The opposite of noise is signal. Noise is undifferentiated sound; there are no points of reference that people can hold onto. It’s like being nowhere, like the description of blindness I once heard from a man in elementary school. Born with no optical nerves, one of the kids asked him what it was like being surrounded by black all the time. He said, “There’s no black, there’s nothing.” The kids didn’t get it. He explained by asking how their third arm felt: there’s nothing there to feel.
Points of reference can be as simple as any repeated sound. We use these to identify where we are; on the street, car horns, engine sounds, moving cars, and other ambient sounds. Though not composed or regularly organized into patterns, there’s differentiation which identifies a space.
Words are another form of signal. They organize our exclamations into intelligible sounds. Imagine humans communicating without clear words. It’d be disturbing to hear, like the severely brain-damaged. Even screaming babies are organizing their sounds as best they can. I imagine one of the reasons they are crying all the time is that they don’t understand why the large ambient objects around them, mom and dad, don’t get it.
And from words there comes Morse Code, Semaphores, Braille and more. Even the regular movements of our body are a language; we can usually tell in the first few seconds of meeting anyone how the interaction is going to follow.
As a musician, I’d assumed incorrectly that the opposite of noise was music. Musical intelligibility is the basic concern of all serious composers. Music’s a great way to investigate the noise-signal issue. The question of how to organize something which has no inner logic—in this case, individual notes—into comprehensible form has been at the heart of composition since the invention of notation. Notation creates an intellectual distance between the player and the sound; this leads to the desire for understanding.
This led to two ideas, those of idea-contrast and sequence. The first means placing ideas one after the other. In doing so, the shift between the two ideas suggests something. Sequence is repeating something, either exactly, or with some variation.
As I began to study music, I found that these questions concerned other composers; in fact, they were the main concern of most post-WW II music. However, the conclusions, which in music means the works created, didn’t correspond to what I felt communicates as recognizable signals. The first sign of this were the notes that Pierre Boulez wrote to his piece called Le Marteau sans maître (in English The Hammer Without a Master). He said his point was to create organized serial music which had no inner points of reference. After struggling to find ways to make random sounds communicate I couldn’t understand why he’d be interested in such an exploit. It seemed like purposefully babbling out complex nonsense. Even stranger: why did so many people jump on the bandwagon?
Humans seem attracted to nonsense. Recently, after years of thinking about it, taking classes in university, and attempting repeatedly to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I finally got the point. Kant says that sense perception gives us information, but that our minds can’t know the “thing in itself.” Our minds create the innerness of the objects which we see. We think we see an orange, but we have no idea of what the inner-ness of that orange is, we must put it there.
Whether it was his intention or not, he does away with common sense. He intellectually breaks the bonds of reality so that objects lose their unquestioned identity and then replaces them with our feelings about the objects. Everything in the Universe becomes a product of our feelings.
This line of reasoning has had devastating consequences. The break between people and the surrounding world has been eroding. It’s gotten so bad that today the most absurd fantasies are taken for truth, simply because someone feels them to be true. The entire New Age movement is proof of this, as is Q-Anon, remote viewings, past-life regression, Astral projection and Shakras. One friend of mine believes in Bigfoot and Ancient Astronauts. Another believes in Reptilians, the idea that the rich are monsters from outer space.
Their beliefs have limits, however. None of these people ever doubt, when ordering a hamburger in a restaurant, that the dish in front of them is anything but a hamburger.