james a.

steintr ager

Speaking of Noise: From Murderous

Loudness to the Crackle of Silk

n information theory, noise has long been positioned as that

which a signal has to overcome through reduction or redundancy in order
to get across. Yet there is nothing paradoxical about the assertion that
noise is not noise. It simply remarks that the worddescriptive, referential, or conceptualis not the thing. But what is this thing, noise, about
which we might speak? And why speak of noise at all? Let me begin to
address these questions with a brief recapitulation of the moment when
noise well and truly entered critical theory, and with a flourish: Jacques
Attalis Bruits: Essai sur lconomie politique de la musique (1977; translated
as Noise: The Political Economy of Music in 1985). The overarching claim
of this work is that shifts in musical production and form are prophetic of
changes in social organization. The more radical implication of Attalis
thesis, moreover, is that music not only is ahead of changes; it can also
provoke them. Throughout, there is a line to Marx and Hegel in the implication that noise is the negative moment in the social dialectic.1 Coupled
to this dialectical account is noise as a sort of primary, material violence
that is channelized and seeking release; it would stand positively as the
Volume 22, Numbers 2 and 3 doi 10.1215/10407391-1428915
2011 by Brown University andd i f f e r e n c e s:A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

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Speaking of Noise

countervailing force to the repressive violence of society (channelization). Music, then, is the sublimation of noise by form. We can most clearly
sense its presence in the music of medieval Carnival. 2 The violence of
noise is both realand Attali cites the fact that sounds pushed to a certain
decibel level can killand figurative: a metaphor of murder (143).
Attali makes clear his debt to Ren Girard and the latters
elaboration of the violence at the base of social relationsa violence that
reappears as ritual sacrifice, for example. The metaphor for murder is
precisely this: not simply a figurative transfer of meaning but a trace of
the original act that is simultaneously reactivated and occluded. 3 Beyond
Girard, the notion of symbolic violenceor simply the idea that any
imposition of an order such as language is violentwas part of the poststructuralist landscape. 4 Not that this is the only way to situate Attali.
There is, for example, a clear precedent for his argument in Friedrich
Nietzsches account of Dionysian (chaotic and material) and Apollonian
(channelized and formal) musical tendencies and the possibility of their
conjunctionfor which Richard Wagners operas are a modelin The
Birth of Tragedy. 5 Closely related to noise as violence is noise as death.
Once again, we slide quickly into the realm of figure: death in the mode
of risk, disorder, and an excess of life (27). The precedents here too are
fairly obvious: Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the treatment of the
death drive as an antirepressive force in Herbert Marcuses messianic
melding of psychoanalysis and Marxism in Eros and Civilization, Norman O. Browns similar thesis in Life against Death, not to mention the
connections forged earlier among death, the sacred, eroticism, and excess
in the writings of Georges Bataille. 6 And so noise is also characterized as
blasphemous.
Finallyand somewhat hastily grafted onto these points of
reference and lending an air of scientific credibilitywe also find reference to Henri Atlans information theory account that noise can be a
source of order, which is here given political resonances that are at best
latent in the original account (which has mainly to do with cybernetics
and communication, albeit with consideration of implications for physics
and biology) (see Atlan). Noise in Attalis argument is polyvalent, but its
various meanings all do hang togetherif not as a coherent paradigm, at
least in terms of family resemblances. Sliding between supposedly literal
effects and figurative meanings, between science and philosophy, gives
the impression of grounding in some original, objective, and material
noise. It is somewhat ironic to find in a work with clear Marxist theoretical

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underpinnings that noise should thus find itself looking rather ideological in form (doubly ironic because information theory had long specified
that whatever we call noise has to do with conceptual unity and that
the noise thing is relative to the context). The electrical engineer may
treat Brownian motion as noise, and so it will be in that instancebut
not in others.7 Attali recognizes such relativitythat noise does not exist
in itself but only in relation to a systemand yet he consistently turns
noise back into an essence or variety of related essences (for example, in
the reifying assertion that noise is violence) (26).
Taking up the matter of relativity and essentialism, I want to
return to the scene of Attalis intervention and ask how we might specify
noise in the context of musicthat is, in Attalis original context. What
exactly would noise be in or to music if we discarded murderous loudness
as an ultimately uninteresting limit case and treated figurative uses such
as blasphemy as suggestive at best? Would it be worth speaking of noise
anymore? In the first part of this essay I consider these questions by looking
at the directionor rather directionsthat the theoretical discourse on
noise has taken since Attali. I concentrate on the writings of Michel Chion,
who has had much to say on the topic and who also occupies an interestingly oblique position vis--vis the sorts of philosophical and political
commitments that we see in Attalis Noise. On the whole, the movement has
been from an apparently unified and monolithic concept of noise, which
reveals its fissures on close inspection, to an understanding of noise that
insists up front on variability both across and within mediato the point
that speaking of noise itself becomes suspect. In the second part I move
seemingly far from French soil and theorybut as it turns out, not that
farwith a consideration of concrete practices and conceptual justifications of (musical) noise making in Japan. I conclude with a return to Chion
and some thoughts on how language, while incapable of determining auditory perception, might in this very incapacity help explain how attention
to words contributes to the active listening he puts forward as a model.
French Noise: Bruit, Son, Remue-Mnage
Some thirty years after Attali proclaimed in a virtual manifesto
the transformative powers of noise, Chion called for an end to the idea in
a short essay titled Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit.8 The crux of
Chions case is this: the term noise can denote a sound of whatever source
and a sonic nuisance. There is here a problem of translation, for Chion does

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not of course use the English word noise, but the French bruit, which has
a much wider application. To take an example given in the essay, whereas
in French it is normal to say le bruit des pas, it would be odd in English to
say the noise of footsteps, unless, that is, one wanted to draw attention
to their negative presence. To summon another French theorist of noise
and its relations, we might look to Michel Serres and his elaboration of the
parasitewhich among other things refers to the disturbing presence of
noise in the transmission of a signal. Bruit would be a parasite word par
excellence: a term that can be used to indicate whatever sound but that
infects the transmission of its own message with the negative connotations
of its more specific use. The tendency in English to use sound starts us
off with what we might call the assumption of neutrality. This tendency is
unwitting; it is merely the idiom. On the other hand, the French inclination
to use bruit colors sonic perception with an implicit negative judgment.
For general purposes, Chion thus suggests that his fellow Francophones
employ son instead of bruit in order to neutralize the sonic field.
Given his topic, and especially his project in the essay Pour en
finir avec la notion du bruit, we may be surprised to discover that Chion
never mentions Attali (though the latter does make a brief appearance
in Le Son 6667). This omission seems to me neither pointed nor careless, but rather a simple confirmation of how different are the authors
respective intellectual milieus, even within the French context. In this
case, as a musician writing about music, Chion has quite different concerns from the broadly social and political agenda of Attali. These have
to do with what might be prejudicial both to composition or production
and to audition. Chion quite openly situates himself in what we might
with relative safety call a French school of twentieth-century music production and theory: musique concrte, and especially the work of Pierre
Schaeffer. And it is in this context and in relation to the practices of
musique concrte, with its use of found sound and manipulation, that we
can best understand Chions critique of causalism, of which the rejection of the noise notionthe assertion of the inherent nature of noise and
the accompanying implicit hierarchization of soundsis a part. By this
expression, Chion means the usually latent valuation that attaches to a
sounds source. Causalism is a value judgment that can be most easily
grasped in the favoring of traditional instruments used in instrumental
music over sampling or extended techniques. In short, Chion is worried
about academicism and distinctions of cultural capital that continue to
mark the world of musicor rather, the world of French music. And it is

