Noise music is a type of experimental music that uses sounds typically considered unwanted as a main part of the music. This style began in the early 1900s with avant-garde music but later took ideas from industrial and electronic music. Noise music often avoids traditional music rules, such as melody, rhythm, and harmony, and challenges the idea of what sounds are considered musical.

The idea of using noise as music started in the 1910s with Luigi Russolo, an Italian artist who wrote a document called The Art of Noises in 1913. Later, artists in movements like Dada and Fluxus, as well as in electroacoustic music and modern classical styles, explored noise music. Composers such as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and James Tenney used the word "noise" to describe their experimental work. In the 1960s and 1970s, pieces like Robert Ashley’s The Wolfman (1964) and Pauline Oliveros’ A Little Noise In The System (1967) were early examples of modern noise music. Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music also influenced future noise artists.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the rise of industrial music and affordable synthesizers allowed people without formal music training to create noise-based music. This led to styles like power electronics, created by the group Whitehouse, and post-industrial styles such as dark ambient, death industrial, and power noise. The 1980s cassette underground helped share these works. In Japan, the Japanoise scene, which began with the Kansai no wave movement, produced influential artists like Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Hanatarash, C.C.C.C., and Incapacitants. These artists, along with others from America and Europe like the Haters, Daniel Menche, Vomir, and Richard Ramirez, helped create harsh noise and harsh noise wall styles by the 1990s.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the American noise scene, inspired by the Brooklyn noise movement, combined styles like kosmische Musik, progressive electronic, ambient, drone, and new age into a style called post-noise. This movement was started by the group Skaters, formed in 2004 by James Ferraro and Spencer Clark. Artists involved included Oneohtrix Point Never, Pocahaunted, Zola Jesus, Laurel Halo, Sun Araw, Yellow Swans, and Emeralds.

Etymology

According to Danish noise and music theorist Torben Sangild, there is no single definition of noise in music. Instead, he describes three basic ideas: one based on how sound works in music, another based on how noise can interfere with a message or signal, and a third that depends on personal feelings (what one person considers noise, another might find meaningful; what was once seen as unpleasant may now be accepted).

In everyday language, the word "noise" usually refers to unwanted sound or noise pollution. In electronics, noise can mean the signal that represents sound in an audio system or the visual "snow" seen on a poor-quality television or video. In signal processing or computing, noise is data that has no meaning—it is not used to send a message but is created as a side effect of other processes. Noise can interfere with, change, or block messages in both human and electronic communication. White noise is a type of random signal that has equal power across all frequencies. This is similar to white light, which contains all visible light frequencies.

Murray Schafer identified four types of noise: unwanted sound, sound that is not musical, very loud sound, and any disruption in a signaling system (like static on a phone). Over time, definitions of what is considered noise in relation to music have changed. Ben Watson wrote that Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (1825) was seen as noise by audiences at the time. Beethoven’s publishers asked him to remove it from a string quartet, and he replaced it with a different piece.

In the 1920s, French composer Edgard Varèse was influenced by the New York Dada movement, which was connected to artists like Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Varèse thought of music in terms of large groups of sounds, leading to compositions like Offrandes, Hyperprism, Octandre, and Intégrales. He said, "To people used to certain kinds of music, anything new has always been called noise." He asked, "What is music but organized noises?"

Paul Hegarty (2007) studied how cultural critics like Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, and Theodor Adorno described noise. He noted that noise has been defined as "unwanted," "not skillful," or "empty and threatening." Hegarty traced these ideas back to 18th-century music. He argued that John Cage’s piece 4'33", in which a performer and audience sit in silence for four and a half minutes, marks the start of proper noise music. For Hegarty, noise music, like 4'33", includes sounds that happen by chance and show the contrast between "desirable" sounds (like notes played properly) and "undesirable" noise.

Characteristics

Noise music, like many modern and contemporary art forms, uses traits of noise that are often seen as negative in creative and artistic ways. It can include sounds made by people, machines, or electronics, as well as traditional and unusual musical instruments. Examples of sounds used in noise music include machine noises, non-musical vocal sounds, sounds from physical objects, recorded sounds, sounds from nature, computer-generated noise, sounds from random processes, and signals like distortion, feedback, static, hiss, and hum. Noise music often uses very loud volumes and long, unbroken pieces. It may also include improvisation, unusual playing methods, disorganized sounds, and uncertain outcomes. In many cases, noise music avoids using traditional musical elements like melody, harmony, rhythm, or a steady beat.

