Invisible Music and the Blind Spots of Popular Music Studies
This essay uses Philip Tagg's 2011 article “Caught on the back foot” as a springboard to examine what popular music studies has left out. It focuses on musical practices that resist easy packaging within mass mediation and commodification—both central concepts in the field—yet remain essential for understanding how music shapes emotion, identity, and society. The discussion is organized around “vernacular music” and “corporeality,” two areas that prevailing theoretical models tend to obscure because they rely on categories that are ill-suited to sonic phenomenology. A wider historical and interdisciplinary lens is needed, along with stronger connections between music research and the physics and physiology of sound and noise.
What do we mean by “popular music”?
For thirty years after the founding of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, members debated the term “popular music.” In 2005 the journal Popular Music published twenty-three responses from its advisory editors; the most common, though not unanimous, reference point was music that is mass-mediated and commodified. Yet this emphasis misleadingly collapses “popular music” into “pop music,” a much narrower category. Jon Savage traces “pop music” as a term back to 1949, when Melody Maker described Benny Goodman as the “Consulting Director of Pop Music” on Russian-language programmes. By contrast, “popular music” has a longer and richer prehistory.
Debates about high and low culture in England date from at least the eighteenth century, in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism. When James Boswell described the music at Vauxhall Gardens in 1778, he captured how the experience differed from high art: it offered “a mixture of curious show—gay exhibition, musick, vocal and instrumental, not too refined for the general ear—for all which only a shilling.” That music was local, tied to other recreations, and entry was paid for. It was absolutely not mass-mediated. The phrase “popular music” itself was in use by 1855, and already referred to music of “Olden Times.”
Fixing on mass mediation confines attention mostly to the period after 1877, when sound recording was patented. But earlier forms of “mass mediation” existed—chief among them print. The bias toward the present is visible in the programming of the IASPM biennial conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 2011. If we assume the Anglo-European popular music tradition is about 350 years old, the data is sobering: fewer than three percent of papers covered the period from 1650 to 1950; about thirty-two percent covered 1950 to 2000; and a staggering sixty-five percent dealt with the ten years from 2000 to 2010. No other branch of cultural studies—literary studies, traditional musicology—skews so drastically toward the immediate present. The result is that popular music is imagined predominantly in terms of sonic excess, with little sense of silence or dynamic range. No other field, one might ask, devotes ninety-five percent of its attention to just twelve percent of its history.
How the “popular” got destabilized
By ignoring earlier periods, we lose sight of how the “popular” was historically constructed. As philosophers like Kant and von Herder discussed the high/low distinction in the eighteenth century, the rising middle classes sought to differentiate themselves from the urban underclasses accompanying the industrial revolution. They used literacy, leisure time, surplus income, and fenced-off cultural activities—concert halls, private art collections, costly books—as markers of refinement. The arrival of modern mass media from the late nineteenth century toppled those fences, placing formerly exclusive artifacts within reach of those long excluded. Mass mediation did not define “the popular”; it radically destabilized it. As Philip Tagg writes, “It would be as misleading as it would be undemocratic to exclude from serious consideration any set of musical practices associated with any population.”
A fixation on mass media can even produce dismissive contemporary claims. One recent scholarly collection declared that “Music in the twenty-first century does not exist for popular culture if it is not online nor amenable to the iPod.” But as of 2006, total iPod sales by Apple amounted to one half of one percent of the world’s population—making that generalization highly implausible. Such a stance mirrors Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century decision to include in his dictionary only words that had appeared in print. Both approaches banish from the field everything that lacks a particular technological endorsement. Both erase the everyday, oral, “coal-face” culture where music forms identity, and where a decisive cultural history unfolds.
