james a.

steintr ager

Speaking of Noise: From Murderous

Loudness to the Crackle of Silk

I
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 word—descriptive, refer-
ential, or conceptual—is 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
Attali’s Bruits: Essai sur l’économie 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 Attali’s
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 impli-
cation 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 and d i f f e r e n c e s: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
250 Speaking of Noise

countervailing force to the repressive violence of society (“channeliza-

tion”). 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 real—and Attali cites the fact that sounds pushed to a certain
decibel level can kill—and figurative: a “metaphor of murder” (143).
Attali makes clear his debt to René Girard and the latter’s
elaboration of the violence at the base of social relations—a 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 violence”—or simply the idea that any
imposition of an order such as language is violent—was part of the post-
structuralist landscape. 4 Not that this is the only way to situate Attali.
There is, for example, a clear precedent for his argument in Friedrich
Nietzsche’s account of Dionysian (chaotic and material) and Apollonian
(channelized and formal) musical tendencies and the possibility of their
conjunction—for which Richard Wagner’s operas are a model—in 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: Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the treatment of the
“death drive” as an antirepressive force in Herbert Marcuse’s messianic
melding of psychoanalysis and Marxism in Eros and Civilization, Nor-
man O. Brown’s 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.
Finally—and somewhat hastily grafted onto these points of
reference and lending an air of scientific credibility—we also find ref-
erence to Henri Atlan’s 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 Attali’s argument is polyvalent, but its
various meanings all do hang together—if 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
d i f f e r e n c e s 251

underpinnings that noise should thus find itself looking rather ideologi-
cal 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 instance—but
not in others.7 Attali recognizes such relativity—that noise “does not exist
in itself” but “only in relation to a system”—and 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 Attali’s intervention and ask how we might specify
noise in the context of music—that is, in Attali’s 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 direction—or rather directions—that 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 interest-
ingly oblique position vis-à-vis the sorts of philosophical and political
commitments that we see in Attali’s 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 media—to the point
that speaking of noise itself becomes suspect. In the second part I move
seemingly far from French soil and theory—but as it turns out, not that
far—with a consideration of concrete practices and conceptual justifica-
tions of (musical) noise making in Japan. I conclude with a return to Chion
and some thoughts on how language, while incapable of determining audi-
tory 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-Ménage

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
Chion’s 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
252 Speaking of Noise

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
parasite—which 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 66–67). This omission seems to me neither pointed nor care-
less, 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 con-
cerns 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 pro-
duction and theory: musique concrète, and especially the work of Pierre
Schaeffer. And it is in this context and in relation to the practices of
musique concrète, with its use of found sound and manipulation, that we
can best understand Chion’s critique of “causalism,” of which the rejec-
tion of the noise notion—the assertion of the inherent nature of noise and
the accompanying implicit hierarchization of sounds—is a part. By this
expression, Chion means the usually latent valuation that attaches to a
sound’s 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 music—or rather, the world of French music. And it is
d i f f e r e n c e s 253

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. Chion’s aim is to draw attention to the lack of a
clear distinction between sound and noise—between supposed host and
parasite—and 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 positions—which
so miss one another that to describe them as antagonistic seems grossly
inaccurate—we do glimpse in Attali and Chion a shared rhetoric. Is there
not, after all, an echo of the French Revolutionary pamphlet in Chion’s
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 affilia-
tions 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 par-
ticular. In his foreword to Chion’s 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
Chion’s 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). Chion’s aim was to show that one
had to talk of audio-vision—the mutually constructive interplay of sound
and spectacle—if one were really to analyze film. And he would provide
at least some of the tools to do so.
While one of Chion’s 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 concrète and Schaeffer’s
insistence on acousmatic listening (that is, listening without the visual
254 Speaking of Noise

presence of musicians or instruments). It also stems from Chion’s engage-

ment—as both theorist and practitioner—with 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 watermelon—in itself somewhat ridiculous,
especially when linked to the sight of the same—may 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 concrète has bor-
rowed 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 employments—as he himself notes, there is an idiomatic
tendency at work here—or 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
d i f f e r e n c e s 255