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primarily in relation to this world that he rejects the currency of noise

as a technical term meaning any sound without precise pitch. This is the
form in which the everyday prejudice against noise is smuggled into a
musical discourse that would consider itself grounded in science and in
objective measurements. Chions aim is to draw attention to the lack of a
clear distinction between sound and noisebetween supposed host and
parasiteand to the fact that the attempt to provide such a distinction is
linguistically and ideologically underpinned rather than the recognition
of a supposed sonic fact.
Despite their apparently incommensurable positionswhich
so miss one another that to describe them as antagonistic seems grossly
inaccuratewe do glimpse in Attali and Chion a shared rhetoric. Is there
not, after all, an echo of the French Revolutionary pamphlet in Chions
call to do away with noise? If so, Chion is rather Girondist in terms of the
relative moderation of his positions as well as the looseness of his affiliations with theory. He even allows that bruit might still be used if strictly
limited to noise pollution. 9 Moreover, in spite of the apparent abruptness
of his declaration against noise as a useful concept in music, we can find
traces of the argument implicit in his earlier writings on film in particular. In his foreword to Chions Audio-Vision from 1990, Walter Murch
mentions that French sound artists dealt with bruits and that the word
had negative connotations that colored the entire approach to sound in
film in France.10 This is a point that Murch may have extrapolated from
Chions overarching thesis, which was precisely that sound in film had
been devalued, disparaged, and largely overlooked and undertheorized.
Film had been treated as fundamentally a visual medium, and the advent
of sound pictures sixty years before had done little to change this attitude
(even if the reality was quite different). Chions aim was to show that one
had to talk of audio-visionthe mutually constructive interplay of sound
and spectacleif one were really to analyze film. And he would provide
at least some of the tools to do so.
While one of Chions key contributions has been to draw our
attention to and raise our awareness of the various ways in which sound
is handled, perceived, and functions differently across media and even
within a given medium, this is not to suggest that his analyses of one
medium have not influenced those concerning another. For example, it
strikes me as feasible and sensible that his rejection of causalism in music
stems only in part from the practices of musique concrte and Schaeffers
insistence on acousmatic listening (that is, listening without the visual

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presence of musicians or instruments). It also stems from Chions engagementas both theorist and practitionerwith sound in film, where it is
clear that effects are often added after the fact and that the cause might
bear only an analogous relation to what is heard and thereby signified.
For example, the crushing of a watermelonin itself somewhat ridiculous,
especially when linked to the sight of the samemay be converted into
an effect of horror when the audio-viewer sees or is visually led to infer a
human body.11 Moreover, it would appear that musique concrte has borrowed and learned from the film medium when it comes to sampling and
sound artistry. In this regard, it is worth noting a parallel between Chion
and Takemitsu Toru, who similarly allowed his more strictly musical
compositions and his work on film soundtracks to positively parasitize one
another (so very different from the computer manipulations of Karlheinz
Stockhausen). This mutual influence and interplay, however, does not
mean that media are the same or that noise appears or works the same
way across media or even within a medium.
It is precisely the differences in media that help explain why
Chion in Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit makes the superficially
suspect claim that he, for one, has never used the French term for noise.
We must take this to mean, I think, that bruit has never been part of his
technical musical vocabulary. It would have been difficult for him to avoid
less technical employmentsas he himself notes, there is an idiomatic
tendency at work hereor to forgo bruit in his writings on sound in film,
where the word and derivations are part of the professional jargon.12 To
provide sounds for a film is bruitage and the Foley artist is a bruiteur. In
fact, the term bruit appears in the very titles of several occasional pieces
by Chion that appeared before Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit. It is
to these essays that I now turn, because they show Chion speaking of noise
in relation to a variety of media and media intersections. I would add that
their occasional nature is also of interest insofar as it helps reveal Chion
at work: many of the claims that would be rendered more abstractly in a
theoretical argument are here made usefully concrete.
I begin with Carnets acoulogiques: Bruits de mer (1990). The
title alone confirms the ordinariness of bruit: sea noises would create
an odd and ominous effect wholly absent from the usual sounds of the
sea. In this brief essay, Chion examines why sound recordings do not and
cannot reproduce the soothing ambience of the shoreline experience. He
speculates that such ambience is the result not of the sonic element alone
but rather of the interplay of the fine details and complexity of the visual

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scene gathered and framed by the massive, undifferentiated aural component: The sound is a stain whereas the image is a drawing; the sound
is like Soulages while the image is like Drer [Le son est une tache l o
limage est un dessin; le son est du Soulages quand limage est du Drer]
(47). Further, Chion suggests that it is precisely in the play of noncoincidence between the two senses in which the specific charm of the ocean
resides. The charm is lost when the aural component is isolated and reproduced. Interestingly, accompanying this essay was a cropped reproduction
of Katsushika Hokusais woodcut print The Great Wave at Kanagawa from
the widely appreciated Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Whether intentional
or not, the illustration suggests that perhaps the medium of visual reproductionalbeit not filmed or realisticmight be able to supplement the
deficit in ways that the aural cannot. The finely drawn black lines of the
engraving lend both complexity and energy to the illustration, and they
are balanced by the massive, undifferentiated color of the printthe two
aspects working together and against one another for effect.
This process of working together and against is echoed in Carnets acoulogiques: Le bruit et la parole (1990), where Chion turns to the
medium of theater. The occasion is a production of Macbeth where the set
design included a floor made of flexible slats that makes noise when one
walks about on it, recalling itself to the ear, to the point that it inhibits the
comprehension of the text [(I)l fait du bruit quand on se dplace dessus, et
se rappelle loreille, jusqu gner la comprhension du texte] (35). The
effect created by the design thus recalls the classical definition of noise in
information theory as that which inhibits the transmission of a signal. It
is in certain respects simply an extension of theater as a medium, which
since childhood Chion has associated with a certain remue-mnage or
hubbub. (Remue-mnage is literally the sound of furniture being moved,
an idiom for uproar.) This impression was doubtless increased because
he was listening to dramas on the radio, where the sounds of movement
were all the more prominent to the extent that through them one tried
to guess what was happening on a stage that remained unseen [o les
bruits de dplacement taient dautant plus sensibles qu travers eux on
essayait de deviner les jeux de scne quon ne voyait pas] (35). The biographical detail adds an intriguing, almost experimental layer to Chions
account. He asserts that for him theater initially had the visual element
removed and was instead experienced acousmatically. That is, through
the medium of radio, the sound element in the theater had been isolated
and, in retrospect, allowed Chion to perceive part of what the medium

