Noise

Author(s): Siegmund Levarie

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 21-31
Published by: University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343040
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Noise

SiegmundLevarie

Noise has become an increasingly noticeable and significant symptom of

our civilization. Fundamentally an acoustical phenomenon, noise has

wider implications.It is the legitimateobjectof scientificinvestigationsin

the fields of psychology and physiology. It can be properly evaluated by
its role in music and in general aesthetics. It leads to basic questions of
sociology. We shall pursue the implications in these various fields one by
one. In this process, as elsewhere, music provides the bridge from facts
(acoustics, psychology, physiology) to commitments (aesthetics, sociology).
Acoustics.-If we define sound as anything we can hear, then noise is
kind
of sound that is disorderly. The orderly kind of sound is called
the
All
sound
is either the one or the other or a mixture of the two. The
tone.
disorderly aspect of noise is very evident when we look at an oscillogram,
that is, the visual transcription of the vibration underlying every sound.
The line produced by noise is highly erratic whereas that of pure tone
emerges as a perfect sine curve.
The main distinction between disorderly noise and orderly tone
concerns pitch. The orderliness of the vibration bestows on tone an
individually defined, discrete pitch, which noise lacks. The disorderliness of the vibration keeps noise undifferentiated. Pitch can be exactly
measured (by frequency or wavelength) and exactly reproduced,
whereas noise can at best be estimated by approximation.
Otherwise all sounds-noise as well as tone-may be characterized
different
by
degrees of loudness and different qualities of timbre. Hence
to
the
common usage of the word, noise is not necessarily loud.
contrary
There are soft noises: the turning of a page, distant footsteps, normal
21

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22

Siegmund Levarie

Noise

frff1ffV~
FIG. 1.-Oscillograms

of tone (top) and noise (bottom).

breathing. Nor is noise necessarily grating. There are unaggressive

noises: rustling silk, rubbing one's hands, a running brook.
In the sounding world around us, noise is far more common than
tone. Occasionally nature produces tones, as when the wind blows
through a reed or a bird sings; but in general almost all natural sounds
around us are noises. The production of tone, on the whole, requires a
controlled situation. Tone is a human artefact brought about primarily
by special "instruments" capable of creating regular vibrations. Elastic
strings have proven extremely practical, but other materials and devices
have given good service (pipes, electric currents, and others). Outside
music, man produces tones as by-products of some organized activity:
the clanging of a bowstring (as beautifully described at the beginning of
the Iliad), the hitting of hammer against anvil, the striking of a clock. In
human life, as in nature, noise is the common occurrence. Tone is an
accomplishment.
Spoken language exemplifies well the mixture of noise and tone: all
consonants are noises, and all vowels are tones. Hence singers are taught
to sing on vowels (the differentiation among which derives from timbre).
Psychology.-The basic biological factor determining our attitude
toward sound is that we cannot close our ears. We cannot "listen away" as

Siegmund Levarie is professor of music at the City University of

New York. The author of books on Mozart, Guillaume de Machaut,
harmony, and Italian music, he has also collaboratedwith Ernst Levyon
Tone:A Studyin MusicalAcousticsand the forthcoming A Dictionaryof
MusicalMorphology.