Vernacular music: the overlooked powerhouse
A focus on mass mediation and commodification is especially limiting in one critical area. The kind of musical practice arguably most immediate, intense, and central to identity is what may be called vernacular music. Consider the period leading up to the 1916 Irish Easter Rising:
Volunteers marched in step to such songs as Ireland Boys Hurrah, God Save Ireland, The Felons of our Land, and Wrap the Green Flag. Implausibly, it was the Protestant choirmaster of St John’s Church in Sandymount, Cecil Grange McDowall, who composed the music for many of the most propaganda verses … on the church organ. He was also responsible for the musical arrangement of The Soldier’s Song, a song which countless Volunteers could remember where they first heard it, and the powerful impact it had: ‘in a few days’ time’, one recalled, ‘every Volunteer in Dublin was whistling or singing it‘.
Suddenly a rich baritone voice burst into the hymn to our Patron Saint Hail Glorious St Patrick and it was taken up by the whole congregation in such a fervent manner that a lump rose in my throat and I wanted to burst out crying or to do something to prove that I was worthy of being in their company.
These practices—sports-ground chants, political demonstrations, locker-room singing, street busking, children’s playground songs, hymn-singing, live-music dances, domestic singing and whistling—play a huge role in forming social identity. They are also invisible in models that prioritize mass media and commodification. In policy work this broader domain has been termed “vernacular music.” The term itself is not new—it appears in writings by Hitchcock, Illich, Pickering and Green, and Bohlman—but one useful definition emerges from contemporary discourse on production and consumption: vernacular music occurs the more the producers and consumers of the musical experience overlap. When a group sings “Happy Birthday” at a party, the distinction between maker and user all but dissolves. The category collects what look like minor, disparate activities into a major site of music-making that crosses genre boundaries—ethnic, indigenous, folk, jazz, pub rock, classical, and religious.
Examples of vernacular music arise in passing in published discussions, but sustained study remains rare. In the last ten years of Popular Music, of roughly 180 articles published, fewer than a dozen would fit this description. Yet the practice is huge: it is multivocal, generically diverse, overlapping with both art music and mass-mediated pop. Vernacular music embodies a parallel cultural history, side by side with the official narratives that guide music policy, funding, and even discourse on nationhood. It is a particularly instructive site for understanding how social contestations shape local and national identities.
The Australian context is rich with examples. From colonial times, vernacular practices drew the lines that delineated evolving social structures. Convict songs—old melodies with new lyrics—expressed a spirit of resistance suppressed in reports sent back to England. In the female factories of Hobart and Launceston, “singing, telling stories and dancing took up much of the women’s time,” while the overseer confirmed women were punished for composing “Obscene” songs ridiculing authorities. Singing even occurred at executions, where it celebrated the condemned and defended against the “gruesome function of the gruesome public spectacle.” In the 1820s convicts “turned the jingling of their chains into music ‘whereto they dance and sing.’”
Police themselves worked to suppress these vernacular gatherings. In 1848 fourteen Hobart musicians petitioned Lieutenant Governor Denison, arguing that repeated police interference threatened their livelihood, and that “music and a dance” were the only recreation left after labor for “the mechanic and labourer.” The police magistrate countered that through “much pains and opposition” he had managed to end “fiddling and dancing in public houses,” a practice that, in his view, brought together “vicious and dishonest characters of both sexes” and served as “the source of much evil to the community.”
Living music in extremis—and ordinary life
The power of non-mediated, non-commodified music does not require a pre-electric past. During the London Blitz and bombing of Australian cities, community singing in air-raid shelters fortified spirits. After the Pacific War, one witness recalled that in Prince Alfred Park “we stopped for over an hour to join in community singing”—popular wartime songs like “We’ll Meet Again,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major”—and “Large sections of the crowd linked arms and swayed as they sang.” In the grotesque extremity of battle, Soviet troops facing Finnish mines in the Winter War of 1939–40 “linked arms, formed close-order rows, and marched stoically into the mines, singing party war songs and continuing to advance with the same steady, suicidal rhythm even as the mines began to explode.”