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does: it marks the passage from noise to voice. In the theater, we hear
the clash of materiality and signification, which for the latter is also a
necessary condition of existence. As a live vocal and more broadly sonic
medium, it highlights the fact that the voice as a carrier of semantic content must silence noise in order to inform but that it simultaneously relies
on and brings sound into relief.13 Chion thus writes, Wouldnt theater
be precisely this: noise, original confusion, living muck from which the
divine human word emerges halfway, in flashes [Ne serait-ce pas cela,
le thtre: le bruit, la confusion originelle, gangue vivante dont emerge
demi, par clairs, la divine parole humaine] (35). When Chion uses the
term gangue, which indicates the amorphous matter that encloses a gem,
we are not, I think, to take it that the voice is what we are meant to extract
from theater. Rather, theater would itself enact the relation between noise
and voice; it would be a sort of embodiment of signal-to-noise ratio where
the latter term is just as important to grasp as the former: the negated,
abject, nonsignificant, but still necessary material remainder. This notion
of theater is simply brought out in the production of Macbeth in question.
Indeed, because the stage design interferes with speech with apparent
purport, we are led to infer that this very clash is in effect the signal: a
call to second-order reflection on the signal-noise relationship and the
emergence and perhaps tenuousness of meaning (with a hint of Atlans
order-from-noise principle).
My last example of Chion on noise in various media returns us
to the more familiar territory of film. The essay Bruits de Chine takes
Bernardo Bertoluccis The Last Emperor as an occasion to narrate a certain
history of the use of sound in film. In the beginning and for a long time,
there were sound libraries that included largely denotative sounds. An
image of a train might be matched with a standardized whistleor the
whistle alone might signify travel. A scene of nature would inevitably
include the chirping of birdsonce again, often the same birds from one
film to the nextand so forth. As sound reproduction technologies have
progressed, however, what might strike us as a more and merely realistic
rendering of sounds in the new regime as opposed to the old, predictable,
limited vocabulary should not fool us. The new noises may be subtler at
getting messages across, but combined with images they are messages
nonetheless. In Technique et cration au cinma (2002), Chion likewise
notes that in film it is much harder to make a sound that does not carry
any particular meaning than to make a significant or meaningful one (un
bruit significatif ) (99). This is a history that Chion has given in greater

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detail in Audio-Vision and other extended writings on sound in film, where

he has been deeply interested in the way that sounds (bruits) come to signify. For example, the choice of what sort of sound should accompany the
image of a man opening a newspaper depends on the meaning desired:
the nervousness of the gesture, the fragility of the paper, the presence or
importance of the personage. Chion calls this process le rendu of a sound:
that is to say, the translation by means of sound of a sensation or signification that is not specifically sonorous (the rendu is always the rendering
of some thing) (Technique 99).14 Cinematic sound in this sense is rarely
redundant in relation to the image. That is, it is unusual to find sound providing no new information but simply reinforcing the visual given (merely
working against noise in the information-theory sense). Rather, it tends to
be on the road, as it were, to language as a system of meaningful distinctions. It is connotation before or without denotation. Historically, the shift
has thus been from fewer soundsmore voice and musical soundtrackto
a proliferation of sounds and an increasingly nuanced expressive palate.
In Bruits de Chine and in other writings, Chion, while cautious not to sound like an advertisement, has treated Dolby as the key
development in allowing a more detailed and more distributed sound and
thus more signifying and expressive narrative resources (Technique 105).
It is here helpful to recall that the original goal of Ray Dolby, who founded
Dolby Labs in 1965, was not fidelity of reproduction per se but rather noise
reduction using technologies of companding, that is, the compression and
expansion of signals. While Dolby noise reduction debuted in 1971 with A
Clockwork Orange, it was only some four years later with the introduction
of Dolby Stereo that channels increased. (Stereo was a misnomer, since
from the outset it could include the central and surround channels that
have since become synonymous with the brand.)15 Original Dolby simply
lowered the right half of the signal-to-noise ratio (rapport signal-bruit in
French). In the golden age of the Hollywood sound film, Chion suggests
that there was a sort of sonic horror vacui that was filled with prolixity
and music. But was this really or mainly some existential avoidance or
a more simple practical necessity? Without dialogue or swelling violins,
the noise of film might prove a positive distraction. Chion himself notes
that Dolby, by reducing hiss and other sonic nuisances, has enhanced
the use of silence as itself message or expressive force (Technique 105).
This can be particularly helpful in horror movies but more generally has
meant that little noises have been able to play an enhanced role. While
others had gone before, The Last Emperor marks a sort of coming out or

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apotheosis of such detailed and nuanced sound, as opposed to the loud bass
rumble of a spaceshipthat is, the sort of overly eager and obvious early
demonstrations of Dolbys powers of reproduction and amplification. This
simply drives home the point that in cinema, where sound is coupled to
image, any noise or indeed silence is presumptively significant: a jammed
or absent transmission always appears jammed or absent for some reason
and thus as a metacommentary.
On this quiet note, we can make out why noise as a monolithic
category might also have little place in music for Chion. Compared to the
semantic-sonic voicing of theater and the significant interplay of sight and
sound in cinemaand even to the effect of the ocean itself considered as
an audiovisual mediumit would appear that noise in music is not positively recuperated as meaning, nor does it conceptually serve any function other than placing artificial limitations on production and audition.
Indeed, if in film sounds are turned toward significance and expression,
in the realm of music we witness a countermove toward and, I think, an
implied preference for insignificance and deconceptionalization. Music
appears as medium that, to be appreciated in its singularity, is or should
be quintessentially acousmatic: stripped of visual elements that might
serve as vectors of signification. Does this leave anything of the tradition
or paradigm in which Attali placed himself, where the negative is positive?
A paradigm in which noise is inherently loud and essentially violent, and
thus a force of disruption, change, and revolution? We do get a hint of such
violence in another brief essay by Chion titled Dissolution de la notion
du timbre, which, while published some twenty years prior, serves as a
sort of anterior pendant to Pour en finir avec la notion du bruit.16 Chion
here seems to advocate a sort of aggressive abuse of instrumental causes
as a way to free ourselves from them as hallowed sources or origins. What
happens to the timbre of the trombone when one strikes the instrument
rather than blowing through it in the traditional manner? Or again and
more emphatically, [W]hat does the timbre of a piano wire mean when it
is attacked according to the various techniques of musique concrte and
then its acoustic visage is reconfigured by recording and manipulation
of this recording? The symbiosis between human and horn, infused with
resounding withour breath and spiritualized, is brutally and physically
demystified; the caress of the fingers on the keyboard becomes an assault
on the instrument that is then prolonged into a tortuous reconfiguration
in the lab that ultimately results in a disfiguration.