scene gathered and framed by the massive, undifferentiated aural com-

ponent: “The sound is a stain whereas the image is a drawing; the sound
is like Soulages while the image is like Dürer” [Le son est une tache là où
l’image est un dessin; le son est du Soulages quand l’image est du Dürer]
(47). Further, Chion suggests that it is precisely in the play of noncoinci-
dence between the two senses in which the specific charm of the ocean
resides. The charm is lost when the aural component is isolated and repro-
duced. Interestingly, accompanying this essay was a cropped reproduction
of Katsushika Hokusai’s 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 repro-
duction—albeit not filmed or realistic—might 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 print—the two
aspects working together and against one another for effect.
This process of working together and against is echoed in “Car-
nets 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 déplace dessus, et
se rappelle à l’oreille, jusqu’à gêner la compréhension 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-ménage or
“hubbub.” (Remue-ménage 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” [où les
bruits de déplacement étaient d’autant plus sensibles qu’à travers eux on
essayait de deviner les jeux de scène qu’on ne voyait pas] (35). The bio-
graphical detail adds an intriguing, almost experimental layer to Chion’s
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
256 Speaking of Noise

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 con-
tent must silence noise in order to inform but that it simultaneously relies
on and brings sound into relief.13 Chion thus writes, “Wouldn’t 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 théâtre: le bruit, la confusion originelle, gangue vivante dont emerge
à demi, par éclairs, 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 Atlan’s
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 Bertolucci’s 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 whistle—or the
whistle alone might signify travel. A scene of nature would inevitably
include the chirping of birds—once again, often the same birds from one
film to the next—and 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 création au cinéma (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
d i f f e r e n c e s 257

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 sig-
nify. 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 signifi-
cation 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 pro-
viding 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 distinc-
tions. It is connotation before or without denotation. Historically, the shift
has thus been from fewer sounds—more voice and musical soundtrack—to
a proliferation of sounds and an increasingly nuanced expressive palate.
In “Bruits de Chine” and in other writings, Chion, while cau-
tious 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
258 Speaking of Noise

apotheosis of such detailed and nuanced sound, as opposed to the loud bass
rumble of a spaceship—that is, the sort of overly eager and obvious early
demonstrations of Dolby’s 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 cinema—and even to the effect of the ocean itself considered as
an audiovisual medium—it would appear that noise in music is not posi-
tively recuperated as meaning, nor does it conceptually serve any func-
tion 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 concrète” and
then its “acoustic visage” is reconfigured by recording and manipulation
of this recording? The symbiosis between human and horn, infused with—
resounding with—our 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.
d i f f e r e n c e s 259

One could easily push these points too far. “Attack,” after all,
in a technical musical context bears little or no connotation of violence. A
pianist’s attack on the keyboard can be light and tender. And to an extent,
Chion is simply describing the fact and the effects—obvious and less
so—of 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 attenuation—in its faint echoing of the arguments of Attali’s
Noise—and 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 cen-
trally about the relationship between sound and language, it does adum-
brate 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 tran-
scendentally 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 extratemporal—as it were, carved up—apprehension 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 pre-
established lines. Or, in the more Aristotelian terms that mark the later
260 Speaking of Noise

“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, however—that is, to the fetishized
source of sound—we 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: 音響, 噪音, ノイズ

Chion’s 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 cur-
rency has to some degree shaped—clearly determined is too strong—what
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 Lärm or Geräusch (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 lan-
guage 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: 音響
(onkyou), 騒音 (sou-on), 噪音 (sou-on), ノイズ (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 none-
theless provide a useful entrée 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 charac-
ter 音 (otou). By itself, otou covers a wide range of sonic referents, ranging
from “sound” and “noise” to “voice,” “tone,” “pitch,” and “timbre.” Bashō’s
d i f f e r e n c e s 261

