Noise

by Siegmund Levarie

Levarie was Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of
New York.

"Noise has emerged as the standard bearer of the forces rejecting civilization
... The new barbarism, with its pre-musical, precivilized worship of noise,
glissando, and indistinct pitches, offers no vision and denies natural and
artistic norms. "

I heard Levarie give this talk during the 1990s, on ABC Radio National. I
asked that ABC for a transcript, but they did not have one. Recently, I was
able to contact Levarie through Earnest G. McClain, and Levarie kindly sent me
a reprint copy of his article.

Critical Enquiry

Autumn 1977 Volume 4 Number 1, The University of Chicago Press.

{p. 21} Noise has become an increasingly noticeable and significant symptom of
our civilization. Fundamentally an acoustical phenomenon, noise has wider
implications. It is the legitimate object of scientific investigations in the
fields of psychology and physiology. It can be properly evaluated by its role
in music and in general aesthetics. It leads to basic questions of sociology.
We shall pursue the implications in these various fields one by one. In this
process as elsewhere music provides the bridge from facts (acoustics,
psychology, physiology) to commitments (aesthetics, sociology).

Acoustics. - If we define sound as anything we can hear, then noise is the
kind of sound that is disorderly. The orderly kind of sound is called tone.
All sound is either the one or the other or a mixture of the two. The
disorderIy aspect of noise is very evident when we look at an oscillogram that
is the visual transcription of the vibration underlying every sound. The line
produced by noise is highly erratic whereas that of pure tone emerges as a
perfect sine curve.

The main distinction between disorderly noise and orderly tone concerns pitch.
The orderliness of'the ibration bestows on tone an individually defined,
discrete pitch, which noise lacks. The disorderliness of the vibration keeps
noise undlifferentiated. Pitch can he exactly measured (by frequency or
wavelength) and exactly reproduced, whereas noise can at best be estimated by approximation.

Otherwise all sounds - noise is well as tone - may be characterized by
different degrees of loudness and different qualities of rone. Hence contrary
to the common usage of the word, noise is not necessarily loud. There are soft
noises: the turning of a page, distant footsteps, normal {p. 22} breathing. Nor is noise necessarily grating. There are unaggressive noises: rustling silk, rubbing 

one's hands, a running brook.

In the sounding world around us, noise is far more common than tone.
Occasionally nature produces tones, as when the wind blows through a reed or a
bird sings; but in general almost all natural sounds around us are noises. The
production of tone, on the whole, requires a controlled situation. Tone is a
human artefact brought about primarily by special "instruments" capable of
creating regular vibrations. Elastic strings have proven extremely practical,
but other materials and devices have given good service (pipes, electric
currents, and others). Outside music, man produces tones as by-products
of some organized activity: the clanging of a bowstring (as beautifully
described at the beginning of the Iliad, the hitting of hammer against anvil,
the striking of a clock. In human life, as in nature, noise is the common
occurrence. Tone is an accomplishment.

Spoken language exemplifies well the mixture of noise and tone: all consonants
are noises, and all vowels are tones. Hence singers are taught to sing on
vowels (the differentiation among them which derives from timbre).

Psychology. - The basic biological factor determining our attitude towards
sound is that we cannot close our ears. We cannot "listen away" as {p. 23}

 we can look away. We are defenseless against sound. Usually we cannot
even place an adequate barrier between us and the audible source of a sound;
for sound, unlike light, casts no shadow. It goes around most obstacles. Our
defenselessness concerns all sound, not only noise but also tone.

The threatening effect of sound on the human psyche has been well observed in
the case of newborn infants, who display a very special kind of reflex, known
as the Moro reflex, in response to any loud noise, to a jarring of the crib:
"The infant lying on his back extends his arms forward, stiffens the lower
extremities and contorts his face into a grimace; after a second or two he
brings the arms slowly together into a sort of embrace, emits a cry and then
gradually relaxes. The reflex normally persists for about a month or six
weeks, being gradually replaced by the startle response shown by adults
following a loud noise like a pistol shot.''

Studies of the Moro reflex have not distinguished, to my knowledge, between
tone and noise - perhaps because the sounds in a dying ward are likely to be
exclusively noise. One wishes that pediatric experiments be refined to
determine whether such a distinction might be mirrored by the kind of reftex.2
In any case, the infant's reaction to sound differs significantly from its
reaction to other stimuli. Before the end of the first week of life, the
infant closes its eyelids when disturbed by some visual stimulation, and it
withdraws in a most coordinated manner a painfully stimulated arm or leg. To
auditory stimuli, however, it remains exposed.

