in a way, they have to be taken for what they have been "built"
for and what their material form conduce to (see Toniutti
gequlìlin). In this sense, I'd like to point out
here, the very large value that the "starting transient"
(the very moment sound - or "noise" - arises, as an acoustic morphology)
has for the perception field, especially in the discrimination
of timbral qualities.
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