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,
音響 (onkyou), the second element comes close to redoubling the first—and
indeed the first character in the compound is incorporated into the second
as its radical—and 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 dis-
turbance. (In Japanese 騒音 is one term that can be used for noise in the
cybernetic sense. In Chinese, 噪 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 降噪; “signal-to-noise ratio” is rendered
信噪比, where the first character indicates message, trust, or fidelity, the
second noise, and the third comparison.) Historically viewed, 噪 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 ノイズ is clearly a loanword, as the katakana
script, generally reserved for foreign—that is, neither Japanese nor Chi-
nese—imports 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 Japa-
nese by the script and by the modified pronunciation: ノイズ is linguistic
hybridity in a word. If nothing else, the linguistic situation in Japanese
suggests already—without any mention of culture—that notions of native-
ness 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 ety-
mologies 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, denotation—the sonic denotation
is already, historically speaking, a figure.
ノイズ 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
262 Speaking of Noise

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 緊縛美 (kinbaku-bi or the fine art of tight binding). Photo-
graphs of nude women artfully bound fit with an array of practices and
types of representation that together define a Japan that is other to West-
ern 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 Oshima’s infamous Empire
of the Senses, where the bereft heroine carries around her lover’s 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 Assayas’s film Demonlover (2003), which
draws for inspiration on hentai—animated movies featuring, among other
things, bizarre sexual couplings of humans with tentacled monsters—and
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 representa-
tive sampling, selection bias, cultural essentialism, and exoticism that
immediately suggest themselves. They are obvious—which 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 guitars—the usual rock-and-roll noise machine—distorted,
d i f f e r e n c e s 263

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 noisemaking—earsplitting sheets
of sound, hammering, often arrhythmic cacophony—it 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 dimen-
sion 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-refer-
enced the registers in such recorded pieces as his “Music for Bondage Per-
formance.” 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
Hokusai’s infamous shunga of a human woman’s carnal encounter with
an octopus—a woodcut that may serve here as the obscene pendant of the
“Great Wave at Kanagawa.” If the sort of tentacular encounters from hen-
tai have a classical cultural point of reference in Japan, it is surely here. 24
And yet Akita’s musical pseudonym is a reference to Kurt Schwitters’s
Merzbau, the Dadaist makeover of the artist’s 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 frequently—indeed,
stereotypically—treated 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 appa-
ratus that accompanies Merzbow’s noise, there is just as much Georges
Bataille, with his entwining of death and eroticism, as anything suppos-
edly 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 Attali’s 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 Attali’s
largely metaphoric—or at least nonsonic—uses of noise. Even with this
264 Speaking of Noise

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

it is marked by a profound conceptualism. Witness the Merzbox: a career-
spanning 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 acous-
matic standpoint—if such an abstraction is allowable given the amount of
context that surrounds his productions—it 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 L’Arte 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 distinction—an essential
distinction—between musical sounds and noises” (“Pour en finir” 9). That
is, there is something inherently limiting about being forced to choose
between noise and music—a limitation that “sound” as a neutral category,
lacking precisely this distinction, does not entail. The limitation seems
to hold just as well for Japanese ノイズ as for French bruit, and it would
appear that the decision to make noise, celebrating its negative connota-
tions, 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 asso-
ciated with 音響 (onkyou) and with machine-generated and manipulated
sounds—hushed rather than harsh or industrial. This is the Zen side that
Hegarty mentions, and it is once again worth noting the suggestive corre-
spondence 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. Nakamura’s 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
d i f f e r e n c e s 265

taken on a dérive—to borrow from the Situationist’s terminology, which

of course focused on the spectacular—that 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 electroni-
cally amplified music production, feedback has long been relativized and
instrumentalized. Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction of the National Anthem
at Woodstock—with notes held until feedback bends them into lacerating
sirens—has 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, Nakamura’s 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. 音響 appears a suitable, open-
ended 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 Nakamura’s approach to sound? Col-
laborations 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 Rowe’s 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
266 Speaking of Noise

variety of manners. 29 For example, a tiny electric fan may blow across the
strings—an “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 instrumental—that 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
Cage’s 4’33” 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 immer-
sive but resonant. The point of reference is as apt as it is inevitable: Cage,
who had attended lectures on Zen by D. T. Suzuki—who would become the
foremost popularizer of Zen in North America and help seal its association
in the American imagination with Japan—openly 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
Oliveros’s work Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. 31 A key figure
in twentieth-century electronic music in the United States as both com-
poser 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,
Oliveros’s piece was the only one specifically written for the album.) There
is a danger here that we may slip not only into exoticism—and I have tried
to show just how difficult it is to speak of cultures, let alone cultural purity,
when it comes to noise—but 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 sentimentalism—“I hear
you” as the assertion of sympathy—we might be cautious in opting for deep
listening in music as a requirement or as inherently ethical. 32
d i f f e r e n c e s 267