This association between sound and the threatening outer world, early
established, lies within the everyday experience of all of us. Our mature
differentiation between noise and tone has a bearing on our enjoyment of
listening to music. For while we remain defenseless before the power of any
sound, the controlled presentation of orderly tones in a good composition
obviates the primeval threat. The intelligible organization of music permits
us to master and subsequently to enjoy the otherwise confusing and often
irritating acoustical stimuli. Noise, on the other hand, evokes in adults and
children alike a direct reflex action as if it were a signal of danger, or an
unpleasant attack. Indicative in this regard is our immediate reaction,
without inference or logical thought, to thunder and lightning. Although we
know that lightning {p. 24} may ignite our house and kill us, we really 

shudder, not at the dangerous flash, but at the accompanying noise 

of the harmless thunder. 

The very idiom ''thunder and lightning" reverses the order of the physical event
so that the terrifying emphasis lands on the word describing the sound.
Similarly, according to reports by many Jews who, in Germany under Hitler,
lived in continuous fear of being arrested, the sighting of a stormtrooper
generated less instinctive fear than the ringing of the doorbell. In Anne
Frank's dramatized story, the threat of approaching footsteps provides the
terrifying climax. During World War II the Germans tried to panic the Allied
troops by extra noise producers attached to their dive bombers. This practice
followed a long tradition, extending from primitive warriors to modern bayonet
fighters, which adds the terror of noise to the menace of the weapon.

Noise need not be loud in order to offend, although here as elsewhere the
inherent quality is intensified by extremes (very high, very low, very loud,
very soft). In periods of stress or preoccupation or concentration, even a
very soft noise can provoke a startled response. A moment later one might
smile at the apparently foolish over response, but one is psychologically
justified in having felt attacked. Musicians know the distressing irritation
caused by the smallest scratch on a phonograph record, or by a static on the
radio, as if the minimal noise amidst controlled tones symbolized a
fundamental aggression against one's civilized status.

Physiology. - Just as noise assails our psyche, it also damages our hearing
apparatus. Factory workers, among others, can attest to both psychic fatigue
at the end of a day and physiological healing impairment at the end of their
lives. According to current studies, deafness may be only one symptom in a
wider syndrome caused by noise.

In 1960, Dr. Samuel Rosen, an otologist at Columbia University, organized an
expedition to the Sudan to conduct a hearing survey of a population living in
a relatively noise-free environment. He chose an area which until 1956 had
been a "closed" one, "untouched by any foreign culture or civilization. ... 

It is primarily bush country surrounded by swamps of the White Nile 

and contains abundant game. It is accessible only during the dry season 

by truck or jeep over a narrow, rough dirt trail sometimes difficult to 

find and to follow. 

In this isolated area live the Mabaans, a pre-nilotic, pagan, primitive, 

tribal people whose state of cultural development is the late Stone Age.  The are a peaceful and quiet people, living in small huts with straw-thatched roofs and bam-
{p. 25} boo sides. ... They have no guns, but hunt and fish with spears. They
do not use drums in their dance and song but pluck a five-string lyre and beat
a log with a stick."

This musical merry-making of the youth was the only high-level noise recorded
by the researchers during a two month period. Except for "the fleeting noises
of domestic animals, few other sounds were sufficiently intense to yield a
reading on the sound level meter."

Carefully set up audiometric and other medical tests confirmed the case
against "noise as the critical factor in the differences in hearing with aging
in valius populations.' In modern industrialized areas in the United States,
hearing deteriorates in the natural course of aging. The primitive Mabaans,
ranging in age from ten to ninety, ''demonstrated better hearing in the high
frequency with aging than [people] in similar studies of modern western
civilization. ... There is a simultaneous presence of blood pressure elevation
and high tone loss with aging in the United States. There is a simultaneous
absence of elevated blood pressure and high tone loss with aging in the Mabaans.''

The auditory test results could have been predicted on the basis of the steep
and noticeable increase of hearing aids even among middle- aged people in New
York City. The established harmful effect of noise on blood pressure is likely
to be paralleled by analogous findings in medical areas yet to be investigated.