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One could easily push these points too far. Attack, after all,
in a technical musical context bears little or no connotation of violence. A
pianists attack on the keyboard can be light and tender. And to an extent,
Chion is simply describing the fact and the effectsobvious and less
soof the rise of extended techniques as part of the musical scene. Yet
he also clearly aims to destroy timbre as the acoustic fetish that holds
musicians and auditors in its thrall and to carry out the ritual sacrifice
that founds the new musical order: Current techniques enable an even
more total scattering of the acoustic identity of the instrument, from the
moment that it is treated as a vulgar sonic body. There is, then, a hint of
Girard and, indeed, of sparagmos: ritual dismemberment and scattering
of the remains. It is the form of sacrifice associated appropriately with
the mysteries of Dionysus. But just as much as this moment looks back to
Attali, in its attenuationin its faint echoing of the arguments of Attalis
Noiseand its attention to particularities within a generalization, it just
as clearly marks out the path to the rejection of noise in the later essay.
Further, if La dissolution de la notion du timbre is not centrally about the relationship between sound and language, it does adumbrate the critique of causalism that is central to Pour en finir avec la
notion du bruit. We can see in the first instance something along the lines
of an anti-Platonism. Chion does not argue in precisely these terms, but I
would like to say that the sonic image of an instrument or its gestalt transcendentally unifies the fourth element of music as traditionally defined.
The notion of timbre suggests a quantifiable, objective feature that, along
with those other quantifiables of pitch, duration, and intensity, completes
our picture of what music is and can be. In fact, however, the term groups
together a number of particularities that can be assorted in different ways
and that change with each particular instantiation. Thus Chion writes that
timbre links to an image formed in the auditory memory on the basis of
variable and acoustically heterogeneous givens, and this image is often the
result of an extratemporalas it were, carved upapprehension of sounds
that once heard are reassembled and grasped in the form of their overall
unfolding. Which is to say that we mistake timbre for a transcendent fact
and guiding icon when it is actually a post hoc and somewhat arbitrary
construction. Critiquing timbre in these terms amounts once again to a
call to render sound acousmatic, this time by banishing the virtual image
that anchors and guides sound production and audition along certain preestablished lines. Or, in the more Aristotelian terms that mark the later

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noise essay, we might take pitch, duration, and intensity as the formal
causes of music and treat timbre as the material cause. When we shift
our point of view to efficient causes, howeverthat is, to the fetishized
source of soundwe are apt to read a final cause into this: the source of
the sound serves as an arche or guiding principle. This is once again why
acousmatic listening for Chion is itself paradigmatic: without knowledge of
the source, we cannot slip in value judgments having to do with causation.
Japanese Noise: , ,
Chions recommendation in Pour en finir avec la notion du
bruit is circumspect. It does not claim to be revolutionary but rather
advisory and only slightly monitory: a suggestion that we try and see what
would happen if bruit were replaced with son. Would we hear more openly?
Just a bit? He also puts before us a specific case: it is in French that bruit
not only carries negative connotations but through its very idiomatic currency has to some degree shapedclearly determined is too strongwhat
we might with hesitancy call the French cultural institutions of musical
production and listening. Chion notes that bruit is not the same as English
noise, and the same goes for Lrm or Gerusch (German), rumore (Italian),
and ruido (Castilian). Different languages entail different constructions
of noise, and they would differently condition local cultures of sound.
Can his argument, then, be usefully translated to other contexts? Can it
travel? And how far would we want to push the connection between language and culture suggested here, however tentatively? To get us thinking
in this direction, I am going to turn not to the examples from European
languages mentioned but rather to Japanese and Japan, where noise is
distributed over a number of overlapping but nonequivalent terms:
(onkyou), (sou-on), (sou-on), (noizu). This series is obviously
not exhaustive; the terms are general, and Japanese, like other languages,
has a highly developed vocabulary for more particular sounds. And while
I think it would be difficult to demonstrate the degree to which inter- and
intralinguistic differences condition perception, these observations nonetheless provide a useful entre into what might be called the culture or at
least cultivation of noise in Japanese underground music. (The reasons
for my hesitancy will soon become clear.)
The first three are compounds, all of which contain the character (otou). By itself, otou covers a wide range of sonic referents, ranging
from sound and noise to voice, tone, pitch, and timbre. Bashos

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famous frog in the haiku drops into the pond with an otou. In English, this
is usually rendered as sound. As one might have come to expect by now,
French translations oscillate between son and bruit. In the first compound,
(onkyou), the second element comes close to redoubling the firstand
indeed the first character in the compound is incorporated into the second
as its radicaland simply means making sound or noise. This compound,
thus highlights the bare sonic element and might be considered the closest
equivalent to English sound or French son in their relative neutrality. The
second and third compounds are usually more negative. In both cases
the sonic element is modified by an initial character that designates disturbance. (In Japanese is one term that can be used for noise in the
cybernetic sense. In Chinese, alone is the term for noise in this sense,
which does not mean that the character lacks other, wider applications.
For example, noise reduction is ; signal-to-noise ratio is rendered
, where the first character indicates message, trust, or fidelity, the
second noise, and the third comparison.) Historically viewed, appears
to be an onomatopoeia and rooted in the chirping of birds and buzzing
of insects (repeating the sound rapidly, one might make out the whirr of
deafening summer cicadas).17
The last on the list is clearly a loanword, as the katakana
script, generally reserved for foreignthat is, neither Japanese nor Chineseimports suggests and as any English speaker can readily infer from
the transliteration noizu. It is also the other frequent term for noise in the
cybernetic and electronic engineering senses in Japanese. Visually marked
as nonnative, mimicking another tongue, and yet transformed into Japanese by the script and by the modified pronunciation: is linguistic
hybridity in a word. If nothing else, the linguistic situation in Japanese
suggests alreadywithout any mention of culturethat notions of nativeness need to be seriously questioned. This is not to say that Japanese is
unique. English noise is itself, after all, a gift of the Norman Invasion and
shouldered the (native?) Middle English din to the side. And noise appears
to have its roots in harm (nox) or nausea, that is, seasickness. These etymologies suggest, moreover, that we should be wary of any implicit call
to origins when theorizing noise. There is no returning of noise from
figurative uses to its literal, that is, sonic, denotationthe sonic denotation
is already, historically speaking, a figure.
is also the usual term for the musical scene in Japan that
has generally specialized in loud, harsh, electronic cacophony. And while
it would be going too far to claim that language determined the shape of