Everyday vernacular music-making remains intense, large-scale, and socially decisive. In Australia, jazz presents a powerful case: most is played in highly localized, small-community venue events each week. While any single venue draws a modest audience, in late twentieth-century Australia the cumulative audience of these small venues was 2.5 times greater than that of “art music” concerts, and employment for musicians matched the orchestral sector. Factor in all other forms of vernacular music, and the numbers show a massive cultural sector invisible in studies rooted in mediation as normally defined.
Neglect matters partly because of methodology. The strong slant toward theory from cultural studies, a predominantly text-based or metalanguage approach, discourages engagement with the corporeality, sensation, and social formation that are the heart of these practices. Musical scholarship that bridges acoustics, physiology, and the sociology of sound could conceive such material far more effectively than the currently dominant disciplines. Greater interdisciplinary openness, including perspectives from medicine, neurology, or sound design, may help fill the gap that an over-reliance on recorded, commodified “data” creates.
Conclusion
“‘Vernacular’ does not refer simply to styles of music but to their relationship to the communities producing them.” They are invaluable sites for reimagining how social formations work, demonstrated by recent research into New Zealand tramping societies’ community singing and the use of guitar in Māori gatherings, work that transforms our picture of those groups. To hear popular music fully—including its entanglements with the body, emotion, conflict, celebration, and identity—means to insist that our tools of analysis do not surreptitiously edit out huge swaths of the world’s sonic reality.
What I have in view with the term “vernacular” is, above all, their corporeal character. Vernacular musics in the sense I’ve been describing are nearly invisible in popular music scholarship. They are also literal embodiments in how they are produced and consumed — made not at a remove from listeners and extensively mediated by technology in the usual sense of that word. The total vernacular musical experience is a physical one rather than a technologically mediated one: live bodies performing for live bodies. That observation bridges the discussion just above to what follows now. Besides that, vernacular music is not only primarily bodily; that form of musical encounter is likewise neglected when so much weight falls on media technologies. That ought to stir reflection, given music’s fundamental physicality. Music may be classed as art or culture, but before either of those, it is sound. Cognition requires sensation first. A maxim from one of gestalt therapy’s founders applies here: it is necessary to “lose … your mind and come … to your senses” (Perls 1976: 53). Second, if we restore the hearing body to the music experience, we recognise that, amid all the concentration on mediations, the most basic mediation of them all is almost entirely overlooked: the senses. Work on technological mediations is driven by the question of how they sift and shape the musical encounter. Yet the senses themselves are intricate mediating processes intervening in the construction of meaning. “We grasp the sensible with our senses, but we know now that this ‘with’ is not merely instrumental, that the sensory apparatus is not [just] a conductor” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 10). Where hearing especially is concerned, the space between the physical sound source and musical affect is not “transparent”; it is thickly mediated. A central concern in popular music studies is how and why we attach meanings and emotions to a piece of music, and the almost invariable answer centres on cultural conditioning and context. That is indeed true, but only in part. Before “culture” steps in, physiology and physics have already placed boundaries on what our responses to music can be — building a base that does not wholly determine what cultural construction is layered on top, but does constrain it. If someone shouts into your ear, what is said can hardly be taken as tenderness, and the reasons are physiological.
Sound’s character and the path it takes to the ear establish preconditions for response. If we cannot locate a sound’s source, for example, a sense of anxious unease — of occupying an unequal power position — underpins our reaction before any cognitive evaluation of the content begins. This “ubiquity effect” (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: 130–131) is why music in a highly resonant cathedral overwhelms worshippers in a way it could not in a corner pub, and why low‑frequency sound invariably conveys a sense of threat (film composers know this well — consider the “shark” theme in Jaws). The trip from ear to the seat of emotion likewise establishes physiological foundations for musical affect. Again taking low frequencies: they tend to turn the hearer into a set of asymmetrically resonating cavities, producing physical trauma.
