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Noise/Music: A History
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Noise/Music looks at the phenomenon of noise in music, from experimental music of the early 20th century to the Japanese noise music and glitch electronica of today. It situates different musics in their cultural and historical context, and analyses them in terms of cultural aesthetics. Paul Hegarty argues that noise is a judgement about sound, that what was noise can beco
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Paperback, 232 pages
Published
September 1st 2007
by Bloomsbury Academic
(first published August 15th 2007)
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About as engaging and informative as a review on Pulse Demon written by a 17 year-old RYM user who just discovered the work of Gilles Deleuze and Karl Marx. Both tinged in the same boring pseudo-academia pretenses.
starts off the discussion of noise on rather interesting therotical foundations, only to ruin things one step at a time with every chapter that is being read. despite his criticism of past teleological approaches to the subject matter (or avant-garde music), i find his book to be too chronological and teleological as it slowly leads the reader to a self-indulgent, culminating panegyric on merzbow (to whom he devotes an entire chapter, instead of exploring the richness of the japanese – or otherw
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May 22, 2012
Adam
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
musicians, outsider music fans, fans of Merzbow and electronic music
I was initially only going to read a chapter or two as research for a paper that I was writing, but after that paper was done I got completely immersed. Each chapter is set up like a research paper in and of itself, but obviously relating back to the overarching topic of "Noise" - either as music, in music etc.
Several chapters in the beginning actually begin as a very in depth study into the history of rock music and "other" music and where other histories of "rock" follow that branch from the B ...more
Several chapters in the beginning actually begin as a very in depth study into the history of rock music and "other" music and where other histories of "rock" follow that branch from the B ...more
Ok, I can't read this book because I totally disagree with the author's viewpoint that noise is bad. The first ten pages of this book (which, admittedly, is all the farther I read) discuss nothing but how noise is chaos, and it's negative, and how all noise is dangerous. All noise is not dangerous...yes, it can be potentially harmful...but the sound of water in the shower is not going to damage my hearing. In fact, I think that most people who fall asleep to white noise machines might also beg t
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really helpful book, covers all sorts of western transgressive musics, mostly focusing on the "popular" forms (noise, japanoise, industrial, techno, prog, punk, rock and roll, sound art), and their theoretical precursors.
This book has a lot of faults. Unfortunately, free improv is only mildly covered, and classical music hardly at all covered. Both of these Heggarty looks down upon as "high" art, even though I'm not so sure it's that clear cut of a distinction--I think this is just his personal ...more
This book has a lot of faults. Unfortunately, free improv is only mildly covered, and classical music hardly at all covered. Both of these Heggarty looks down upon as "high" art, even though I'm not so sure it's that clear cut of a distinction--I think this is just his personal ...more
Well-done work on the phenomenology of noise which utilizes and subverts trends in both academic writing and music criticism, most noticably the sort of A+B=C linear progression of influences and diffusions so well-loved by writers of both aforementioned fields. Hegarty pays some lip service to chronological progressions, utilizing a linear, teleological approach (which could be seen as either hypocritical or self-consciously post-modern, depending on how forgiving the reader is feeling), while
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Interesting book. Interesting insights and statements on the relation between noise and music. Some passages were rather difficult for me but in the end the point he was making always became clear. A whole chapter on Merzbow might seem obsolote or might come across as idolatry, but then again, as a case study and illustration of what noise can be about this was also very interesting and got me into checking some more Merzbow than I actually did. Having opened up for Merzbow once I was kind of bi
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ugh. Miles Davis as poster child for Adornian aesthetic theory? no, thank you. a sloppy, uncritical application of Frankfurt School theory to a wide array of cultural productions, further obfuscated by the author's refusal of linguistic consistency. as metafiction, a brilliant burst of failure-as-noise-as-success. as scholarship, an attempt to cash in on noise's brief celebrity that doesn't even reach for substantiality.