Zen Noise: From Aesthetics to Ascetics

Beyond meditative practices—sonic awareness and deep lis-

tening—is there not something noisy about Zen’s 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 Chion’s work, not so much to affirm it or even interpret it but
rather to consider what a close encounter with it—as reader and transla-
tor—has 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
Chion’s 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 domain—to 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 also—more importantly—to suggest that there are alternate
routes that lie open.
In his discussion of “reduced listening” in film—listening atten-
tively to the sound-divorced images—Chion 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.
268 Speaking of Noise

This variety and difference need not exclude traditional instru-

mental music—to do so would be to close the door once again on the noise
cage—nor 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 lan-
guage, 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 correspondence—as in the represen-
tationalist notion that a word evokes an idea or images of its objective
referent—but 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 noise—of voice
and sound—marks 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 para-
doxical 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 expres-
sive 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
d i f f e r e n c e s 269

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 d’étoffes, frôlements 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
étoffes 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 source—that is, the criterion of semantic equivalence seems satis-
fied—the 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 mark—putting into relief both
similarity and difference—that 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 Chion’s posi-
tion 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 Univer-
sity 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 Revolu-
tion: Libertines, License, and the Autonomy of Pleasure (Columbia University Press, 2012).
He is currently working on global networks of media—including music and film—and the
discursive construction of “culture.”
270
Notes 1 It is telling in historical and cul-
tural terms that Adorno is not
a point of reference in Attali’s
examination of noise. Many of
Adorno’s concerns about disso-
nance and interruption as forms
of negativity in music would be
apposite—and his concern about
the limitations of popular music is
an important rejoinder to Attali’s
celebratory approach. See Adorno.
2 Similar affirmations of the carni-
valesque will be found in Turner
and—in historical perspective—in
Stallybrass and White.
3 See Girard. Freud’s 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 act—is clearly an
important precursor for Girard’s
argument.
4 This aside on “symbolic vio-
lence” follows Niklas Luhmann’s
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
media—the social system respon-
sible for generating a reality not
subject to consensus—is leading us
astray. In this context, Luhmann
archly remarks that if we hold the
mass media so responsible, we
will always attribute to it duplic-
ity or “something the French
might call symbolic violence”
(100).
5 Nietzsche’s text gets surprisingly
scant mention in Attali, but see
Noise 9.
6 This discourse has proven
remarkably long lived. See, for
example, Bersani.
Speaking of Noise
7 On this relativity in the con-
text of information theory and
cybernetics, see Ashby 186.
8 Chion’s “Pour en finir” appears
translated as “Let’s Have Done
with the Notion of ‘Noise’ ” in this
special issue of differences.
9 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
also—until now—been European,
part of his task has been to con-
vince his wary continental read-
ers of the artistic merits of film
sound (the French word for sound
effect, for instance, is bruit—which
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 film’s illusory bubble of
peace. (Audio-Vision xiii)
11 The example comes from Chion’s
discussion of Liliana Cavani’s
1981 film The Skin (Audio-Vision
22).
12 In Le son: Traité d’acoulogie,
Chion treats at some length the
relation between noise and music,
including the matter of causal-
ism (62–88). And the final two
chapters of his Film, a Sound Art
take up the question of noise—and
indeed “fundamental noise”—in
cinema (439–64).
13 Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s
celebrated definition of informa-
tion as “a difference that makes
a difference,” we might say that
theater simultaneously occludes
and gives us to hear differences
that don’t make a difference; it
brings to our attention the non-
informative materiality of the
d i f f e r e n c e s
voice as the vehicle of expression.
(See Bateson 448–66.)
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 pub-
lished in Analyse musicale. The