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the scene, there does seem to be at least an affinity between the word and
its connotations and the type of music or nonmusic filed under its rubric.
In Noise/Music: A History, Paul Hegarty sums up the variety of this scene
with a striking juxtaposition: If Japanese noise is zen, then it is also rope
bondage (134). The first term of equivalency signifies a certain studied,
extreme meditative calm and detachment. I will return to it shortly. The
second equivalency is perhaps less evident but nonetheless stands as a sort
of other pole in the definition of Japaneseness. The particular practice
in question is (kinbaku-bi or the fine art of tight binding). Photographs of nude women artfully bound fit with an array of practices and
types of representation that together define a Japan that is other to Western sexual morality: from shunga or highly stylized and often grotesque
erotic woodblock prints to films that mix together violence and eroticism
(ranging from the highbrow avant-gardism of Oshimas infamous Empire
of the Senses, where the bereft heroine carries around her lovers severed
penis, to lowbrow horror films).18 Such practices and representations have
long been a source of fascination and repulsion outside Japan.19 To take
just one case at least marginally relevant to my topic, I would point the
reader in the direction of Olivier Assayass film Demonlover (2003), which
draws for inspiration on hentaianimated movies featuring, among other
things, bizarre sexual couplings of humans with tentacled monstersand
has a crackling, staticky soundtrack by Sonic Youth, an alternative band
known for its musical incorporations of noise. 20
Let me put aside the problems and complexities of representative sampling, selection bias, cultural essentialism, and exoticism that
immediately suggest themselves. They are obviouswhich is not to say
entirely without interest. Noise music in Japan has become one of those
exports that has earned national brand distinction as Japanoise. As such,
it is to J-Pop as J-horror is to the dreamy Japanimation of Miyazaki Hayao.
Granted, it also boasts a much smaller group of fans than any of the other
terms of comparison. The undisputed leader of the scene for over two
decades now has been Akita Masami, who goes by the nom-de-bruit of
Merzbow. 21 He is also an animal rights activist, a frequent contributor
to the pornographic press with a specialist interest in bondage, and an
occasional filmmaker (directing a short, gruesome film in the Legendary
Suicides series that features a woman erotically committing seppuku).
Merzbow seems to have gone further than most in attacking what Chion
has called the acoustic fetish. His initial instruments of choice included
tape decks and guitarsthe usual rock-and-roll noise machinedistorted,

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treated, and accompanied in various ways. In recent years he has moved

to the laptop computer. And while the new technology has not meant a
fundamental change in his approach to noisemakingearsplitting sheets
of sound, hammering, often arrhythmic cacophonyit has rendered the
notion of timbre as a form of causalism a nonissue. It may appear as a sort
of hyperformalism in which form itself gives way to blocks of content, in
which mediation seeks to produce an encounter with the immediate. It is a
sort of sonic obscene, and, provisionally suggesting a transcultural dimension to the phenomenon, we might be little surprised that it is the female
body that appears in this context as an abject force to be both ecstatically
encountered and controlled. 22
If I make this comparison of what is usually taken as a visual
register with the sonic, it is not accidental. Akita has himself cross-referenced the registers in such recorded pieces as his Music for Bondage Performance. More to the point, he has suggested in an interview that noise
is to music as pornography is to sex, with the implication that the initial
terms of comparison carry, if not common content, a shared extremity. He
has also insisted on the non-Christian, non-Western approach to sexual
mores in Japan in particular. 23 To illustrate this difference, he alludes to
Hokusais infamous shunga of a human womans carnal encounter with
an octopusa woodcut that may serve here as the obscene pendant of the
Great Wave at Kanagawa. If the sort of tentacular encounters from hentai have a classical cultural point of reference in Japan, it is surely here. 24
And yet Akitas musical pseudonym is a reference to Kurt Schwitterss
Merzbau, the Dadaist makeover of the artists Hanover house. This fact
alone should give us pause when it comes to assertions of cultural purity,
which hold here only to the extent that Japan has been frequentlyindeed,
stereotypicallytreated as not an originator but a perfecter of artistic
traditions and the purveyor of a studied and deeply formalist aestheticism
(the tea ceremony stands out in both respects). 25 In the conceptual apparatus that accompanies Merzbows noise, there is just as much Georges
Bataille, with his entwining of death and eroticism, as anything supposedly autochthonous. Indeed, Akita is well aware of a prominent (Western)
tradition of conflating death, cruelty, and excess with the erotic in which
Bataille looms large and of which Attalis Noise is a descendant. It will be
recalled that the latter precisely positioned bruit as violence and murder,
as death, as an excess of life, and as a potentially revolutionary force.
Merzbow seems to have attempted a literalization of Attalis
largely metaphoricor at least nonsonicuses of noise. Even with this

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attempt to literalize, it is not clear that this is autonomous noise, since

it is marked by a profound conceptualism. Witness the Merzbox: a careerspanning fifty compact disc collection that came bound in a rubber fetish
box along with a T-shirt, posters, and other paraphernalia (Extreme
Records, 2000; limited edition of 1,000). 26 But from a strictly sonic or acousmatic standpointif such an abstraction is allowable given the amount of
context that surrounds his productionsit seems fair to say Merzbow has
boxed himself in exactly in the manner that Chion accuses Luigi Russolo,
the godfather of noise, of doing in his LArte dei Rumori (c. 1913): Instead
of opening the noise cage, Russolo enters it, shuts the door on himself,
claims that here lies paradise and that all is fine and dandy amidst the
noises, thereby confirming the idea of an absolute distinctionan essential
distinctionbetween musical sounds and noises (Pour en finir 9). That
is, there is something inherently limiting about being forced to choose
between noise and musica limitation that sound as a neutral category,
lacking precisely this distinction, does not entail. The limitation seems
to hold just as well for Japanese as for French bruit, and it would
appear that the decision to make noise, celebrating its negative connotations, and to label oneself accordingly, acts, if not in terms of linguistic or
cultural determination, at least as a retroactive binding to a certain set
of concepts, criteria, and practices. Which is to say that in Merzbow the
attack on the acoustic fetish has itself become fetishized.
If Akita Masami and like-minded Japanese cacophonists such
as Melt Banana have carved out a spot in the global underground music
networks for noizu and loudness, another scene that emerged in the 1990s
and into the first decade of the twenty-first century (and counting) is associated with (onkyou) and with machine-generated and manipulated
soundshushed rather than harsh or industrial. This is the Zen side that
Hegarty mentions, and it is once again worth noting the suggestive correspondence between the term and the genre: both tending to sound without
further (value) distinctions. Among the more important contributors is
Sachiko M., who uses a sine-wave generator to produce subtly shifting
soundscapes. We should not jump to the conclusion, however, that onkyou
is somehow the distaff side of Japanoise, and I will concentrate on the
work of Nakamura Toshimaru, in large part because he, like Merzbow,
represents another extreme version of anticausalism, albeit without the
revolutionary trappings or pose. Nakamuras instrument of choice is a
no-input mixing board, and it would not qualify as an instrument at
all in the traditional sense. It is a piece of sonic apparatus that has been

