Noise music is a category consisting of multiple discrete genres of music that have employed noise as a musical resource.
It includes a wide range of musical styles, and sound based creative practices, that feature noise as a primary aspect. It can feature acoustically or electronically generated noise, and both traditional and unconventional musical instruments. It may incorporate live machine sounds, non-musical vocal techniques, physically manipulated audio media, processed sound recordings, field recordings, computer generated noise, stochastic processes and other randomly produced electronic signals such as distortion, feedback, static, hiss and hum. There may also be emphasis on high volume levels and lengthy, continuous pieces. More generally noise music may contain aspects such as improvisation, extended technique, cacophony and indeterminacy, and in many instances conventional use of melody, harmony, rhythm and pulse is often dispensed with.
The Futurist art movement was important for the development of the noise aesthetic, as was the Dada art movement (a prime example being the Antisymphony concert performed on April 30, 1919 in Berlin), and later the Surrealist and Fluxus art movements, specifically the Fluxus artists Joe Jones, Yasunao Tone, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Wolf Vostell, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Walter De Maria's Ocean Music, Milan Knížák's Broken Music Composition, early LaMonte Young and Takehisa Kosugi.
Contemporary noise music is often associated with extreme volume and distortion. In the avant rock domain examples include Jimi Hendrix's use of feedback, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and Sonic Youth. Other examples of music that contain noise-based features include works by Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Helmut Lachenmann, Cornelius Cardew, Theatre of Eternal Music, Rhys Chatham, Ryoji Ikeda, Survival Research Laboratories, Whitehouse, Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Blackhouse, Jean Tinguely's recordings of his sound sculpture (specifically Bascule VII), the music of Hermann Nitsch's Orgien Mysterien Theater, and La Monte Young's bowed gong works from the late 1960s. Genres such as industrial, industrial techno, lo-fi music, black metal, sludge metal and glitch music employ noise-based materials.
Read more about Noise Music: Definitions, Characteristics, Noise Compilations
Famous quotes containing the words noise and/or music:
“You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized.”
—Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)
“Have you ever been up in your plane at night, alone, somewhere, 20,000 feet above the ocean?... Did you ever hear music up there?... It’s the music a man’s spirit sings to his heart, when the earth’s far away and there isn’t any more fear. It’s the high, fine, beautiful sound of an earth-bound creature who grew wings and flew up high and looked straight into the face of the future. And caught, just for an instant, the unbelievable vision of a free man in a free world.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)