edited by Antonio Mastrogiacomo, Stefano Giust and Paola Bommarito
In his essay Bruits. Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique (1977), Jacques Attali [1] proposes an idea as bold as it is prophetic: music, and more generally sound, is not simply a mirror of society, but an instrument through which it anticipates itself. According to Attali, noise is the early signal of social change, the auditory trace of conflict, disorder, transformation: noise disturbs because it breaks an order, but in this break also lies the possibility of imagining another form of living, of producing, of feeling.
In the 1970s, while Attali was writing his essay, the Canadian composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer [2] developed another revolutionary vision of sound, based on the concept of soundscape: the soundscape as a dynamic cultural and political construction. Schafer invites us to listen to what surrounds us with critical attention, to distinguish the musicality of a “balanced” environment from the entropic noise of modernity, produced by noise pollution and sound territorialization. At the same time, this “noise of the world”, if captured with awareness, can become an object of analysis, composition, and poetic restitution: in this perspective, no longer “non-music”, noise creates a form of sonic reality, a presence that challenges us to redefine our perception and our role as active listeners only if the practice of listening becomes ethical, everyday politics.
The soundscape speaks before data or statistics do: noise can be a premonition.
In the context of electronic cultures, noise takes on a different function: from the experiences of the twentieth-century avant-gardes (from futurism to musique concrète) to the explosion of techno culture, noise represents a way to express rupture, dissent, the search for an elsewhere.
We arrive, without even going back to the start, at industrial music, Japanoise, illegal raves, self-managed sound systems, where noise shows itself as a countercultural language, a practice of disobedience, an expression of the invisible: techno, for example, born in the suburbs of Detroit, is characterized from the beginning by urban, mechanical, minimal sounds that transform industrial disenchantment into collective energy; the dance floor, placed under observation by critics such as Kodwo Eshun or Steve Goodman (Kode9) [3], defines as a ritual space an embodied politics of “sound war” for the right to presence and transformation. Noise presents itself, in other words, as an instrument of social aggregation, survival, and subversion: it amplifies the gesture through which a community responds to systemic violence by means of the multiplication of sounds, beats, frequencies.
Noise still remains at the center of many contemporary artistic and musical researches, which explore its expressive possibilities as a source of meaning: in recent times, artists such as Christina Kubisch, Jacob Kirkegaard or Valerio Tricoli have redefined the boundary between music and environment, between sound and interference, between composition and recording; in parallel, electroacoustic music, from sound installations to acousmatic practices, shows an increasingly widespread tension towards field recording and soundscape composition, in which the sound source is drawn from in a relational, stratified, situated way.
In this perspective, noise embodies a primary force that generates forms, relationships, imaginaries: on the one hand a field of conflict and renegotiation, on the other a perceptive threshold that challenges us to think differently about cultural production, the landscape, listening, the body.
What does it mean today to “organize noise”? What policies are hidden in the sound textures of our everyday life? What practices are emerging, or re-emerging, around sound as a collective, memorial, curatorial device?
This issue of roots§routes magazine intends to investigate noise as an integral part of the soundscape and as a transformative agent that inhabit both the drifts of contemporary composition and the musical cultures born on the margins, from rave to noise experimentation, from techno to industrial, from sound art to acoustic activism. We are looking for contributions that address noise not only as a sound object, but as a concept crossed by multiple tensions – aesthetic, political, ecological, technological, urbanistic – contaminated by different knowledges, disciplines and practices.
Notes
[1] Attali J., Rumori. Saggio sull’economia politica della musica, Mazzotta, Milano 1968.
[2] Schafer R. M., Il paesaggio sonoro, Lim, Lucca 2022
[3] Goodman S. (Kode9), Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, MIT Press, Cambridge (MA) 2010