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taken on a driveto borrow from the Situationists terminology, which

of course focused on the spectacularthat begins and ends in the same
place: a mixing board in which input does not come from an outside source;
rather, the output has been plugged into the machine, creating a closed
circuit. The result is noise from the board itself that can be subsequently
manipulated. Of course, while feedback in music or sound amplification
has usually been treated simply as noise from an engineering point of
view, it would be better to speak of unwanted feedback (in cybernetics,
where the term originated, feedback has generally played a positive role
as the way that systems control and regulate themselves). In electronically amplified music production, feedback has long been relativized and
instrumentalized. Jimi Hendrixs deconstruction of the National Anthem
at Woodstockwith notes held until feedback bends them into lacerating
sirenshas become a sort of locus classicus in this regard. 27 And one might
note that a group such as Sonic Youth, which has situated itself between
noise and pop, has used guitars both to unleash howls of feedback as well
as for a more subtle play of amplified harmonics.
What Nakamura does is not new, then, but it does represent
a logical extension and almost reductio ad absurdum: a negation of the
traditional instrument and the conversion of feedback without notes into
the sole sonic register. It makes little sense to talk of harmony or melody
here, and anything approaching rhythm is a carefully extracted artifact
of the machine. In performance, Nakamuras sounds hover on the edge of
silence and demand the utmost attention if they are to be grasped at all.
The tactile metaphor is not apt, for one cannot grasp but must hearken to
these gentle, modulated buzzes and hums. appears a suitable, openended term for such a form of sound production, which, while not exactly
music in the traditional sense, does not tie one to the violent, excessive
aspects of noise (nor, of course, does it exclude them either). But is there
anything culturally Japanese about Nakamuras approach to sound? Collaborations suggest at the very least affinities with musicians from the
West. I am thinking primarily of his work with the British musician
Keith Rowe, who was for over thirty years one of the principal members
of amm, whose sonic landscapes may have genealogical connections to
free jazz, British free improvisation, and avant-garde classical music but
remain somewhat in a class of their own. 28 Rowes instrument of choice
is the electric guitar, but it is approached in ways that are also distinctly
anticausalist. The guitar itself is laid on a table over which the operator
hovers like a surgeon more than a musician and produces sounds in a

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variety of manners. 29 For example, a tiny electric fan may blow across the
stringsan attack that is no longer physical but given over to a caress
of air instead of solid objects (plectra, fingers). The electrical engine also
creates interference with the amplification technology, and this noise
is recuperated as sound and music rather than avoided as a nuisance. As
with the no-input mixing board, an element of reproduction, processing,
or amplification thus becomes instrumentalthat is, a part of the network
or circuit that is itself the instrument.
To hear Nakamura and Rowe perform puts one in mind of John
Cages 433 and the conceptual underpinning that the composer gave his
celebrated and disdained work: the near silence attunes the listener to the
rustle of the room, to the alternation of inhalation and exhalation, to the
traffic outside, and such sounds join in an experience that is not immersive but resonant. The point of reference is as apt as it is inevitable: Cage,
who had attended lectures on Zen by D.T. Suzukiwho would become the
foremost popularizer of Zen in North America and help seal its association
in the American imagination with Japanopenly embraced the philosophy
as an appropriate way to approach his music. 30 Zen, with its emphasis on
meditation and emptiness, does seem an appropriate point of reference
for the type of listening that sound-based and anticausalist rather than
traditional instrumental musics call for. It thus comes as no surprise to
find, many years after Cage, Zen once again given as a model in Pauline
Oliveross work Deep Listening: A Composers Sound Practice. 31 A key figure
in twentieth-century electronic music in the United States as both composer and accordionist, Oliveros has also crossed borders from avant-garde
circles into (certainly not the mainstream) thoughtful alternative music:
Sonic Youth played her composition Six for New Time on their millennial
tribute album Goodbye 20th Century, a compilation featuring the work of
crucial composers and pieces of experimental classical music. (Notably,
Oliveross piece was the only one specifically written for the album.) There
is a danger here that we may slip not only into exoticismand I have tried
to show just how difficult it is to speak of cultures, let alone cultural purity,
when it comes to noisebut also into the mystifying and precious. Just
as an emphasis on careful listening in conversation as a morally upright
openness to others can appear as a form of aural sentimentalismI hear
you as the assertion of sympathywe might be cautious in opting for deep
listening in music as a requirement or as inherently ethical. 32

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Zen Noise: From Aesthetics to Ascetics

Beyond meditative practicessonic awareness and deep listeningis there not something noisy about Zens most famous vehicle of
enlightenment, that is, the koan as absurd or meaningless, the disruption
of communication that provokes intuitive enlightenment? One of the most
celebrated, attributed to Hakuin Ekaku, is apposite: Two hands clap and
there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?33 In conclusion, I want
to return to Chions work, not so much to affirm it or even interpret it but
rather to consider what a close encounter with itas reader and translatorhas suggested to me as paths of development. In particular, I want to
rejoin the notion of the materiality of sound to that of language as a guide
to listening. Just as Zen seems a trifle portentous, should we not similarly
take our distance from what we might call Romantic particularism in
Chions considerations of timbre and noise? Is not the embrace of sound or
son rather than noise or bruit as a neutralization of value judgments and
exclusions also an attempt to purify the sonic domainto ensure that it
is unsullied by matter and instruments? Having banished the cause and
its materiality, do we now quest after an ineffable, transcendent aural
experience? I use the interrogative here both to leave open possibilities of
critique and alsomore importantlyto suggest that there are alternate
routes that lie open.
In his discussion of reduced listening in filmlistening attentively to the sound-divorced imagesChion has made it clear that this is
only one manner of approaching the audiovisual medium. To be helpful,
acousmatic listening in this case must eventually return to the image in
order precisely to grasp the mutual interactions of the sonic and visual
registers. These mutual interactions demonstrate that the notion of prior
purity is spurious: it is the mutation of sound and image in interaction that
holds logical priority. Reduced listening is a pedagogical technique and
a preliminary approach rather than an end in itself. If it is ethical, it is in
the sense of building habits of listening and undertaking a certain sonic
asceticism as a useful exercise or labor. These notions of labor and exercise
(the original senses of askesis) are in quiet yet determined opposition to
the liberationist paradigm in Attali: the noise that will set you free from
order and all forms of symbolic violence. They do have a liberational
subtext nonetheless: promoting a freedom from determining concepts such
as noise, timbre, and cause in order to open one to sound in its variety and
to vouchsafe a freedom to produce and listen differently.

