Noise music

Noise music, often simply called noise, is a subgenre of experimental music that treats unwanted sound as a core musical ingredient. It abandons conventional music theory and typical song structures, frequently lacking clear melody, rhythm, or harmony, and it deliberately blurs the line between what is considered musical and non-musical sound.

The idea of noise as music first emerged in the 1910s with Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, who published *The Art of Noises* in 1913. Later, the Dada and Fluxus movements, along with electroacoustic music, modern classical, and musique concrète, explored similar ideas. Composers like John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and James Tenney explicitly used the term "noise" for some of their experimental work. In the 1960s and 1970s, pieces such as Robert Ashley's "The Wolfman" (1964) and Pauline Oliveros's "A Little Noise In The System" (1967) became early examples of contemporary noise music. Non-academic artists like Lou Reed, with *Metal Machine Music*, also influenced later noise musicians.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the rise of industrial music and affordable commercial synthesizers encouraged non-musicians to experiment with strictly noise-based styles. This led to genres like power electronics, a term coined by the English group Whitehouse, as well as post-industrial styles such as dark ambient, death industrial, and power noise. Most of these releases were distributed through the 1980s cassette underground. In Japan, the Japanoise scene, growing out of the Kansai no wave movement, produced influential acts like Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hanatarash, C.C.C.C., and Incapacitants. Alongside American and European artists such as the Haters, Daniel Menche, Vomir, and Richard Ramirez, they helped shape harsh noise and harsh noise wall into the 1990s.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the American noise underground, particularly from the Brooklyn noise scene, blended kosmische Musik, progressive electronic, ambient, drone, and new age into a style called post-noise. This movement was catalyzed by the Skaters, a group formed by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark in 2004. Other artists in this vein included Oneohtrix Point Never, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, Laurel Halo, Sun Araw, Yellow Swans, and Emeralds.

**Etymology**

Danish noise theorist Torben Sangild argues that no single definition of noise in music is possible. He offers three basic definitions: one based on musical acoustics, a second based on distortion or disturbance of a communicative signal, and a third based on subjectivity—what is noise to one person can be meaningful to another, and what was once unpleasant can become acceptable over time. In common use, noise means unwanted sound or noise pollution. In electronics, noise can refer to the signal of acoustic noise in an audio system or the visual "snow" on a degraded television image. In signal processing or computing, it is data without meaning, an unwanted by-product. Noise can block, distort, or change a message in both human and electronic communication. White noise is a random signal with a flat power spectral density, containing equal power within any fixed bandwidth, analogous to white light containing all frequencies.

According to Murray Schafer, there are four types of noise: unwanted noise, unmusical sound, any loud sound, and a disturbance in a signaling system (like static on a telephone). Definitions of what is considered noise relative to music have shifted over time. Ben Watson, in his article "Noise as Permanent Revolution," notes that Ludwig van Beethoven's *Grosse Fuge* (1825) "sounded like noise" to its contemporary audience, leading his publishers to persuade him to remove it from its original setting. In the 1920s, French composer Edgard Varèse, influenced by New York Dada and Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia's magazine *391*, conceived of his music in terms of sound-masses, resulting in works like *Offrandes*, *Hyperprism*, *Octandre*, and *Intégrales*. Varèse declared that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise" and asked, "What is music but organized noises?"

In attempting to define noise music and its value, Paul Hegarty (2007) cites cultural critics Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, and Theodor Adorno to trace the history of "noise." He defines noise at different times as "intrusive, unwanted," "lacking skill, not being appropriate," and "a threatening emptiness," tracing these trends back to 18th-century concert-hall music. Hegarty contends that John Cage's composition *4'33"*—where an audience and performer sit through four and a half minutes of "silence"—represents the beginning of noise music proper. For Hegarty, noise music, like *4'33"*, consists of incidental sounds that embody the tension between "desirable" sound (properly played notes) and undesirable "noise" that defines the genre.

**Characteristics**

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