Music. - Although music may utilize all available sounds, the proper building
material of the art of music is tone. When we think of a piece - a popular
tune or a Bach fugue - we identify it by its pitches, that is, precisely by
that characteristic of sound that distinguishes tone from noise. The other
sound qualities of loudness and timbre enter but remain dispensable. To evoke
the "Star-spangled Banner," for instance, one does not first wonder whether it
is hummed or trumpeted but rather how its opening line "goes." If I reproduce
this line, another person will recognize it as an individual, particular
experience defined by pitches.

Now the path from the unlimited world of sound to the discrete experience of a
specific piece of music marks a long and complex accomplishment of civilized
man. It involves spiritual as well as intellectuaI endeavors, all of them in
the direction from random to order, from nature to art. The process is one of
continued selection, or increasingly refined discrimination. At the beginning
lies undifferentiated sound; at the end, the art of music.

The diagram on page 26 sketches the main steps in the development from the
infinite world of physical vibration to the finite world of musical tones.

In this process of repeated distillation, the left column shows the increasing
purification; the right column, the nonmusical elements that are eliminated
at each step. Just to distil sound from the rest of nature, {p. 26} we first 

eliminate all those vibrations that we do not perceive because they lie 

above or below our senses (X rays, radio waves) or that we do
not hear because their frequency is either too high (light) or too low (e g.,
a swing). From sound, we distil pitches, that is, tones, by eliminating noise.

From the infinite number of possible pitches (as represented by the siren), we
select discrete tones. And finally to reach a musical system -  any musical
system - we eliminate asystematic chance relations between tones and select
systematically from among the discrete tones a certain number with which to
operate. 

In Western tradition, this number happens to be 12. Other numbers are
possible. Whatever the musical system, however, it is inevitably reached by a
similar selection process which successively rejects nonmusical elements in
favor of musical.

From this final point of view, noise appears as a premusical element Other
phenomena that may be called premusical are continous pitch variation - that
is, the siren or glissando in which individuated tones remain submerged - and
asystematic chance relations of tones which deprive individuated tones of
meaningful connections

The history of music, at least until recently, is a manifestation of musically
meaningful tone relations. Before the Romanticism of the nineteenth century,
noise instruments such as drums a cymbals were almost never prescribed by the
composer. They existed, of course, and {p. 27} were employed for particular purposes (such as marches, dances) but they never characterized the musical style 

of a period or composer. In the entire huge opus by Bach, there is not a 

single instance of a nondiscrete pitch. Timpani, when providing a desired 

element of percussive definition, are always marked by pitch. (So are the 

bells in the spurious cantata "Schlage doch," the only occurrence in the 

music of Bach of another percussion instrument.) Similarly Haydn, Mozart, 

and Beethoven employ pitchless noise instruments only when deliberately 

evoking the barbarian: in occasional Turkish music in symphonies 

or in an opera like Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

The situation drastically changes in the Romantic style of the nineteenth
century which must be considered a direct antecedent of many current trends.
Realism, first at home in opera, demanded noise. Beethoven raises a storm in
the Pastoral Symphony exclusively with instruments of defined pitch while
producing the artful illusion of noise by an indistinct and quasi-disorderly
mixture of tones in a low register. Comparable pieces by later composers
utilize drums, wind machines, rattling chains, scratching metals, 

and hammer strokes.

The establishment of noise as a primary style characteristic can be read off
the growing lists of noise instruments in twentieth-century scores. Highly
typical in this respect is the work of Edgar Varese, a strong influence on
generations of American composers growing up after the Second World War. His
famous lonization, of 1931, is scored for thirty-nine percussion instruments
without definite pitch, three percussion instruments with definite pitch, and
two sirens.

The participation of sirens is significant. The glissando of a siren projects
a theoretically infinite number of tones each one of which has lost
individuality because of the almost instantaneous transition to its immediate
neighbor .This lack of pitch definition places the sound of a siren
psychologically closer to noise than to tone. It is the opposite of
individuation, a continuous becoming, never an artistic being. Like noise, a
siren is premusical (see fig. 2).