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This variety and difference need not exclude traditional instrumental musicto do so would be to close the door once again on the noise
cagenor do they imply that sampling, prepared instruments, extended
techniques, in-time processing, or subsequent manipulations are somehow
immaterial. Moreover, if sound in music is turned away from signification
or expression, this does not mean that Chion has encouraged ineffability.
On the contrary, beyond neutralizing the sonic field with the rejection of
noise and its replacement with the neutral but all too general sound,
he has emphasized the importance of a rich and variegated sound language, an active rather than passive sonic vocabulary that can open and
guide audition without determining it. We might think of this as a sort of
pragmatic Sapir-Whorff hypothesis for the ear: the notion that language
helps variegate or specify the phenomenal domain. Such variegation and
specification we cannot describe as correspondenceas in the representationalist notion that a word evokes an idea or images of its objective
referentbut rather as attunement. The matter of attunement was brought
before me when considering an observation that Chion had made about
translations into French of the line in Macbeth where life appears as a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: the word
sound is frequently and inexplicably rendered bruit or fracas (crashing). As
I have already remarked, the contrast of signification and noiseof voice
and soundmarks a certain essential quality of the theatrical medium for
Chion. Here the negative connotations of bruit or fracas may actually do
positive work in highlighting the constructive tension between the terms.
In this regard, fracas is of particular interest in that it seems to body forth
its signification: the first syllable, with its ending on the vowel a (voiced,
with open throat and breath vibrating the vocal chords), colliding against
the hard c (closing off the throat with the back of the tongue). Enfolded
in this example, we might see indicated a more radical or at least paradoxical version of acousmatic listening. In cinema, we can separate the
perceptual registers of sight and sound. But can we not also contemplate
an acousmatic relation to the voice: a hearing of the sound without the
significance?
To do so might be strictly speaking impossible if it means
entirely negating not only the clearly significant but also the expressive capacities of sound. It could be an interesting exercise, though, in
which the reduction of meaning to mere sonicality could be turned into
a moment of Zen: the paradoxical achievement of language heard as

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signifying nothing. After this moment, we would return to the interplay

of sound and signification with a heightened awareness of the possible
mutual conditioning of the registers. Speaking of the resources of Dolby
in The Last Emperor, Chion draws our attention to the nuanced use of
sound in the film through a series of onomatopoeias at the outset of his
essay: Crissements dtoffes, frlements soyeux, froissements [Rustling
of fabrics, silken brushings-up-against, crinklings] (Bruits de Chine 112).
The very sound of these words, in which sibilants slide into liquids and
labials brush against uvular vibrations, while one would be hard pressed
to call it mimetic, does carry something of the sounds in question. This is
especially true in series, where otherwise nononomatopoeic terms such
toffes and soyeux are, in a manner of speaking, captivated and reveal the
sonic materiality and particularity that they share with their neighbors.
One of the things that the translator notices about onomatopoeia is that,
while it is often easy enough to find an equivalent in the target language
from the sourcethat is, the criterion of semantic equivalence seems satisfiedthe words, which do capture however imperfectly the sound object
to which they refer (in the mode of imitation), nevertheless differ in their
resonances, that is, in their sonic materiality. 34 A crissement is sonically
related to a crinkling but not the same. For if it is clear that, especially
when enunciated, such terms are the very stuff of sound; from the point
of view of semantics they always miss the mark of faithful reproduction.
And yet is it not precisely in missing the markputting into relief both
similarity and differencethat they better aim our ears at the target?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Michel Chion for his gracious enthusiasm
when it came to having some of his shorter writings translated for this special issue. It was
in reading some of the many occasional writings that Professor Chion has produced that I
began to develop my own case in this essay. Any misinterpretations or mischaracterizations
are, of course, my own (although, as such, I hope they would at least confirm Chions position that sources in themselves do not confer value; what counts is what you do with them). I
would also like to thank Stephen Nagy of the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong for lending his expert eye to the material in the second half of this
essay in particular.
james a. steintr ager is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the
Inhuman (Indiana University Press, 2004) and the forthcoming The First Sexual Revolution: Libertines, License, and the Autonomy of Pleasure (Columbia University Press, 2012).
He is currently working on global networks of mediaincluding music and filmand the
discursive construction of culture.

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Speaking of Noise

Notes

It is telling in historical and cultural terms that Adorno is not

a point of reference in Attalis
examination of noise. Many of
Adornos concerns about dissonance and interruption as forms
of negativity in music would be
appositeand his concern about
the limitations of popular music is
an important rejoinder to Attalis
celebratory approach. See Adorno.

Similar affirmations of the carnivalesque will be found in Turner

andin historical perspectivein
Stallybrass and White.

See Girard. Freuds argument

in the fourth part of Totem and
Taboo that the actual murder
of the powerful father led to the
transformation of the primal
horde to the band of brothers
and to the very emergence of
culture as a way to both figure
and hide this actis clearly an
important precursor for Girards
argument.

This aside on symbolic violence follows Niklas Luhmanns

assessment of the critique of
mass media, which he sees as
incorrectly assuming that social
order is built on consensus about
background convictions and so
forever suspicious that the mass
mediathe social system responsible for generating a reality not
subject to consensusis leading us
astray. In this context, Luhmann
archly remarks that if we hold the
mass media so responsible, we
will always attribute to it duplicity or something the French
might call symbolic violence
(100).

Nietzsches text gets surprisingly

scant mention in Attali, but see
Noise 9.

This discourse has proven

remarkably long lived. See, for
example, Bersani.

On this relativity in the context of information theory and

cybernetics, see Ashby 186.

Chions Pour en finir appears

translated as Lets Have Done
with the Notion of Noise in this
special issue of differences.

In the original French, noise

would be limited to les nuisances
sonores (Pour en finir 9).

10 Murch writes:
[S]ince the initial audience
for his books and articles has
alsountil nowbeen European,
part of his task has been to convince his wary continental readers of the artistic merits of film
sound (the French word for sound
effect, for instance, is bruitwhich
translates as noise, with all of
the same pejorative overtones that
the word has in English) and to
persuade them to forgive sound
the guilt by association of having
been present at the bursting of
the silent films illusory bubble of
peace. (Audio-Vision xiii)
11

The example comes from Chions

discussion of Liliana Cavanis
1981 film The Skin (Audio-Vision
22).

12 In Le son: Trait dacoulogie,

Chion treats at some length the
relation between noise and music,
including the matter of causalism (6288). And the final two
chapters of his Film, a Sound Art
take up the question of noiseand
indeed fundamental noisein
cinema (43964).
13 Drawing on Gregory Batesons
celebrated definition of information as a difference that makes
a difference, we might say that
theater simultaneously occludes
and gives us to hear differences
that dont make a difference; it
brings to our attention the noninformative materiality of the

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voice as the vehicle of expression.