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Critical Inquiry

Autumn 1977

23

we can look away. We are defenseless against sound. Usually we cannot

even place an adequate barrier between us and the audible source of a
sound; for sound, unlike light, casts no shadow. It goes around most
obstacles. Our defenselessness concerns all sound, not only noise but also
tone.
The threatening effect of sound on the human psyche has been well
observed in the case of newborn infants, who display a very special kind
of reflex, known as the Moro reflex, in response to any loud noise, to a
jarring of the crib: "The infant lying on his back extends his arms forward, stiffens the lower extremities and contorts his face into a grimace;
after a second or two he brings the arms slowly together into a sort of
embrace, emits a cry and then gradually relaxes. The reflex normally
persists for about a month or six weeks, being gradually replaced by the
startle response shown by adults following a loud noise like a pistol
shot."'
Studies of the Moro reflex have not distinguished, to my knowledge,
between tone and noise-perhaps because the sounds in a lying-in ward
are likely to be exclusively noise. One wishes that pediatric experiments
be refined to determine whether such a distinction might be mirrored by
the kind of reflex.2 In any case, the infant's reaction to sound differs
significantly from its reaction to other stimuli. Before the end of the first
week of life, the infant closes its eyelids when disturbed by some visual
stimulation, and it withdraws in a most coordinated manner a painfully
stimulated arm or leg. To auditory stimuli, however, it remains exposed.
This association between sound and the threatening outer world,
early established, lies within the everyday experience of all of us. Our
mature differentiation between noise and tone has a bearing on our
enjoyment of listening to music. For while we remain defenseless before
the power of any sound, the controlled presentation of orderly tones in a
good composition obviates the primeval threat. The intelligible organization of music permits us to master and subsequently to enjoy the otherwise confusing and often irritating acoustical stimuli.3 Noise, on the
other hand, evokes in adults and children alike a direct reflex action as if
it were a signal of danger, or an unpleasant attack. Indicative in this
regard is our immediate reaction, without interference of logical
thought, to thunder and lightning. Although we know that lightning
1. L. E. Holt and J. Howland, Holt's Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, 11th ed., rev. by
L. E. Holt, Jr., and R. McIntosh (New York, 1940).
2. Since writing this article, I have persuaded Dr. Nathan Rudolph, of the department of pediatrics, Downstate Medical Center, State University of New York, to join me in
setting up such experiments. In due time, we hope to publish the results. Preliminary
findings indicate that newborn infants indeed distinguish between tone and noise. Of
twenty-four neonates tested thus far, all were disturbed by noise and only three by tone.
3. For a development of these thoughts in a different context, see Heinz Kohut and
Siegmund Levarie, "On the Enjoyment of Listening to Music," The PsychoanalyticQuarterly
19 (1950): 64-87.

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24

Siegmund Levarie

Noise

may ignite our house and kill us, we really shudder, not at the dangerous
flash, but at the accompanying noise of the harmless thunder. The very
idiom "thunder and lightning" reverses the order of the physical event
so that the terrifying emphasis lands on the word describing the sound.
Similarly, according to reports by many Jews who, in Germany under
Hitler, lived in continuous fear of being arrested, the sighting of a
stormtrooper generated less instinctive fear than the ringing of the
doorbell. In Anne Frank's dramatized story, the threat of approaching
footsteps provides the terrifying climax. During World War II the Germans tried to panic the Allied troops by extra noise producers attached
to their dive bombers. This practice followed a long tradition, extending
from primitive warriors to modern bayonet fighters, which adds the
terror of noise to the menace of the weapon.
Noise need not be loud in order to offend, although here as
elsewhere the inherent quality is intensified by extremes (very high, very
low, very loud, very soft). In periods of stress or preoccupation or concentration, even a very soft noise can provoke a startled response. A
moment later one might smile at the apparently foolish overresponse,
but one is psychologically justified in having felt attacked. Musicians
know the distressing irritation caused by the smallest scratch on a
phonograph record, or by a static on the radio, as if the minimal noise
amidst controlled tones symbolized a fundamental aggression against
one's civilized status.
Physiology.--Just as noise assails our psyche, it also damages our
hearing apparatus. Factory workers, among others, can attest to both
psychic fatigue at the end of a day and physiological hearing impairment
at the end of their lives. According to current studies, deafness may be
only one symptom in a wider syndrome caused by noise.
In 1960, Dr. Samuel Rosen, an otologist at Columbia University,
organized an expedition to the Sudan to conduct a hearing survey of a
population living in a relatively noise-free environment.4 He chose an
area which until 1956 had been a "closed" one,
untouched by any foreign culture or civilization .... It is primarily
bush country surrounded by swamps of the White Nile and contains abundant game. It is accessible only during the dry season by
truck or jeep over a narrow, rough dirt trail sometimes difficult to
find and to follow. In this isolated area live the Mabaans, a prenilotic, pagan, primitive, tribal people whose state of cultural development is the late Stone Age. They are a peaceful and quiet
people,... living in small huts with straw-thatched roofs and bam4. The following report leans on his findings. See Samuel Rosen et al., "Prebycusis
Study of a Relatively Noise-free Population in the Sudan," Annals of Otology,Rhinologyand
Laryngology 71 (September 1962): 727-43; and "High Frequency Audiometry in Prebycusis: A Comparative Study of the Mabaan Tribe in the Sudan with Urban Populations,"
Archives of Otolaryngology79 (January 1964): 18-32.