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This is an excellent analysis of the evolution of noise from natural to cultural phenomenon. Features chapters on pretty much the full spectrum of noise types. While the specific chapters are themselves, and Hegarty admits this himself in the introduction, not encyclopedic in their scope, overall the book is a great overview of both the sound genre and the aforementioned social appropriations of noise.
This book was interesting, but horribly written. The first couple of chapters are ok, but after a while it becomes painfully apparent that this was written without an editor. It made me wonder if he was trying to make his writing an analogy to the noise he was writing about.
The names he drops are pretty good and reminded me to check out more than a few artists I'd either heard and forgotten about or heard of and never checked out. The discography is really helpful on this front. ...more
The names he drops are pretty good and reminded me to check out more than a few artists I'd either heard and forgotten about or heard of and never checked out. The discography is really helpful on this front. ...more
This is a book about music as noise: why it is, where it came from and how it came to be. Following in the footsteps of Attali's Noise this book extends the concept of noise as cultural jamming instrument and applies it to the modern era in several admittedly arbitrary genres (which would otherwise could not be respected based on the context). Those interested in abstract expressionist music and high-brow snobbery will love this book.
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I guess this book provided more or less what I expected it to, but it wasn't that much of a joy to read. I think it turns out that listening to this music is more enjoyable than reading about it. No prob, though, it's nice to see a thorough, scholarly take on this broad subject and I'm glad I read it.
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Not perfect, but probably the best thing out there on the topic. I would prefer if the author would have stuck to either a purely theoretical-semiotic approach or a strickly formal analysis. It's a mixed bag with mixed results. It gets four stars because I'm in love with subject matter.
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Whew, welcome to academia!
You thought noise music was just scritches, throbs, fubs, whistles, snaps and farts? Nope. According to Hegarty it's
Derrida, Kant, Foucault and Masami Akita. Get with the program you Naysayers! ...more
You thought noise music was just scritches, throbs, fubs, whistles, snaps and farts? Nope. According to Hegarty it's
Derrida, Kant, Foucault and Masami Akita. Get with the program you Naysayers! ...more
THE book on noise music. Unsurpassed.
Not so much a history as an interpretation, and not nearly as compelling as it could be, at that. David Toop charts a much more readable/engaging course through similar material.
In the end, this was a good book. Although, clearly the author is into some crazy shit. Like music that consists of nothing but feedback and chickens.
The book reads more like college textbook than fun historical rhetoric. My entire review of the book can be found soon on Tiny Mix Tapes.
Very rigorous treatment of noise as both musical form and philosophical approach. Can be a bit dry at times, but I wouldn't spite a music book for being theoretically demanding.
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Dense and a bit of a chore to read at times. Explores the depths of noise in number of genres.
"This cozy humanism insists on diversity as a value in no need of further exploration, and modifies Derrida's notion of differance into a homespun, patronizing judgement, refusing alterity in favour of a recognizable, proximate form (to praise difference is to control it as a judged otherness). To think the difference between difference and alterity is to pit Levi-Strauss' positive view of culture being an accumulation of beneficial encounters against Baudrillard's insistence on alterity and tur
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O ruído na música é visto como mais que um barulho, mas uma categoria ligada à transgressão, ruptura, e um movimento que tensiona a dialética da inovação seguida de incorporação ao vocabulário. O ápice dessa incorporação do problemático teria se dado no Noise japonês, com Merzbow. Embora com vários exemplos difíceis de achar, o livro fornece um mapa de coisas musicais interessantes. Por vezes as observações conceituais são apressadas ou soam um pouco forçadas, o que torna os conceitos abertos de
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It took a few tries to get into this book, largely because of the irregular typesetting: small, long lines of sans-serif. I wish publishers would stick with normal font sizes and serif fonts. Anyway. This book is an academic take on noise music. A lot of over-inflated perceptions on the philosophy of what a lot of artists were meaning with there music. Not sure I buy all of it. However, the chapters "Industry", "Power", "Japan", and "Merzbow" were pretty good and basically covered why I thought
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