(See Bateson 44866.)
14 Chion also takes up the matter in
Audio-Vision, ch. 5.
15 For a detailed account, see Sergi.
16 The essay Dissolution de la
notion du timbre is translated
as Dissolution of the Notion of
Timbre in this special issue of
differences. It was originally published in Analyse musicale. The
essay underwent minor revisions
for inclusion in Chions collection
Le Promeneur coutant.
17 For , the Japanese pronunciation
sou is closely, albeit not exactly,
phonetically reflected in current
Putonghua pronunciation: zao4 in
Pinyin. This leads one to wonder
about how onomatopoeia works
ideographically, since clearly
sound words are not ideas in the
sense of images that are rendered.
Contrary to popular misunderstanding, Chinese characters do
have a strong phonetic aspect. Yet
neither alphabet nor syllabary,
they obviously do not comprise a
phonetic script. The association
established between sound and
character is thus largely arbitrary. That is, a character does
not contain information on pronunciation exceptand this is an
important qualificationinsofar
as the nonradical component of a
composite character triggers the
echo of others of its form, with the
radical providing the semantic,
categorical information. With ,
for instance, the left-hand radical
indicates ideographically a mouth,
whereas the right-hand component hints at a shared phonetic
group without indication of tone:
(zao3; bathe); (zao4; irritable); (cao4; control); (cao3;
anxious, sad); (sao1 or 4; rank,
fetid), and so forth. Interestingly,
the onomatopoeic element in this
series appears primary: on its

own (sao4) indicates the sound

of birds and is constituted by an
ideographically appropriate array
of three mouths over a tree. These
reflections also lead one to wonder
what happens when a language
evolves and what happens when a
sonic character travels from one
language to another. The character and thus the meaning seem
intact, but the sound is modified to
suit native pronunciation and is
also to an extent historically fixed.
Indeed, Japanese on readings
derived from Chinese pronunciation as opposed to kun readingswhile lacking in any tonal
element are usually deemed closer
phonetically to classical Chinese
than is modern Putonghua.
18 The longer history of such representations would have to take in
Nikkatsu studios entry into pinku
eiga with the bondage film
or Flower and Snake (1974; dir.
Konuma Masaru; based on a novel
by Dan Oniroku) and followed by
other films in its Roman Porno
series such as or Wife to
Be Sacrificed (1974; dir. Konuma
Masaru). As for representations from the outside, the selfconsciously exoticizing mondo
exploitation documentary Shocking Asia (1976; dir. Rolf Olsen)
included a sequence on sadomasochism in Japan, including
images of rope bondage.
19 For a now classical account of
bizarre sexual representations,
see Buruma. On high film in
this regard, see Desser.
20 Another relevant example would
be the now defunct American
band Rapeman, fronted by the
highly regarded independent producer Steve Albini, which made
ample use of noise and that took
its patently offensive title from
the eponymous hero of a manga
series.

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Speaking of Noise

21 On the scene in general, see

Hegarty (13351); he covers
Merzbow in a separate chapter
(15565). See also Voegelins
personalor necessarily subjective?account of listening to
Merzbow (6769).
22 Julia Kristeva discusses the
female and specifically the mothers body as what the child must
abject or differentiate itself from
in order to develop object relations at all in Powers of Horror
and her theoretical essay Labjet
damour. Her notion of abjection
is closely related to the notion of
the obscene as an encounter with
the Real beyond the realm of
language and imaginary identifications as developed by Lacan
and elaborated by iek.
23 Merzbow, for example, has stated:
We [the Japanese] have no deviant sex, because we have no
Christianity (Hensley). Hensleys
interview also includes Merzbow
making reference to the influence
of Bataille, as well as tentacular
eroticism.
24 Hokusais octopus fantasy has
been given film treatment in Edo
Porn, dir. Shindo Kaneto (1988).
25 On the question of Japanese noise
as culturally derived and specific,
Hegartyin spite of the polar and
culturalist opposition mentioned
aboveotherwise argues that the
scene itself can be read as a statement of sorts against specifity
and as an example of a messy
and complex hybridity (134).
26 To give this conceptual aspect
its institutional credentials, I
should add that the Merzbox was
displayed at the Kunsthalle Wien
in April 2002, with Masami providing opening and closing live
concerts. This conceptualism has
been further mythologized in the

Merzcar: an extremely limited

release in the form of a Mercedes
230 in which a cd of Merzbows
Noise Embryo was programmed
to play without the possibility of
turning it off when the car was
started. The Merzcar may or may
not have existed (an ontological
ambiguity that can only add to its
conceptual allure).
27 There is certainly the possibility
of political allegory herewith
Hendrix taking apart with noise
the ideological musical underpinning of the nation. Attali writes:
[T]he work of Jimi Hendrix is
meaningless without the electric guitar, the use of which he
perfected (35).
28 Merzbow has himself collaborated with many in the global
noise improvisational scene such
as Bastard Noise (United States)
and Kapotte Muziek (Netherlands); he has also appeared on
splits (traditionally records
with one side dedicated to
one band and the other side to
another), including one with
a mm, which is also to say that the
neat division implied abovefollowing Hegartyis in actuality
much fuzzier.
29 The table-top guitar has become
something of a staple in free
improvisatory and related musics.
Along with Rowe, Fred Frith
has long made use of the technique, documented on his Live in
Japan: The Guitars on the Table
Approach (1982). A similar use
of the guitar can be found on
his more recent Clearing (2001),
where chains, brushes, and other
nontraditional modes of attack
are coupled with live manipulation using effects pedals and tape
loops. Bruce Russell of the New
Zealandbased noise band The
Dead C also uses a guitar-on-thetable approach.

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d i f f e r e n c e s

30 Zen was not the only Eastern

influence on Cages musical conceptions. He also drew on the
writings of Ananda K. Coomara
swamy, and the I Ching became a
favorite compositional device.
31 In Deep Listening, Oliveros
explains that the titular concept,
while not tied to a particular
religious context or to religion in
general, nonetheless resonates
with meditative practices such as
Zen: Thich Nhat Hanh is a Zen
Buddhist monk whose usage of
the term deep listening has a
specific context as one of the Five
Mindfulness Trainings that he
proposes. This is a compassioncentered listening to restore
communication in order to relieve
suffering and bring happiness to
all beings. Listening (as a practice
in this sense) would be training to
respond with calmness and clarity of mind (xxiv).

Works Cited

32 If I take my distance from celebration of aural violence that

has as a visual analog depictions
thatat the very leastmay give
us pause, I am equally suspicious
of the essentialism that would
posit listening and networks as
female and commanding and
hierarchies as malea characterization made most famously
by Carol Gilligan in her aptly
titled In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens
Development.
33 In an appendix to Oliveross Deep
Listening, Maika Yuri Kusama,
a student of Oliveros, uses this
famous koan as a starting point
to comment on the composers
teaching methods (8082).
34 Chion himself discusses onomatopoeia and the different sonic
tendencies of languages such
as French and English in Le son
(5861).

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