essay underwent minor revisions
for inclusion in Chion’s collection
Le Promeneur écoutant.
17 For 噪, 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 misunder-
standing, 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 arbi-
trary. That is, a character does
not contain information on pro-
nunciation except—and this is an
important qualification—insofar
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 噪,
for instance, the left-hand radical
indicates ideographically a mouth,
whereas the right-hand compo-
nent hints at a shared phonetic
group without indication of tone:
澡 (zao3; bathe); 躁 (zao4; irri-
table); 躁 (cao4; control); 懆 (cao3;
anxious, sad); 臊 (sao1 or 4; rank,
fetid), and so forth. Interestingly,
the onomatopoeic element in this
series appears primary: on its
271
own 喿 (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 char-
acter 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 pronun-
ciation as opposed to kun read-
ings—while lacking in any tonal
element are usually deemed closer
phonetically to classical Chinese
than is modern Putonghua.
18 The longer history of such repre-
sentations would have to take in
Nikkatsu studios entry into pinku
eiga with the bondage film 花と蛇
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 生贄夫人 or Wife to
Be Sacrificed (1974; dir. Konuma
Masaru). As for representa-
tions from the outside, the self-
consciously exoticizing “mondo”
exploitation documentary Shock-
ing Asia (1976; dir. Rolf Olsen)
included a sequence on sado-
masochism 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 pro-
ducer Steve Albini, which made
ample use of noise and that took
its patently offensive title from
the eponymous hero of a manga
series.
272
21 On the scene in general, see
Hegarty (133–51); he covers
Merzbow in a separate chapter
(155–65). See also Voegelin’s
personal—or necessarily subjec-
tive?—account of listening to
Merzbow (67–69).
22 Julia Kristeva discusses the
female and specifically the moth-
er’s body as what the child must
abject or differentiate itself from
in order to develop object rela-
tions at all in Powers of Horror
and her theoretical essay “L’abjet
d’amour.” 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 identi-
fications as developed by Lacan
and elaborated by Žižek.
23 Merzbow, for example, has stated:
“We [the Japanese] have no devi-
ant sex, because we have no
Christianity” (Hensley). Hensley’s
interview also includes Merzbow
making reference to the influence
of Bataille, as well as tentacular
eroticism.
24 Hokusai’s octopus fantasy has
been given film treatment in Edo
Porn, dir. Shindō Kaneto (1988).
25 On the question of Japanese noise
as culturally derived and specific,
Hegarty—in spite of the polar and
culturalist opposition mentioned
above—otherwise argues that the
scene itself can be read as a state-
ment 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 pro-
viding opening and closing live
concerts. This conceptualism has
been further mythologized in the
Speaking of Noise
Merzcar: an extremely limited
release in the form of a Mercedes
230 in which a cd of Merzbow’s
“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 here—with
Hendrix taking apart with noise
the ideological musical underpin-
ning of the nation. Attali writes:
“[T]he work of Jimi Hendrix is
meaningless without the elec-
tric guitar, the use of which he
perfected” (35).
28 Merzbow has himself collabo-
rated with many in the global
noise improvisational scene such
as Bastard Noise (United States)
and Kapotte Muziek (Nether-
lands); 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 above—fol-
lowing Hegarty—is 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 tech-
nique, 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 manipula-
tion using effects pedals and tape
loops. Bruce Russell of the New
Zealand–based noise band The
Dead C also uses a guitar-on-the-
table approach.
d i f f e r e n c e s 273

30 Zen was not the only Eastern
influence on Cage’s musical con-
ceptions. 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 compassion-
centered 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 clar-
ity of mind” (xxiv).
32 If I take my distance from cel-
ebration of aural violence that
has as a visual analog depictions
that—at the very least—may give
us pause, I am equally suspicious
of the essentialism that would
posit listening and networks as
female and commanding and
hierarchies as male—a charac-
terization made most famously
by Carol Gilligan in her aptly
titled In a Different Voice: Psy-
chological Theory and Women’s
Development.
33 In an appendix to Oliveros’s Deep
Listening, Maika Yuri Kusama,
a student of Oliveros, uses this
famous koan as a starting point
to comment on the composer’s
teaching methods (80–82).
34 Chion himself discusses ono-
matopoeia and the different sonic
tendencies of languages such
as French and English in Le son
(58–61).

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