It depends on who is listening. My mother would have considered 'drums and bass' as noise. She would not have put any effort into trying to understand it. It was, to her, meaningless. She liked the Beatles though because they could 'carry a tune'.
Somewhere between signal and noise, is cacophony: "I think there's meaning, but I am not sure. It's too complicated. Is it worth my effort in concentration?" The job of the Cacophonist is to persuade listeners that it is worth the effort. You can't be me, I'm taken
reflecting on the phenomenon over the years, i concluded that amid the pointless noise of normal city life, the overwhelming daily barrage of aural bother/meaninglessness/pollution/cacophony, here was the same volume, the same knee trembling power, but ordered...
placed into patterns.
wonderful!
i accept cacophony as an (un)necessary evil, enervating though it is, it does give value to silence. best of all is ordered sound with human variation, and if it's artistic enough, it can be scaled up in volume, and still stay true, though like driving a porsche on a slick mountain road, the greater the thrill, the higher the fall, and the more likely.
i heard a good podcast the other day, an interview with the other ravi shankar daughter, (not norah jones), and she spoke about her music, and playing with her father.
she said that while she plays the written structure of the piece, she can be 'miles away' but when it's her turn to improvise, she has to be totally present.
i find this to be true.
certainly an ability to tolerate cacophony is an advantage in this day and age, but chaotic, jumbled sound can be quite destructive to one's hearing sensitivity, shutting the nuanced part down, much as working in a fishmonger can cancel out one's sense of smell.
...and that's why people are gradually losing their appreciation for 'real' music, and settle for loops of soulless deep-frozen moments, usually in meters that are reductive rather than polyrhythmic.
we have evolved all kinds of complex toys and games more than a simple african villager, yet his/her ability to enter music, and manage semi-conflicting pulses in rhythm and dance that are much more sophisticated than the braindead europap we are subjected to.
just as they usually have better teeth too, their relationship between their golgi relexes and their soundscapes is much more integral and whole than ours, suggesting a similar degradation.
more silent background, less cacophony = emptier canvas to observe better and create on.
theory no. 44448847464890!
there a few moments where intentional cacophony can be used as an artistic flourish, such as the end of 'a day in the life' by yer luvvable moptops.
but a whole evening of it?
earplugs please! it takes all sorts... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
The dissonances of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps were not well received at its premiere in 1913. It was not representing the Paganism that they knew and loved. It was noise.
Later, however:
Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, in his Six Talks at Harvard that he called The Unanswered Question, said of one passage, "That page is sixty years old, but it's never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms...", and of the work as a whole, "...it's also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name."
I am not convinced that dissonance somehow does us physiological harm. It doesn't release those painkillers in the brain that rhythm, harmony and melody can release. We don't know what biochemicals dissonance might cause to be released. Perhaps its been studied - but I've never seen it referenced in my perusal of the area. Just because dissonance doesn't make us feel good, there is no reason that say it's bad.
And many of us spend all day with dissonances of different kinds. It is useful to be able to deal with the increasing dissonances. If communications in the Old Unconnected World were a belt, today's environment is Lycra. All over containment. What we need is dissonance training ;-) You can't be me, I'm taken
Sven Triloqvist:
it is a useful skill to be able to tune out unpleasant or annoying sounds one cannot control, but not all have the talent!
maybe in some there is no collateral damage, but i suspect for the majority this is not so.
./mediateletipos))) / aural culture
Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson investigates the man-made noise pollution which is becoming increasingly invasive in our lives and in our environment, affecting both humans and wildlife. He explores what noise is, the impact of man-made noise and the possible long-term consequences if we don't turn the volume down. In the oceans, increasing levels of background noise is disrupting long-distance communication among whales. On land, studies of Great Tits have revealed how birds near busy roads sing at higher frequencies than those in nearby quieter woodlands. In 1996 the European Commission issued a Green Paper which stated that an estimated 20 per cent of all EU citizens were exposed to noise levels that scientists and health experts considered to be unacceptable, at which most people become annoyed, sleep is disturbed and health may be at risk. Noise is a health issue as well as a nuisance. Recent studies have demonstrated excessive risks of hypertension in people living near airports, even when asleep. Following the Green Paper, the European Commission issued a directive for member states to map noise levels of major cities. Today, noise, like air and water pollution, is an environmental issue which governments and policy makers cannot ignore.
Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson investigates the man-made noise pollution which is becoming increasingly invasive in our lives and in our environment, affecting both humans and wildlife. He explores what noise is, the impact of man-made noise and the possible long-term consequences if we don't turn the volume down.
In the oceans, increasing levels of background noise is disrupting long-distance communication among whales. On land, studies of Great Tits have revealed how birds near busy roads sing at higher frequencies than those in nearby quieter woodlands.
In 1996 the European Commission issued a Green Paper which stated that an estimated 20 per cent of all EU citizens were exposed to noise levels that scientists and health experts considered to be unacceptable, at which most people become annoyed, sleep is disturbed and health may be at risk. Noise is a health issue as well as a nuisance. Recent studies have demonstrated excessive risks of hypertension in people living near airports, even when asleep.
Following the Green Paper, the European Commission issued a directive for member states to map noise levels of major cities. Today, noise, like air and water pollution, is an environmental issue which governments and policy makers cannot ignore.
i think it dumbs people down, leave alone the aesthetic issue.
If communications in the Old Unconnected World were a belt, today's environment is Lycra.
more like velcro!
put a perfumier in a slaughterhouse, you think his art will improve?
as for dissonance, o yeah, there is sooo too damn much of it, people do it for its own sake, a weird desire to push the envelope i guess.
the jewel in the mud is consonance/resonance, imo, and dissonance is just unresolved chaos. as in anything even too much consonant resonance, musical over-literalness, would be soon dull, like a melody with only octaves for harmony.
so, more mud...
as we evolve we take on more adventurous games, look how long it took for the flattened fifth to be accepted in yurp! centuries, wasn't it?
so what seems like discontinuous unpatterned chaos now to my culturally entrained sensibilities may one day entrance me with its beauty. i can't help being a product of my musical environment, in fact i love it...
i always thought you were visiting from the future, sven, lol.
:) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