A dramatic case: in December 2009, nineteen‑year‑old student Tom Reid was at his first university party in London, pushed against a bass speaker. He told a friend: “My heart feels funny. I think the bass is affecting me. Oh God, I feel very weird. My heart is beating so fast.” Minutes later he collapsed and died. The cause was listed as Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (SADS), which according to a medical spokesperson resulted from being “suddenly exposed to a lot of loud noise” (Erwin 2009). Loudness was not the whole story. Among noise‑related traumas, Low Frequency Noise (LFN) is the fastest‑growing problem. By the early twenty‑first century popular music had become (alongside the drop forge — hardly common) the most significant LFN source (Johnson 2009b). Cultural criticism can explain why the young man was at such a party and why the music was played at that volume. It is utterly incapable of explaining the lethal effect. Documented accounts of anxiety, depression, and physical harm in several European countries have led to legislation concerning not only the level but also the frequency content of public music (ibid.). The basis for this is the body’s hard‑wired responses to sound. To grasp such social impacts we must look beyond the usual boundaries of culturalist popular music study and enter into dialogue with physics and physiology — learning terms like bass trap, comb filter, Haas effect, amygdala, and the “quick and dirty paths” of neuroscience (Johnson 2008).
Sonic research is well positioned to explore the body’s role in meaning‑making, because sound cuts through positivist dualities and theoretical categories that have been indulged in visiocentric cultural analysis. I mean not the analysis of visual imagery but the fact that cultural theory is itself historically vision‑oriented. “Theory” here refers to the deployment of an explicit discursive screen through which a social practice is considered as an explanatory model — another “mediation.” It may carry a generic name like “gender theory” or “postcolonial theory,” or the name of an influential thinker such as Deleuze or Lacan. A screen lets us view a subject through or on it, but also blocks our view. The “theoretical turn” that began in the 1970s has brought that second sense increasingly to the fore. A historical tension between empirical evidence and theory runs through the field:
… to a great many Continental philosophers, the empiricist assumption that there exists a pre‑theoretical world of facts just waiting to be described seems hopelessly naïve. For the past two centuries, almost all Germany’s philosophers have subscribed to some version of the Kantian view that — in Hannah Arendt’s formulation — “truth is neither given to nor disclosed to but produced by the human mind”. (Miller 2002: 88)
The rise of theory was a necessary reaction against the extreme fetishisation of so‑called facts that “sometimes obscured the mind’s role in framing concepts” (ibid.: 89). Yet this “reaction” itself grew excessive; even the eminent “post‑modernist” Richard Rorty watched theory’s ascent with dismay at the unforeseen social disengagement, the “political uselessness, relative illiteracy, and tiresomely self‑congratulatory enthusiasm of this new Academic Left with its continual invocation of the names of Derrida and Foucault” (Ryerson 2002: 433). As a discourse that emerged from the need to uncover the ideological webs that illuminate society’s hidden springs, theory has enriched cultural conversation. But in the hands of many spokespersons it also fostered a smug neo‑scholastic autonomy from social practice.
At best, an artifact’s own particularity receded as it was folded into an ideologically driven narrative that reaffirmed a cultural theory. At worst, the actual “text” was either cherry‑picked so arbitrarily, or effectively falsified, that we lost sight
altogether of what it actually was — the subjects became an abstract homogenised mass. Meaghan Morris warned against “theorizations” in cultural studies in which “no text is more bleached of cultural particularity than the one which relentlessly theorises ‘difference’ without ever once stumbling over some stray, material fact – a poem, a press photo, a snatch of TV news – that could, in its everyday density, take ‘theory’ by surprise” (cited in Duggan 2001: xviii; see Johnson 2009c, from which portions of this section are taken). That disconcerting gap between theory and social practice is gleefully embraced by a newish darling of cultural theory, Slavoj Žižek: “For me, life only exists insofar as I can theorize it. … I can be bored to death by a movie, but if you give me a good theory, I will gladly erase the past in an Orwellian fashion and claim that I have always enjoyed it” (Boynton 2002: 57). Whether joking or serious, that statement acknowledges a connection between a fetish for theorization and the falsification of empirical reality. That our sense of the real is largely culturally constructed (though not entirely, as pain vividly demonstrates) does not mean that all reality is constructed by culture. Žižek’s cheerfully perverse view of the relation of theory to cultural practice can plausibly be seen as a reaction against the absurdities of Stalinist politics (ibid.: 61–62). That helps account for it as a historically situated phenomenon, which in this context is exactly the point. The supposed indifference to historical evidence is itself a manifestation of historical conditions — the historical specificities and therefore limits of (post)structuralist theory when it runs loose from experiential checks.