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Critical Inquiry

Autumn 1977

25

boo sides. . . . They have no guns, but hunt and fish with spears.
They do not use drums in their dance and song but pluck a fivestring lyre and beat a log with a stick.
This musical merry-making of the youth was the only high-level noise
recorded by the researchers during a two-month period. Except for
"the fleeting noises of domestic animals, few other sounds were
sufficiently intense to yield a reading on the sound level meter."
Carefully set up audiometric and other medical tests confirmed the
case against "noise as the critical factor in the differences in hearing with
aging in various populations." In modern industrialized areas in the
United States, hearing deteriorates in the natural course of aging. The
primitive Mabaans, ranging in age from ten to ninety, "demonstrated
better hearing in the high frequency with aging than any [people] in
similar studies of modern western civilization. ... There is a simultaneous presence of blood pressure elevation and high tone loss with aging in
the United States. There is a simultaneous absence of elevated blood
pressure and high tone loss with aging in the Mabaans."
The auditory test results could have been predicted on the basis of
the steep and noticeable increase of hearing aids even among middleaged people in New York City. The established harmful effect of noise
on blood pressure is likely to be paralleled by analogous findings in
medical areas yet to be investigated.
Music.-Although music may utilize all available sounds, the proper
building material of the art of music is tone. When we think of a piece-a
popular tune or a Bach fugue-we identify it by its pitches, that is,
precisely by that characteristic of sound that distinguishes tone from
noise. The other sound qualities of loudness and timbre enter but remain dispensable. To evoke the "Star-spangled Banner," for instance,
one does not first wonder whether it is hummed or trumpeted but rather
how its opening line "goes." If I reproduce this line, another person will
recognize it as an individual, particular experience defined by pitches.
Now the path from the unlimited world of sound to the discrete
experience of a specific piece of music marks a long and complex accomplishment of civilized man. It involves spiritual as well as intellectual
endeavors, all of them in the direction from random to order, from
nature to art. The process is one of continued selection, of increasingly
refined discrimination. At the beginning lies undifferentiated sound; at
the end, the art of music.
The diagram on page 26 sketches the main steps in the development
from the infinite world of physical vibration to the finite world of musical
tones.
In this process of repeated distillation, the left column shows the
increasing purification; the right column, the nonmusical elements that
are eliminated at each step. Just to distil sound from the rest of nature,

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26

Noise

Siegmund Levarie
Vibration oo

Supersensory, infrasensory
Perceived by senses
Other senses (eye: light, etc.)
Ear: sound
Noise
Tone
Continuous pitch variation (siren)
Discrete pitch variation
(individuation)
Chance relations (asystematic)
Musically meaningful
tone relations
(systematic)
FIG. 2.-The

selection process from vibration to music.

