On the Media-Archaeology of Noise in Recorded Music
In the introduction to his article “Mapping Noise. Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance” (chapter 12 of Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications and Implications, the book he co-edited with Erkki Huhtamo in 2011), Jussi Parikka writes:
“this chapter does not address the important notions of noise in acoustics, sonic art, and soundscape studies, in which works by Douglas Kahn, Jacques Attali, Paul Hegarty, Emily Thompson, and Jonathan Sterne are exemplary […] it primarily addresses noise in the context of telecommunications, networks, and digital culture.” [258].
To me, such a separation of acoustic noise and noise in telecommunication seems increasingly problematic and highly artificial.
Influential, insightful and thought-provoking as they undoubtedly are, the noise analyses of the likes of Kahn, Attali and Hegarty always leave me with the uneasy feeling that the actual phenomenon of noise in recorded music, to quote Greg Hainge’s recent Noise Matters, “remains[s] out of reach in some way.” As with so many writings on music – either within or outside musicology – readings of noise often touch upon many relevant issues, but keep losing track of the actual, sounding specificity of their subject. They are often either too general or too specific, in both cases trading a plurality of noises for one singular Noise. Consequently, they tend to smother the specificity of different noises under the weight of a very broad or very narrow analysis.
Of the authors mentioned by Parikka, both Sterne and Thompson can be credited for breaking this trend by shifting the focus to historiographical accounts of recorded sound and music. By doing so, their works did shed a valuable and much needed new light on the changing position of noise under the influence of sound recording. However, for both Sterne and Thompson, assessing the scientific and technological history and historiography of sound recording is more important than its consequences in the domain of music. And whilst authors such as Paul Thebergè, Mark Katz, Aden Evens, Evan Eisenberg and Albin Zak III have written about the many consequences of recording technology on musical productions and reception, as well as on what Simon Zagorski-Thomas dubbed the ‘musicology of record production,’ their work often lacks the conceptual depth of media-archaeological approaches, limiting its usefulness for a more thorough revaluation of the position and importance of noise in recorded music.
Taking all this into consideration, I would argue that, given their strong scientific, technological and conceptual interconnection with – both analogue and digital – communication media, sound recording technologies are the ideal vehicle to assess the continuum, instead of the discrepancies, between what Parikka calls the “important notions of noise in acoustics, sonic art, and soundscape studies” and “noise in the context of telecommunications.” As sound recording has dealt with the unavoidability of noise and the necessity of noise reduction from its very conception onward, especially in the context of recorded music it has developed a refined sense for the many ways in which noise can be both highly desirable and very disturbing. Taking the continuum between acoustic noise, communicational noise and informational noise as the focal point of analysis provides, I suggest, the starting point for developing what might be called a media-archaeological account of noise in recorded music.