Underpinning all this is a turning away from the messy, corporeal self and its stubborn rootedness in very particular materiality, by invoking theory, mediations, and disciplinary boundaries. In musical contexts metaphors for this turning include the privileging of the disembodied and de‑localised concert‑hall interior, the fixation on the score, and the disembodiment of performance. I started this section by stating that cultural theory leans toward visiocentric epistemes, and that sonic research tends to break that distancing and disembodying model down. Some elaboration is now needed. In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon wrote in the Preface to The Great Instauration: “I, … dwelling purely and constantly among the facts of nature, … let the images and rays of natural objects meet in a point, as they do in the sense of vision” (Bacon 1960: 13). In 1981 Fredric Jameson began The Political Unconscious: “This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective as … the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (Jameson 1981: 17). A lineage from the Renaissance to the postmodern is laid open in the unexamined reliance on visual metaphors to theorise knowing: images, rays, vision, perspectives, horizons. The foregrounding of “perspective” in drafting and painting — later extended into a general phenomenological principle by Leibniz — is the construction of the world as seen. In painting and literature, “realism” started from the visible world. Attitudes toward the body assumed a visual cast: its cutting up for “inspection” became institutionalised with the rise of “anatomies” from the Renaissance onward. This “visualisation” of knowledge has remained deeply embedded across cultural discourses — ranging from Michel Foucault on mechanisms of punishment and control to Laura Mulvey on cinema (Foucault 1977; Mulvey 1975; see further Levin 1993; Tonkiss 2003). Even Merleau‑Ponty, in his “Introduction” to his analysis of “The Body” and sensation, reduces the sensorium strictly to sight (2012: 69–74; the index to that edition has well over a hundred references for “sight” and “gaze,” most of them several pages long; there are no entries for “hearing” or “sound”).
Just as Foucault’s work reminds us, the hegemony of sight as an instrument of knowledge devoted to control and enforcing a separation between Self and Other has characterised the modern era epistemologically and discursively. Because “knowledge” cannot be grasped directly we need metaphors — and those both form the discourse and define what is discussed. Ways of knowing and interpreting are called “insights,” “observations,” “speculations,” “visions.” We “demonstrate,” “show,” “reveal,” “display,” “visualise,” or “reflect” — even sonic experience and knowledge, which is “theorised” (a term from the Greek for “spectacle”), using words like “signify,” “semiotics” (from the Greek for “signs”), “visualisation,” “imagery,” “imagination,” aural “perspectives,” and acoustic “horizons.” Those terms, usual when dealing with sound, are all borrowed from visual vocabulary.
The metaphors we use to model knowledge are not simply rhetorical flourishes; they are shaping principles that affect how we understand, value, and use what we know. Because visuality became the most authoritative mode of knowing from the time of the scientific revolution onward, it became the model for cultural analysis, creating a self‑reinforcing loop. This is evident in the way cultural theory tends to shrink its domain to visual things. Nowhere is this perhaps clearer than in film studies: relevant bibliographies show an overwhelming tilt toward sight, in a medium that is equally sonic. Mulvey’s oft‑cited essay, for example, makes “the gaze” the sole operative faculty in the cinema. Cultural theory speaks of all meaningful artifacts as “texts” and offers “readings” of them. Both as a practice and as a figure for scrutiny and analysis, “reading” allows one to set aside awkward material data far more easily than “listening” does, this latter being a less differentiated sonic flood. Visual epistemologies carve up and compartmentalise; acoustic orders and their phenomenologies are marked by leakage both within and between material and conceptual spaces. The study of music and emotion “dissolves intractable dichotomies concerning nature versus culture, and scientific universalism versus cultural particularism” (Becker 2001: 154).