we first eliminate all those vibrations that we do not perceive because

they lie above or below our senses (X rays, radio waves) or that we do not
hear because their frequency is either too high (light) or too low (e.g., a
swing). From sound, we distil pitches, that is, tones, by eliminating noise.
From the infinite number of possible pitches (as represented by the
siren), we select discrete tones. And finally to reach a musical systemany musical system-we eliminate asystematic chance relations between
tones and select systematically from among the discrete tones a certain
number with which to operate. In Western tradition, this number happens to be 12. Other numbers are possible. Whatever the musical system,
however, it is inevitably reached by a similar selection process which
successively rejects nonmusical elements in favor of musical.
From this final point of view, noise appears as a premusical element.
Other phenomena that may be called premusical are continuous pitch
variation-that is, the siren or glissando in which individuated tones
remain submerged-and
asystematic chance relations of tones which
individuated
of meaningful connections.
tones
deprive
The history of music, at least until recently, is a manifestation of
musically meaningful tone relations. Before the Romanticism of the
nineteenth century, noise instruments such as drums and cymbals were
almost never prescribed by the composer. They existed, of course, and

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Critical Inquiry

Autumn 1977

27

were employed for particular purposes (such as marches, dances) but

they never characterized the musical style of a period or composer. In
the entire huge opus by Bach, there is not a single instance of a nondiscrete pitch. Timpani, when providing a desired element of percussive
definition, are always marked by pitch. (So are the bells in the spurious
cantata "Schlage doch," the only occurrence in the music of Bach of
another percussion instrument.) Similarly Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven employ pitchless noise instruments only when deliberately
evoking the barbarian: in occasional Turkish music in symphonies or in
an opera like Die Entfiihrung aus dem Serail.
The situation drastically changes in the Romantic style of the
nineteenth century which must be considered a direct antecedent of
many current trends. Realism, first at home in opera, demanded noise.
Beethoven raises a storm in the Pastoral Symphony exclusively with instruments of defined pitch while producing the artful illusion of noise by
an indistinct and quasi-disorderly mixture of tones in a low register.
Comparable pieces by later composers utilize drums, wind machines,
rattling chains, scratching metals, and hammer strokes.
The establishment of noise as a primary style characteristic can be
read off the growing lists of noise instruments in twentieth-century
scores. Highly typical in this respect is the work of Edgar Varese, a
strong influence on generations of American composers growing up
after the Second World War. His famous Ionization, of 1931, is scored for
thirty-nine percussion instruments without definite pitch, three percussion instruments with definite pitch, and two sirens.
The participation of sirens is significant. The glissando of a siren
projects a theoretically infinite number of tones each one of which has
lost individuality because of the almost instantaneous transition to its
immediate neighbor. This lack of pitch definition places the sound of a
siren psychologically closer to noise than to tone. It is the opposite of
individuation, a continuous becoming, never an artistic being. Like
noise, a siren is premusical (see fig. 2).
Aesthetics.--Individualized and individuating pitch accounts for the
fundamental distinction between tone and noise. Yet in the world
around us, the two aspects of sound are seldom, if ever, cleanly separated. Pure tone, that is, the acoustical counterpart of an exact sine
curve, can be electrically produced in a laboratory. It may be approximated by the vibration of a tuning fork. Otherwise all tones we hear
contain some admixture of noise, particularly at the moment of attack.
The complex mechanism of a piano, for instance, never completely eliminates the noise of the finger on the key, of the actions of the various
levers against each other, and of the hammer against the string. The best
violinist cannot entirely free his tone production from some scratching
of the bow against the string; the best flutist, from some wind escaping
from his mouthpiece; the best timpanist, from some rapping of his sticks