Just as early modernists were inspired by simple art styles, some modern noise musicians are interested in old audio technologies like wire-recorders, 8-track cartridges, and vinyl records. Many artists create their own tools to make noise, as well as special recording equipment and custom software (for example, the C++ software used to create the viral symphOny by Joseph Nechvatal).

Noise music today is often linked to very loud sounds, distortion, computer-generated sounds, and high-frequency sine waves like 8 kHz.

History

During the 14th century, a European and North American tradition called the charivari was used to publicly shame someone in the community. This tradition involved loud parades where people used pots, pans, and other objects to make noise. These parades were sometimes called "rough music." By the 19th century, the classical music period introduced one of the earliest examples of non-musical sounds in Western music. For instance, Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory (1813) included sounds of muskets and cannons to represent battle. Later, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (1880) included actual cannon fire in the musical score.

French composer Carol-Bérard, born in 1885, studied under Isaac Albéniz. He was influenced by primitive music and instruments. In the late 1900s, he experimented with using noises as music, created a system to write them down, and wrote about the challenges of using noise in music. In 1910, he composed Symphony of Mechanical Force. His work showed how music and noise could be connected, years before the Futurism movement.

By 1913, Italian artist Luigi Russolo, a member of the Futurist movement, wrote a statement called The Art of Noises, explaining that the industrial revolution had given people the ability to enjoy more complex sounds. He believed traditional music was too limited and wanted noise to replace it. Russolo created noise-making devices called intonarumori and formed a noise orchestra to perform with them. His works, such as Awakening of a City and The Meeting of Aeroplanes and Automobiles, were first performed in 1914.

A performance of Russolo’s Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) caused strong reactions from the audience, including disapproval and violence, as he had predicted. None of his original noise-making devices survived, but some have been rebuilt and used in recent performances. Although his work does not look like modern noise music, it helped introduce noise as a purposeful musical element and changed how people saw unwanted sounds as art.

Luigi Russolo’s brother, Antonio Russolo, also a Futurist composer, recorded two works using the original intonarumori. A 1921 recording called Corale and Serenata combined traditional orchestral music with the noise machines. This is the only surviving sound recording of these devices.

In 1919, the Dada art movement’s Antisymphony concert in Berlin was an early example of noise music. Marcel Duchamp, a Dada artist, created a work called A Bruit Secret (With Hidden Noise) in 1916, which used a noise-making object made with Walter Arensberg. The exact sound inside the object remains unknown.

Around the same time, composers began using sounds from the environment in their music. In 1931, Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation used 37 percussion instruments, a lion’s roar, and two sirens to create music based entirely on noise. John Cage, an American composer, later said that Varèse had changed how people understood music by focusing on sound itself rather than traditional musical tones.

In 1937, John Cage wrote about using sounds from the world, such as rain, radio static, and the sound of a moving truck, as musical materials. He believed all sounds could be used creatively. His first work exploring this idea was Imaginary Landscape #1, which used turntables and recordings.

In the late 1940s, French composer Pierre Schaeffer created a type of music called musique concrète (concrete music). His 1948 work Cinq études de bruits (Five Noise Studies) included sounds from train stations, such as Etude aux Chemins de Fer (Railway Study). A radio broadcast of this work, called Concert de bruits (Noise Concert), premiered in 1948.

In the late 1940s, under the influence of Henry Cowell, composers like Lou Harrison and John Cage began using junkyard items, such as brake drums and gongs, to create music. In 1957, Varèse made a piece called Poème électronique using sounds from scraping, thumping, and blowing.

In 1960, John Cage created Cartridge Music, which used phonograph cartridges with objects replacing the needle and microphones to amplify small sounds. That same year, Nam June Paik made Fluxusobjekt, a work using tape and a hand-controlled playback device. In 1960, six Japanese musicians formed Group Ongaku, an early noise music group. Their recordings used traditional instruments and objects like vacuum cleaners and oil drums, with manipulated tape speeds to distort sounds. Yasunao Tone later became a pioneer of "glitch" music in the 1990s.

