Excess chaos just doesn’t have pop appeal. We call it “noise,” “ugly,” or “formless.” My music teacher in college said, “Music is ordered sound and silence.” “Ordered” is a pretty important word in that sentence. There’s some highly ordered music that doesn’t appeal to most of us, though. A lot of folks say that the strain of jazz known as bebop is just noise. But I’m going to offer up an alternate definition of noise: Noise is any pattern we don’t understand.