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28

Siegmund Levarie

Noise

against the membrane. A singer is bound to noise by the consonants of

his text; among musical performers, he may have the best chance of
approaching purity of tone in a vocalization such as a melisma, coloratura, or a piece expressly so composed (for instance, the "Chorus of
Heavenly Spirits" in Spontini's opera Nurmahal, or Ravel's Vocalise en
forme d'Habanera).
The aesthetic criterion guiding performers is the elimination or, at
least, maximal reduction of any noise. All technical training concentrates
on how to minimize scratching, knocking, hissing, rasping, and grating.
The aesthetic ideal, in short, is escape from noise toward tone. This
purely practical process parallels the artful distillation demonstrated for
the genesis of tone out of premusical elements. Tone becomes the final
aesthetic accomplishment, while noise remains symptomatic of a more
primitive stage transcended by evolving civilization.
The persistent admixture of noise to tone serves as a reminder of
the imperfection of this material world. "Uns bleibt ein Erdenrest Zu
tragen peinlich," Goethe complains at the end of Faust. "We are left to
bear painfully an earthly remainder." Yet a positive lesson may also be
drawn: absolute purity comes treacherously close to sterility. For the
maintenance of life, bacteria are as essential as cleanliness. Music made
with "sterilized" pure tones would have as limited an appeal as existence
under an oxygen tent. The only such composition (of limited duration)
in my experience appropriately accompanied an eerie fairy story in an
illusive silvery puppet theater.
The opposite process, namely, the recognition of the presence of
tone in every noise, is also possible. Analysis of sound, developed by the
French scientist J. B. J. Fourier around 1800, shows that every sound can
be dissected into an unlimited number of sine waves, that is, tones, of
varying frequencies. No matter what the noise, it can be understood as a
superposed conglomeration of tone "clusters." Unlike the presence of
noise in tone which could be ideally eliminated, the presence of tone in
noise is fundamental. Noise can be decomposed into tone, but the flow is
not reversible. Noise is the primary, natural, disorderly phenomenon. It
becomes the remainder in the refined, artistic, orderly genesis of tone.
For the production of music, noise, unlike tone, is not essential but
may serve it as, in terms of evolution, a tamed animal serves man. Noise,
though inadequate to create a musical system, may add spice to a composition. Thus it has been used-apart from the deliberate barbarism of
most of music history. In dance music,
Turkish music-throughout
characteristic beat and add luster to the
the
mark
instruments
percussion
tune. In Richard Wagner's overture to Die Meistersingervon Niirnberg (to
give just one example), a soft triangle stroke distinguishes the artful
combination of three themes at the moment of return to the tonic C
major; and a rousing loud cymbal clash, the climactic final cadence. In
these as in countless similar instances, noise, always subordinated to

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Critical Inquiry

Autumn 1977

29

tone, affects us like a lion in a cage. It provides excitement without

danger. In the coexistence of noise and tone, aesthetic value derives
from the preponderance of one over the other.
Sociology.-In recent decades, noise has broken out of the cage. It
dominates the contemporary scene outside and inside the concert hall.
Together with the siren, it has become the most noticeable symptom of
modern life. Electric appliances, crowded stores and supermarkets, factory machines, automobiles, trains, airplanes-whatever the technological gain, the concomitant phenomenon and the price we pay for it is
noise, and usually at a high degree of loudness. Our spontaneous reaction to the howling of a siren, the acoustical symbol for dynamism run
wild, is utilized by the alarm signals of fire engines, police cars, ambulances, and air-raid drills. Has the intended shock worn off so that we
accept the wailing factory siren as a substitute for the noon bells of a
church? Under the impact of noise and sirens, our healthy and elementary reactions to acoustical events and acoustically deeply rooted symbols
seem to be vanishing. Only occasionally some feeling for fundamentals
still prevails-usually on a subconscious level-as in the identification of
the all-clear signal with a steady tone. Similarly amidst the confusing and
inherently threatening noise of a traffic crossing, the reassuring horn
tones of a honking car admonish us to collect our wits. The overpowering attack by noise on a defenseless population has evoked an increasing
number of protective anti-noise laws in various cities, states, and countries.
In music, too, noise and glissando, for the first time in civilized
history, have assumed the role of a primary style characteristic. They
have affected alike popular entertainment and avant-garde sophistication. Compared to the language of systematic tonal relationships, there is
no difference between, on one side of the social spectrum, the gross
brass slides and loud drum batteries in a dance hall and, on the other,
the relatively pleasant and soft sound of a vibrating gong submerging in
a bucket of water. The overall popularity of noise instruments is reflected, among other symptoms, in the recent quantitative and qualitative superiority of a percussion program at a leading New York college
over other instrumental instruction.
What are the possible reasons for the ascendancy of noise in our
society? How can we interpret it? It signifies a particular kind of rebellion. We have established the acoustical and musical facts according to
which a system built on musically meaningful tone relations represents
the end product of a long and artful selection process. To arrive at it,
many elements had to be eliminated, among them noise. The result of
the selection process marks an accomplishment of civilized man; for
civilization may be defined as a willingness to accept limitations, and
within the infinite world of sounds, any tone system signifies a voluntary
limitation. In this sense, a creative artist is essentially always civilized, for

