Elise Kermani , rev. December 2001
I would like to start with some definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary:
Music - the art of organizing tones to produce a coherent sequence of sounds intended to elicit an aesthetic response in a listener.
Sound - a vibratory disturbance in the pressure and density of a fluid, or in the elastic strain in a solid, with frequencies in the approximate range between 20-20,000 cycles per second and capable of being detected by organs of hearing.
Noise - a sound of any kind, especially when loud, confused, indistinct or disagreeable.
(physics) any disturbance especially a random and persistent disturbance that obscures or reduces the clarity or quality of a signal.
Sonic - of or relating to audible sound.
In thinking about the words "music", "sound" and "noise" I realized that my music composition "Wak Auf" relates to all three words in a sort of continuum that I am calling the "sonic spectrum". On one end of the spectrum I have put the term "music" - for the purpose of this article, to describe what most people refer to as sounds which are agreeable, highly structured, familiar, commercially viable, etc, etc. In the middle of this continuum is "sound", which could be described as less structured than music but
more structured than noise. "Noise", on the far right of this spectrum, is a phenomena which could be considered to be highly unorganized and physically and psychologically displeasing or damaging. All sounds from the left to the right within the sonic spectrum - from a Mozart symphony to the hum of your computer - are capable of being part of music composition. Every listener has different thresholds and opinions about which sounds constitute music and which constitute noise, as one's "music" is actually in the
"ear" and in the "mind" of the listener.
In composing Wak Auf, I sampled parts of "music", the Bach's Cantata no.140; and mixed it with "sound masses", electronically produced harmonic drones; and then processed these elements to extend the composition into the realms of "noise", very short, repetitive and machine-like loops.
Composition does not need to be about creating pleasure. Sometimes it is necessary to create so-called ugly or displeasing sounds in order to reveal reality. Of course, all listeners have different thresholds for pain and pleasure, so the definition of what constitutes noise is subjective and the balance between the two extremes is one of the secrets to a good composition.
Personally I find organized or consonant noise of machines very pleasurable, in fact more pleasurable at times than a symphony composed by Bach or Beethoven. There are times though when I prefer not to hear the noise of machines, but rather to hear silence or to turn on my favorite easy listening music (which I admit is NOT my music!) For example, a constant noise is easier for me to concentrate when I'm composing music - yet Tony Bennett is good to listen to while doing housework or eating dinner. And, if I am recording my music, I want there to be absolute (or virtual) silence.
My activity dictates the background music. And if my activity is to listen and to listen solely with all of my attention - then I prefer the music to be complex, rich and unpredictable. This usually means that I prefer to listen to a wide palette of sounds balancing the extremes from the full sonic spectrum.
The sonic continuum of easy versus difficult listening changes over time. In past millennia of mindful human listening it is possible that all the sounds of nature and of everyday living (cooking, children crying, building a house) were the first musics, therefore they were the most familiar and probably the most pleasant sounds. From these sounds of life came a sense of rhythm and pitch. Listening to those sounds and recreating them with instruments into the first organized music became an abstraction possible only by the human species.
But the sounds of the 21st century (computer hum, modems screeching, TV's and radios blaring, car stereos with massive bass boosters, oven-toaster-microwave buzzers, refrigerator hums) have accumulated to such a volume that they have become a distraction, and can actually damage our ability to listen and think originally, deeply, and clearly. Take a walk in a busy suburban mall and you will hear a good sampling electronic media noise which I find extremely distracting.
The sounds from everyday life in the 21st century are not all that healthy and in fact can create hearing loss and mental confusion. The noise of the mass media and the surplus of sound bites compete for entry into our consciousness. Is it possible for a composer to hear for example, an original and creative music in the overloaded mix of incoming sonic stimuli?
We could argue that there is no original music, that all composed music comes from music or sounds that already exist. Then, how does one filter out the unwanted public sounds (noise pollution) from all of the existing sounds in order to hear clearly? Humans do not have a switch or earlids to turn off the ear's listening.
How much noise (and which noises) should be tolerated in any specific community? Should honking horns and bass-blaring car stereos be illegal in a crowded urban area? Should it be allowed in rural settings? Who gets to make which noises, where, at what volume and for how long?
Did manufacturers think about noise pollution when they designed the new DirtDevil vacuum cleaner? Or what about your neighbor and the electric leaf eater that you can hear for a mile away? Isn't making public noise above a certain decibel level an invasion of privacy?
In Delmar, during the season of fall, there are truck machines that come around each neighborhood sucking up the leaves on the side of the road with a loud wail. The noise sounds better the closer you are to it and more annoying the further away it is. For example, with the truck near your house you can at least hear the rattling and noise of the machine mixed in with a "masked" wail, but far away all you hear is a constant penetrating siren at a pitch at about G# above middle C, and no matter where I went in the house, I could hear that inescapable ominous sound. I plugged my ears, the sound still resonated through my head. It was a very strange and unpleasant hearing experience.