The body itself has come to be seen as the very opposite of culture:
One of the historian’s most tenacious habits is the strict separation of biology as an immutable sphere of life from society and culture as spheres that are variable and changeable over time. In this dichotomy between nature and history, the body is assigned to the category of nature and biology. … the body itself is always thought of as a physiologically stable entity. (Duden 1991: vii.)
This habit grows stronger in visiocentric theoretical frameworks. The link goes back at least to Descartes. Approached as an auditory phenomenon, however, the very concept of the body becomes unstable, releasing us from the confining either/or of the mind/body binary. We must “dig up” the body and acknowledge its part in meaning‑making before we can challenge that deeply ingrained mind/body split. Cultural theory, taking that split for granted and positing cultural construction extravagantly for many facets of identity and its societal relations, has often written the body out except where it stands as a cultural construction. Phenomena like affect, ideology, semiotics — the entire sphere of meanings central to cultural study — have, as it were, been lifted off the bone and defined in ideational terms. Elizabeth Wilson observed that feminist studies treat “bodily transformation ideationally and symbolically, without reference to biological constraints. That is, to think about the body as if anatomy did not exist” (Wilson 2004: 69).
Current philosophy increasingly undermines such theory, and investigations of sonic affect provide empirical evidence for the fragility of the underlying nature–culture split. The two continually leak into each other. The body mediates and filters meanings as much as culture does. Indeed, “mediation” itself — my point of entry into this discussion, a pivotal term in popular‑music discourse — can no longer be taken for granted. Sonic studies challenge the mind/body binary: Where does the mediating auditory interface with human experience begin and end? In sonic processes, where does the material become the cognitive? Here a turn to Extended Mind Theory and Distributed Cognition is revealing — models of cognitive ecology that conceive human thought as “inextricable tangles of feed‑back, feed‑forward, and feed‑around loops, that promiscuously criss‑cross the boundaries of brain, body, and the world” (Clark 2008: xxviii). Such approaches “require that traditional boundaries among individual, object, environment, and the social world be redrawn” (Tribble and Keene 2011: 4). Empirical investigation into these areas repeatedly confirms, as in the work of Tribble and Keane just noted, that a sense of historical depth can help break open the stifling frameworks of self and society underlying much cultural theory.
All this points to the limits of theory modelled on sight when trying to make sense of popular music. Drawing, again, on comments by Philip Tagg, the issue is not simply methodological but deeply epistemological: a question of how we think we know music and sound. Music theory experienced a notable flourish from the later seventeenth century in connection with the newly formed Royal Society, which devised experiments in music and hearing — including comparisons of tuning based on mathematics (ratios) and on the ear of a professional performer and teacher: a meeting between theory and practice. Something alarming emerged: the living ear failed to detect supposed “errors” in mathematical tuning as big as a quarter‑tone (Wardhaugh 2008: 105). A riddle was the ear’s ability “to recognize exact ratios when they are expressed in sound, and to tolerate considerable deviation from those ratios” (ibid.: 59). That “puzzle” — the split between hearing and theory — reminds us of music’s singular phenomenology and its power to stiff‑arm neat visiocentric analytical models.
Sonority and modern sound technologies collapse categories that are deployed within
Sounds resisting easy categorical placement endanger epistemological power blocs trying to defend their control. These key tensions that sound obscures – between public and private space, body and mind, artistic and natural, subjective and objective, social and aesthetic, being and meaning – were understood well by seventeenth‑ and eighteenth‑century theorists but can now impede sonic comprehension. Acoustical experience defies conceptual ordering. A sound that is simply itself, lacking lexical “sense,” can nevertheless stand as a profoundly meaningful social practice. Humans routinely generate primal utterances – sobbing, screaming, sighing themselves – whose affective force exceeds cultural theory’s taxonomy. The sound just is; explanation is unnecessary. Such expressiveness is better explained through sonic physiology and neuroscience than cultural frameworks, and indeed it scrambles the boundary between the two. Beginning the study of music from its fundamental sonority requires weaving through numerous disciplines – including cultural history, philosophy, acoustic engineering, auditory physiology, and neuroscience – before theoretical constructs become necessary.