Aesthetics. - Individualized and individuating pitch accounts for the
fundamental distinction between tone and noise. Yet in the world around us,
the two aspects of sound are seldom, if ever, cleanly separated. Pure tone,
that is, the acoustical counterpart of an exact sine curve, can be
electrically produced in a laboratory. It may be approximated by the vibration
of a tuning fork. Otherwise all tones we hear contain some admixture of noise,
particularly at the moment of attack. The complex mechanism of a piano, for
instance, never completely eliminates the noise of the finger on the key, of
the actions of the various levers against each other, and of the hammer
against the string The best violinist cannot entirely free his tone production
from some scratching of the bow against the string; the best flutist, from
some wind escaping from his mouthpiece; the best timpanist, from some rapping
of his sticks {p. 28} agaillst the memrane. A singer is bound to noise 

by the consonants of his text; among musical performers, he may 

have the best chance of approaching purity of tone in a vocalizalion 

such as a melisma, coloratula, or a piece expressly so composed (for instance, 

the "Chorus of Heaenly Spirits" in Spontini's opera Nurmahal, or Ravel's Volalise forme d'Habanera.

The aesthetic criterion guiding performers is the elimination or, at least,
maximal reduction of any noise. All technical training concentrates on how to
minimize scratching, knocking, hissing, rasping, and grating. The aesthetic
ideal, in short, is escape from noise toward tone. This purely practical
process parallels the artful distillation demonstrated for the genesis of tone
out of premusical elements. Tone becomes the final aesthetic accomplishment,
while noise remains symptomatic of a more primitive stage transcended by
evolving civilization.

The persistent admixture of noise to tone serves as a reminder of the
imperfection of this material world. "Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest Zu tragen
peinlich," Goethe complains at the end of Faust. "We are left to bear
painfully an earthly remainder." Yet a positive lesson may also be drawn:
absolute purity comes treacherously close to sterility. For the maintenance of
life, bacteria are as essential as cleanliness. Music made with "sterilized"
pure tones would have as limited an appeal as existence under an oxygen tent.
The only such composition (of limited duration) in my experience appropriately
accompanied an eerie fairy story in an illusive silvery puppet theater.

The opposite process, namely, the recognition of the presence of tone in every
noise, is also possible. Analysis of sound, developed by the French scientist
J . B. J . Fourier around 1800, shows that every sound can be dissected into
an unlimited number of sine waves, that is, tones, of varying frequencies. No
matter what the noise, it can be understood as a superposed conglomeration of
tone ''clusters." Unlike the presence of noise in tone which could be ideally
eliminated, the presence of tone in noise is fundamental. Noise can be
decomposed into tone, but the flow is not reversible. Noise is the primary,
natural, disorderly phenomenon. It becomes the remainder in the refined,
artistic, orderly genesis of tone.

For the production of music, noise, unlike tone, is not essential but may
serve it as, in terms of evolution, a tamed animal serves man. Noise, though
inadequate to create a musical system, may add spice to a composition. Thus it
has been used - apart from the deliberate barbarism of Turkish music -
throughout most of music history. In dance music, percussion instruments mark
the characteristic beat and add luster to the tune. In Richald Wagner's
overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (to give just one example), a soft
triangle stroke distinguishes the artful combination of three themes at the
moment of return to the tonic C major: and a rousing loud cymbal clash, the
climactic final cadence. In these as in countless similar instances, noise,
always subordinated to {p. 29} tone, affects us like a lion in a cage. 

It provides excitement without danger. In the coexistence of noise and tone, 

aesthetic value derives from the preponderance of one over the other.

Sociology. - In recent decades, noise has broken out of the cage. It
dominates the contemporary scene outside and inside the concert hall. Together
with the siren, it has become the most noticeable symptom of modern life.
Electric appliances, crowded stores and supermarkets, factory machines,
automobiles, trains, airplanes - whatever the technological gain, the
concomitant phenomenon and the price we pay for it is noise, and usually at a
high degree of loudness. Our spontaneous reaction to the howling of a siren,
the acoustical symbol for dynamism run wild, is utilized by the alarm signals
of fire engines, police cars, ambulances, and air-raid drills. Has the
intended shock worn off so that we accept the wailing factory siren as a
substitute for the noon bells of a church? Under the impact of noise and
sirens, our health and elementary reactions to acoustical events and
acoustically deeply rooted symbols seem to be vanishing. Only occasionally
some feeling for fundamentals still prevails - usually on a subconscious level
- as in the identification of the all-clear signal with a steady tone.
Similarly amidst the confusing and inherently threatening noise of a traffic
crossing, the reassuring horn tones of a honking car admonish us to collect
our wits. The overpowering attack by noise on a defenseless population has
evoked an increasing number of protective anti-noise laws in various cities,
states, and countries.