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30

Siegmund Levarie

Noise

he cannot work without some kind of limitation. A citizen is civilized if he

understands that the alternative to limitation is chaos and anarchy.
By contrast, any deliberate repudiating of accomplishments of civilization and voluntary returning to a precivilized state denotes an act of
rebellious barbarianism. Rebellions are sometimes necessary. They can
produce positive results when a justified need for change replaces the
old order, not by anarchy, but by a new order. Such was the case in the
American Revolution. Music history, too, records various "revolts." We
read that the secular uprising of the ars nova of the fourteenth century
was condemned in a papal bull because of its depravity, wantonness,
irregularity, and excess. Around the year 1600, the crumbling confines
of an earlier practice were overthrown by a group of composers in the
north of Italy, whose new aesthetic principles were in turn interpreted
by musicians of the next generation as "deformations of nature and
propriety." None of these and other revolutionary efforts, however, relapsed into disorder because each in its own way accepted as a basis for
further operations the artistic accomplishments of discrete tone and
some ordered system. The development of music (and of good art in
general) has been identical with that of civilized man.
Today, however, the rebellious departure from traditional music is
one of principle. It began with Arnold Sch6nberg's attack, in the early
decades of the century, not on discrete tones, but on natural tone relationships and proportions. Since then, for the first time in history, an
irruption of the irrational has openly declared musical proportion and
order to be without value. Noise and other phenomena eliminated on
the long path from chaotic sound to civilized music are claimed to be
essential. The inarticulate and the unformed have been elevated to
aesthetic standards.
Noise has emerged as the standard bearer of the forces rejecting
civilization. Barbarianism has always existed, but never before has it
been held up as a model to aspire to. The function of barbarianism in
our society was predicted and described in 1930 by Ortega y Gasset:
"The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing
itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the
commonplace and to impose them wherever it will."5 A decade before
him, Karl Kraus had written: "A culture ends when the barbarians break
out of it."6
The eruption of noise in contemporary music has been claimed to
be "good" on the grounds that it is an expression of our time. If it be true
that art should mirror its time, it must by no means mirror only the
external and existent. The mirror should also reflect human aspirations
and their wellsprings. The art of great epochs has fulfilled this function
5. The Revolt of the Masses (New York, 1951), p. 12.
6. Pro domo et mundo (Leipzig, 1919), p. 147.

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Critical Inquiry

Autumn 1977

31

above all others. Greek art reflects not so much the actual Greek of the
time as a certain elevated aspect of the Greek soul. The Romantic postulate, that the artist's works are identical with his life, is clearly at variance
with fact. One need not boast about "expressing one's time." The secular, physical person is only half the man; and of this half, biography
renders account. Art is much more the record of that other, invisible
part of him. It provides those energies which shape the most precious
parts of ourselves. For above all, the task of art is to show a way. In
medieval terms, it is anagogic. Where art is concerned, one may safely
ignore all concern for being timely. The new barbarianism, with its premusical, precivilized worship of noise, glissando, and indistinct pitches
offers no vision and denies natural and artistic norms. It is like screaming during a catastrophe-an occupation that is neither musical nor
artful. The responsible reaction is to try to recognize noise for what it is
and to assess it accordingly.

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