Noise is sound, chiefly unwanted, unintentional, or harmful sound considered unpleasant, loud, or disruptive to mental or hearing faculties. From a physics standpoint, there is no distinction between noise and desired sound, as both are vibrations through a medium, such as air or water. The difference arises when the brain receives and perceives a sound.
Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect.
Electroacoustic music is a genre of popular and Western art music in which composers use technology to manipulate the timbres of acoustic sounds, sometimes by using audio signal processing, such as reverb or harmonizing, on acoustical instruments. It originated around the middle of the 20th century, following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition to fixed media during the 20th century are associated with the activities of the Groupe de recherches musicales at the ORTF in Paris, the home of musique concrète, the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, where the focus was on the composition of elektronische Musik, and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, where tape music, electronic music, and computer music were all explored. Practical electronic music instruments began to appear in the early 20th century.
A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularized by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.
Chaim Moshe Tzadik Palestine, known professionally as Charlemagne Palestine, is an American visual artist and musician. He has been described as being one of the founders of New York school of minimalist music, first initiated by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Moran, and Phil Niblock, although he prefers to call himself a maximalist.
Japanoise, a portmanteau of "Japanese" and "noise", is the noise music scene of Japan.
The Luhring Augustine Gallery is an art gallery in New York City. The gallery has three locations: Chelsea, Bushwick, and Tribeca. Its principal focus is the representation of an international group of contemporary artists whose diverse practices include painting, drawing, sculpture, video and photography.
M. W. Burns is an American sound artist. His audio installations explore how sound can transform one's sense of place. Much of his work has focused on public address and the evolving proliferation of spoken message systems where voices are deployed as behavior management devices, operating as a kind of "disembodied sonic superego". One of his earliest public works took place in 1983 in a Philadelphia park, repeating short phrases over a PA system.
Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. The expression was born in the 19th century and has been used especially as the name of a discipline since the 1980s.
Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminacy, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.
Noise Fest was an influential festival of no wave noise music performances curated by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth at the New York City art space White Columns in June 1981. Sonic Youth made their first live appearances at this show.
Marina Rosenfeld is an American composer, sound artist and visual artist based in New York City. Her work has been produced and presented by the Park Avenue Armory, Museum of Modern Art, Portikus (Frankfurt), Donaueschinger Musiktage, and such international surveys as documenta 14 and the Montreal, Liverpool, PERFORMA, and Whitney biennials, among many others. She has performed widely as an improvising turntablist, and served as co-chair of Music/Sound in the MFA program at the Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College, from 2007 to 2020. She has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Brooklyn College, and Dartmouth.
In music, "noise" has been variously described as unpitched, indeterminate, uncontrolled, convoluted, unmelodic, loud, otherwise unmusical, or unwanted sound, or simply as sound in general. The exact definition is often a matter of both cultural norms and personal tastes. Noise is an important component of the sound of the human voice and all musical instruments, particularly in unpitched percussion instruments and electric guitars. Electronic instruments create various colours of noise. Traditional uses of noise are unrestricted, using all the frequencies associated with pitch and timbre, such as the white noise component of a drum roll on a snare drum, or the transients present in the prefix of the sounds of some organ pipes.
Olga Balema is an artist and sculptor. One of the major concerns of her work is form, another material. Another is paying attention to where and how things go into a space. Sometimes the work can be called site respondent, other times it responds only to itself. Her practice presents mundane materials in evocative forms. She is based in New York City, New York.
Sound scenography is the process of staging spaces and environments through sound. It combines expertise from the fields of architecture, acoustics, communication, sound design and interaction design to convey artistic, historical, scientific, or commercial content or to establish atmospheres and moods.
Michael Leslie Brewster was an American artist, recognized for coining the term “acoustic sculpture.” He worked with sound to create sonic environments beginning in the 1970s until 2016. His works were shown across the United States and Europe, and are in permanent collections, notably the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the Fondo per Arte Italiano, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Giuseppe Panza Collection.
Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts is a book by historian and theorist Douglas Kahn. First published in 1999, the book charts a history of sound in the arts through the arc of modernism, the avant-garde, late-modernism, the experimentalism of John Cage, the work of the generation following him including artists such as Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Yoko Ono, as well as writers William S. Burroughs and Michael McLure, and filmmakers Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov. In doing so, Kahn uses the book to call for a form of historiographic listening that through which a new understanding of cultural history and theory can be drawn.
Sonic philosophy or the philosophy of sound is a philosophical theory that proposes thinking sonically instead of thinking about sound. It is applied in ontology or the investigation of being and the determination of what exists. The materialist sonic philosophy is also considered part of aesthetic philosophy and traces the effect of sound on philosophy and draws from the notion that sound is a flux, event, and effect.
Lionel Cruet is an audiovisual and geopolitical artist whose work is focused on intimate relationships with the environment.
Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw are a team of American sculptural installation artists known for their collaborative works. Catron and Outlaw create large-scale sculptures, kinetic installations, and immersive environments that often comment on American culture and consumerism.