In music, too, noise and glissando, for the first time in civilized history,
have assumed the role of a primary style characteristic. They have affected
alike popular entertainment and avant-garde sophistication. Compared to the
language of systematic tonal relationships, there is no difference between, on
one side of the social spectrum, the gross brass slides and loud drum
batteries in a dance hall and, on the other, the relatively pleasant and soft
sound of a vibrating gong submerging in a bucket of water. The overall
popularity of noise instruments is reflected, among other symptoms, in the
recent quantitative and qualitative superiority of a percussion program at a
leading New York college over other instrumental instruction.

What are the possible reasons for the ascendancy of noise in our society? How
can we interpret it? It signifies a particular kind of rebellion. We have
established the acoustical and musical facts according to which a system built
on musically meaningful tone relations represents the end product of a long
and artful selection process. To arrive at it, many elements had to be
eliminated, among them noise. The result of the selection process marks an
accomplishment of civilized man; for civilization may be defiled as a
willingness to accept limitations, and within the infinite world of sounds,
any tone system signifies a voluntary limitation. In this sense, a creative
artist is essentially always civilized, for {p. 30} he cannot work without 

some kind of limitation. A citizen is civilized if he understands that the 

alternative to limitation is chaos and anarchy.

By contrast, any deliberate repudiating of accomplishments of civilization and
voluntary returning to a precivilized state denotes an act of rebellious
barbarianism. Rebellions are sometimes necessary. They can produce positive
results when a justified need for change replaces the old order, not by
anarchy, but by a new order. Such was the case in the American Revolution.

Music history, too, records various "revolts." We read that the secular
uprising of the ars nova of the fourteenth century was condemned in a papal
bull because of its depravity, wantonness, irregularity, and excess. 

Around
the year 1600, the crumbling confines of an earlier practice were overthrown
by a group of composers in the north of Italy, whose new aesthetic principles
were in turn interpreted by musicians of the next generation as "deformations
of nature and propriety." None of these and other revolutionary efforts,
however, relapsed into disorder because each in its own way accepted as a
basis for further operations the artistic accomplishments of discrete tone and
some ordered system. The development of music (and of good art in general) has
been identical with that of civilized man.

Today, however, the rebellious departure from traditional music is one of
principle. It began with Arnold Schönberg's attack, in the early decades of
the century, not on discrete tones, but on natural tone relationships and
proportions. Since then, for the first time in history, an irruption of the
irrational has openly declared musical proportion, and order to be without
value. Noise and other phenomena eliminated on the long path from chaotic
sound to civilized music are claimed to be essential. The inarticulate and the
unformed have been elevated to aesthetic standards.

Noise has emerged as the standard bearer of the forces rejecting civilization.
Barbarianism has always existed, but never before has it been held up as a
model to aspire to. The function of barbarianism in our society was predicted
and described in 1930 by Ortega v Gasset: "The characteristic of the hour is
that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance
to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it
will." A decade before him, Karl Kraus had written: "A culture ends when the
barbarians break out of it."

The eruption of noise in contemporary music has been claimed to be "good" on
the grounds that it is an expression of our time. If it be true that art
should mirror its time, it must by no means mirror only the external and
existent. The mirror should also reflect human aspirations and their
wellsprings. The art of great epochs has fulfilled this function
{p. 31} above all others.

 Greek art reflects not so much the actual Greek of
the time as a certain elevated aspect of the Greek soul. The Romantic
postulate, that the artist's works are identical with his life, is clearly at
variance with fact. One need not boast about "expressing one's time." The
secular, physical person is only half the man; and of this half, biography
renders account. Art is much more the record of that other, invisible part of
him. It provides those energies which shape the most precious parts of
ourselves. For above all, the task of art is to show a way. In medieval terms,
it is anagogic. Where art is concerned, one may safely ignore all concern for
being timely. The new barbarism, with its pre-musical, precivilized worship of
noise, glissando, and indistinct pitches, offers no vision and denies natural
and artistic norms. It is like screaming during a catastrophe - an occupation
that is neither musical nor artful. The responsible reaction is to try to
recognize noise for what it is and to assess it accordingly.

--
Peter Myers, 21 Blair St, Watson ACT 2602, Australia
http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers          ph +61 2 62475187
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