In 1961, James Tenney composed Analogue #1: Noise Study using computer-generated noise and Collage No.1 (Blue Suede), which used a recording of Elvis Presley’s song Blue Suede Shoes. In 1964, Robert Ashley created The Wolfman, a work that used feedback from his own voice and tape recordings. In 1965, the London group AMM was formed by Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, and Eddie Prévost, and their music influenced later noise bands. In Canada, the Nihilist Spasm Band, a long-running noise group, was formed in 1965 and later worked with artists like Thurston Moore and Jojo Hiroshige.

In 1966, the New York band The Velvet Underground released a track called "Noise," originally recorded by John Cale.

Legacy

In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali examines how noise music is connected to changes in society. He argues that noise music is not only a reflection of society but also a sign of future changes. Attali explains that noise in music can predict social changes and shows how noise represents the hidden thoughts of society, helping to test new social and political ideas. His different way of looking at music history, with a focus on noise, influenced later studies on noise music, including Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2006) by Brandon LaBelle, Sound Art: Beyond Music, between Categories (2007) by Alan Licht, Micro Bionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century (2009) by Thomas Bey William Bailey, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (2009) by Caleb Kelly, Immersion Into Noise (2011) by Joseph Nechvatal, and Noise as a Constructive Element in Music Theoretical and Music-Analytical Perspectives (2022) by Mark Delaere.

In Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999), writer Douglas Kahn discusses how noise is used as an artistic medium. He explores ideas from artists and thinkers such as Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.

In 2008, filmmaker Adam Cornelius made a documentary titled People Who Do Noise, which focuses on modern noise music. The film includes avant-garde noise artists such as Smegma, Oscillating Innards, Yellow Swans, and Daniel Menche.

Related scenes and genres

Industrial music is a type of music that was inspired by post-industrial society. It began in the 1970s and was influenced by experimental and early electronic music styles, such as musique concrète, tape music, noise, and sound collage. The term "industrial" was first used in 1976 by Monte Cazazza and Throbbing Gristle when they created Industrial Records. Other early artists included NON and Cabaret Voltaire. By the late 1970s, more artists like Clock DVA, Nocturnal Emissions, Einstürzende Neubauten, SPK, Nurse with Wound, and Z’EV appeared. Whitehouse also created the subgenre called "power electronics," which later influenced modern noise music.

In the early 1980s, Japan became known for creating many artists and bands that made very harsh and intense music, sometimes called Japanoise. These artists include Government Alpha, Alienlovers in Amagasaki, Koji Tano, and Merzbow (a pseudonym for Masami Akita, who was inspired by the Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’s Merz art project). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Akita used the album Metal Machine Music as a starting point and further developed the noise style by moving away from guitar-based sounds. According to Hegarty (2007), Japanese noise music became a major part of the noise genre, especially from the 1990s onward. Other important Japanese noise artists include Hijokaidan, Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants, KK Null, Yamazaki Maso’s Masonna, Solmania, K2, the Gerogerigegege, and Hanatarash. Nick Cain of The Wire said that artists like Merzbow, Hijokaidan, and Incapacitants were key to the growth of noise music after 1990.

Power noise, also called rhythmic noise, rhythm 'n' noise, or distorted beat music, is a subgenre of noise and post-industrial music. It started mainly in Europe during the 1990s and was influenced by different types of electronic dance music.

Harsh noise is a subgenre of noise music that began in the early 1980s. It came from the Japanese noise music scene and the European power electronics movement.

The Brooklyn noise scene was an underground music movement in Brooklyn, New York, that started in the 2000s. It was led by groups like Black Dice and Wolf Eyes. By the late 2000s, artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeralds added influences from '70s cosmic trance music and '80s new age music to the scene.

Post-noise is a music genre and scene that started in the 2000s. It is connected to hypnagogic pop, new-age, and hauntology. The term "hypnagogic pop" was first used in 2009 by writer David Keenan in an article titled Childhood's End in The Wire magazine. Musician Daniel Lopatin described this style as a shift away from loud, aggressive noise music.

Compilations

• A Collection of Noise and Electronic Music Volumes 1 through 7, Sub Rosa, Various Artists (1920 to 2012)
• The Japanese-American Noise Treaty (1995), CD, Relapse
• New York Noise, a television program that features music videos