Saul Bellow captured this predicament succinctly in The Dean’s December: “The humanists have flunked the course. They have no strength because they’re ignorant of science” (Bellow 1982: 225).
Conclusion: from music to noise, music from noise
This essay stands on the platform Philip Tagg built, identifying major blind spots in popular music studies – particularly the neglect of vernacular musics (in my sense) and the consequent reluctance to confront their primary mode: corporeality. My argument urges popular music scholarship to narrow the gap between its discourses and actual social practices by giving greater weight to the body and physical space, vernacularity, empirical work, the violation of disciplinary boundaries (themselves discursive constructs designed to enforce comforting order), and messy sonic specificity. A missing body lies at the heart of the void, something akin to Kristeva’s “abject” (1982) – that disorder which threatens all theorizing. This disruptive shadow haunts one of the most visceral expressive forms: music.
Music, I propose, achieves its greatest insight when it challenges order’s mechanisms and theory breaks down before actual sonic phenomena. To conclude, I point toward an argument: understanding of music and its social roles will deepen if we abandon orderly discourses of aesthetics and inherited cultural theory and confront music in its most anarchic form – the place all music sometime occupies, noise. The staunchest music lover, on hearing what others call music, has likely wished the racket would stop. In that instant music reveals itself in its purest state: sound liberated from theoretical and taxonomic mediation.
Within the sonic domain, “noise” supplies a potent tool for examining historical tensions that moulded modernity. Luigi Russolo, in 1913, fervently contended that the nineteenth century birthed Noise through the machine’s invention, advising readers to “cross a large modern capital with our ears more sensitive than our eyes” (Russolo 1986: 26). Picker’s treatment of street‑musician conflicts in Victorian Britain implicitly demonstrates noise’s explanatory capacity (Picker 2003). As a disruption of existing codes, discourses, habits, expectations, aesthetics and moralities, noise presents a uniquely defiant refusal to be controlled, a pure form of resistance. It materialises change’s latent power, the comprehensive upheaval of discursive and political order.
Yet noise remains instructively ambiguous in analyses of cultural change. It designates what is excluded from a discourse or symbolic system, as a musical score bans noise from music. But what is discarded from the musical text – as Charles Keil’s “Theory of Participatory Discrepancies” (1995) suggests – can hold the key to musical affect. Promise always hovers in noise: a message from a spatial or temporal “Other”, an encoded prophecy of change. Cultural theorists have offered various models of the disruptive or subversive in social spheres (Douglas 1996’s “dirt”; “stigmatization” per Goffman 1963; the “deterritorialisation” of Deleuze and Guattari 2004). But a model built specifically around sound, like noise, could prove far more productive for music studies. Noise incorporates all these disruptive features – it deterritorialises; it collapses self/other distance like abjection; it “spoils” identity akin to Goffman’s stigma. More than these, noise is provocatively ambiguous and historically apt in our constantly acoustic urban environment. Attali treated music as that which, ambiguously, mirrors prophecy and represents a political discourse being silenced (Attali 1985: 8‑9, 111). For him music itself is metaphor rather than a fully operational analytic tool. The idea of “noise” draws us nearer an ultimate model of disruption while signalling productive transformation. Acoustic engineers, astronomers, and communications researchers commit extensive resources to deciphering noise, hoping to reveal an intelligibility that theory cannot yet capture. Determining something as “noise” is powerfully diagnostic of belief‑systems prevailing in varying places, periods, cultural formations, as shown in extended fieldwork coordinated by Helmi Järviluoma (2009). “Noise” thus indicates that within what is asserted as random, disruptive, distorted, already lies latent meaning waiting to emerge, potentially instructive, always underpinning social discourse at every historical junction.