And on a recent trip to Indiana to visit my family I had to travel in a small airplane the noise of which was so loud that I had to hold my ears shut for the entire trip. The stewardess wore earplugs.
I must admit that I prefer to listen and write music that uses extreme dynamics and a wide range of noise and music, so I am presenting a complex argument in this article. I complain about certain noises and loudness levels, yet I use many noises in my compositions and I write and listen in double fortissimo.
I think we can differentiate between noise which sharpens consciousness and noise which dulls the senses; between music which expands our listening abilities and music that is merely seductively selling us something or creating hearing damage. The music of Mozart and Bach may be very pleasing, but is it possible that it is so pleasing that it actually lulls us to sleep and turns off our abilities to hear deeply?
This was the subject of my latest composition "Wak Auf" which was premiered in June, 2001 by the DownTown Ensembe of NYC. View the score.
Description of "Wak Auf":
"Wak Auf" is a musical attempt to wake the listener to the horrors of technological violence of the 21st century. This excerpt (on CD) begins at the section II and then follows through to the epicenter of the piece (Section IV) and showcases the terror of the nightmare: the moment that you cannot awake from a dream of the veil of human consciousness. It then follows to the end of the piece (Section V,VI, and VII).
Note: this recording has extreme volume levels, monitor your headphon/speaker levels.
In "Wak Auf" I sampled short bytes from Bach's Cantata 140 ("Wachet Auf") and created noise by shortening and lengthening the computer loops and mixing it with the background sounds of prerecorded drones made by the layering of electronic keyboard sounds. Also in the recording is Daniel Goode on clarinet, Tom Chiu on violin, and Skip LaPlante on the 96-string zither and upright bass.
"Wak Auf" is in the structure of a 7 part instrumental Cantata. The seven sections are:
- Choral, full ensemble, in key center of A;
- Recitative, clarinet solo, key center of Bb;
- Duet, bass and violin, key center of B;
- Choral, full ensemble, in the key center of C;
- Recitative, violin solo, in key center of C#;
- Duet, clarinet and violin, in key center of D; and
- Choral, full ensemble, in the key center of Eb.
The tonal centers make a rising gesture of a tritone from the notes A to Eb. Each tonal center includes additional microtones slightly above and below the tonal center. Many parts in the score indicate that instrumentalists evoke a particular "mood" or "thought' with a few verbal directions. Through rehearsal I guided the players to find melody and textural centers that they worked toward in the live performances, but none of the performances were the same. We were aware of the way the architectural spaces of the venues were canceling or creating tones and this affected the way we adjusted our live playing.
The Chorals include the full ensemble playing including myself manipulating computer looped samples of the chorals from the Bach Cantata no. 140 (see sample of score, Part I, IV and VII below). The last choral I had cut up short motifs of the Bach and had the performers play the notes in fast repititious gestures (clarinet section Section VII).
The "Wak Auf" Chorals attempt to mix an acoustic with an electronic signal to create an enormous vertical chord spanning 4 octaves of noise. The thematic content is that of a religious nightmare, or a feeling of total exclusion. The epithet in the center of the score is from the New Testament Matthew 25:1-13 which tells the story of the 12 virgins who went in to meet with Christ and some were left outside the door and some "went in with him to the marriage." In the score I have the violin and bass imitate the sound of knocking doors, but this also doubles as the sound of knocking inside one's head to wake oneself up during a bad dream.
The optimal location for performing "Wak Auf" would be a large cathedral or mosque type structure where the sounds of the "call" and of the overtones would find many places in the curves of the ceiling and corners of the wall to resonate. Budget allowing, I would also write out parts for a live tenor voice, and other instruments expanding this composition for eight players or so. Click here to download an audio excerpt of Wak Auf.
Addendum (12/01):
When this essay was originally published by the Electronic Book Review (EBR) in October 2001, we included an online survey where the readers could mark where they thought sounds belonged on the Sonic Spectrum. I have attached the current results of that survey below.
I was interested in hearing what other people think constitutes music, sound, and noise and so I had created a graph with examples from my listening experience including sounds made by animals, machines, humans and nature and I had viewers mark where they thought these sounds belong on the sonic continuum. Their input was anonymously sent to EBR and was automatically be added to the existing chart.
It is interesting but not surprising to note which sounds people thought were the most musical and which sounds they thought were the most noisy. Many people agreed on some of the sounds and on others there is a wide discrepancy.
I remember the statement of an elderly Persian woman new to the United States, complaining to me that all of western classical music sounded like noise to her, especially Bach and Beethoven. Only the sounds from her native Persia sounded like real music to her. It just goes to show you, that noise is in the "ear of the listener", and in the constraints of the culture in which we choose to live.