On Noise

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about signal and noise. On Voice, my last article, focused on techniques creators can use to juice up signal and trim noise as they develop their creative voice. This week I’m flipping my focus. 

We tend to think of signal and noise in a binary way. Signal is the good stuff: the meaningful information we’re trying to find. Noise is the bad stuff: the random fluctuations, variations, and artifacts that interfere with the signal.

Noise is unreadable, inscrutable. Noise is not silence but it is also not loudness. It is the absence of coherence.

—Brian Eno (Musician, Composer, Producer, Visual Artist, Theorist), A Year with Swollen Appendices

Noise lacks logic, consistency, and clarity. When a piece of music doesn't jell, we say it’s “just noise” and dismiss it. When a photograph or video signal is distorted and grainy, we say the image is “noisy.” Noise is typically undesirable, something we need to filter out, counteract, or eliminate. But what if noise is the desired outcome? What if the goal is to counter the prevailing logic, to destabilize or disrupt the status quo, to create space for something new?

The evolution of art is the story of the ongoing introduction of noise into the prevailing aesthetic. Recall how the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 was reviewed by the prevailing critics and the members of the French Academy of Fine Arts, the defenders of the status quo. Joseph Vincent, a prominent painter and Academy member wrote about Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, “Only be so good as to tell me what those innumerable black tongue-lickings in the lower part of the picture represent?” Or how rock and roll was greeted by the music establishment of the 1950s and 60s. Initially derided as “black music,” rock and roll was linked to juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity, anti-social behavior, and even deafness. In both cases, what became the dominant aesthetic was baked into the noise.

Distortion and complexity are the sources of noise. Rock music is built on distortion: on the idea that things are enriched, not degraded, by noise. To allow something to become noisy is to allow it to support multiple readings. It is a way of multiplying resonances. It is also a way of “making the medium fail”—thus giving the impression that what you are doing is bursting out of the material: “I’m too big for this medium.”

—Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices

That we often label fresh forms of expression as noise tells something important about our own creativity. Our genetic disposition toward sense making, toward pattern recognition, toward signal over noise tells us we are programmed to maintain the status quo. We choose signal over noise even though noise is often the harbinger of change. Noise expands our range of expression. It’s the first signal that something new is on the horizon, that the prevailing logic and aesthetic is about to crack. Knowing our bias toward maintaining the status quo, we need to make ourselves pay attention to the noise: to what seems distorted, random, and loud. Not every noisy thing is a leading indicator of change, but many are… Signal and noise aren’t opposites. They are temporary states that fluctuate. What was once noise becomes signal and vice versa. Look closely for the signal in the noise.

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

—John Cage (composer), Silence: Lectures and Writings

It’s difficult to listen to noise, to pay attention to something that resists our desire to understand it, but this is what art does. Decoration doesn’t resist our attention: it withdraws from our attention. When you walk into a beautifully decorated room, you notice the wall treatments, the floors and floor coverings, and the appointments, then those decorative elements withdraw from your consciousness. Decorations convey an aesthetic and create a mood—they aren’t meant to be the object of conversation. Like decoration, art may invite you in, but it does so to provoke, prod, agitate. Art is the conversation, and to keep conversation going it resists easy interpretation. In this context, the noise is where the deeper meaning is hidden. Art that doesn’t resist easy interpretation dances at the edge of cliché.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

—Frank Zappa (musician, composer, satirist, film maker)

Noise is a form of dissonance: sensory dissonance or cognitive dissonance. Sensory dissonance is a kind of ugliness—unappealing sounds, images, movements, or other kinds of unpleasant sensations. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we cannot establish any relationship between the elements in a work of art (other than the conclusion that the elements have no relationship).

Some works of art are simply failed experiments. There’s no meaning to be found. Others are opaque: there’s meaning to be found, but it’s difficult to decipher. Sometimes, what’s missing is the “secret code”—the vocabulary required to convey meaning. Cubism is widely considered one of the most influential art movements of the 20th century. Pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 1910s, Cubism smashed the prevailing assumptions about perspective and introduced art that integrated multiple planes and points of view that invited the viewer to reassemble the abstracted forms. Here’s how the philosopher Stuart Greenstreet describes Picasso and Braque’s achievement:

Instead of imitating the contours of the human face, the mask presents a discrete set of signs: the cylindrical eyes, the box-like mouth, the narrow wedge of the nose—all arrayed on the plane of the face. These signs are simply assorted abstract shapes until the mask-maker has arranged them into a meaningful image. Picasso saw this act of artistic combination as analogous to syntax: that is, to the arrangement of words in the construction of sentences. This insight led him to develop a new pictorial syntax: his own way of reordering the artist’s array of signs. His aim was to ‘remake art’ by forging a new convention which we would have to learn before we could recognise what a particular image resembles.

—Stuart Greenstreet, How Cubism Tried to Create a New Language (Philosophy Now)

Cubism inspired related movements in the visual arts, music, literature, and architecture, but largely dropped out of fashion by the mid-1920s. One reason Cubism failed to displace naturalism and achieve mainstream acceptance is that the visual language Picasso developed was never “taught” outside of the artwork. Greenstreet continues: “Cubism failed to displace mimetic art because too few people ‘contracted’ to become fluent in its language. It never became popular enough to become a convention.” The story of Cubism teaches us something essential about decoding noise: a new form of expression is a new language.

The way we decode what seems like noise is by learning the new language—the vocabulary, syntax, and conventions inherent in what seems impenetrable. Repeated exposure helps. Listen to music that you don’t fully understand. Find passages that resonate with you and listen for connections between those sections and the ones that sound like noise. Look for stepping stones, small advances that lead you into the noise. You may not be able to fully understand the signal in the noise, but you can nibble away its edges. Once a patch of noise is small enough, you may find that you can leap over it, which may in fact be its intended purpose. The noise may be a forcing function that calls your attention to the space between ideas and gives you the opportunity to be an active participant in the creation of work’s meaning, as we are when we view Cubist artworks. Finally, look for help from those who love work you’re trying to understand. What the mind can’t fully comprehend is often perfectly clear to the heart.