"The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise"
In understanding my attraction to noise as the core building material of the relationship/communication space...(sculpting voice in the space between), these are quotes I underlined from "The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise" by Stan Link.
mechanical reproduction has transfigured itself and is no longer reproduction.
the types of noises born with recording were both the difference and connection between an original and its reproduction
noise engenders listening strategies
listeners learned to "hear through" noise.
we know where and when these things occurred and simply drove around them so to speak. We could ignore noise and , as we say, ignorance is bliss.
both were after ideas of authenticity and realism that implied suppressing the artifacts of documentation and transduction.
noise was undesirable in part because it drew attention to the physical apparatus.
in that regard, the ultimate subtext of noise reduction is the realization of an independent, pure, almost sacrosanct, musical object.
retro filtering generates circumstantial listening in which music has been heard in a more sensory, rather than ideal, acceptation. In short, it asserts experience.
nostalgia intrinsically involves the act of remembering, and therefore reflects a consciousness. Indeed, regarding noise as interference with, or degradation of, a signal inherently implies a sentience perceiving it as such. As a barrier to the signal, noise engenders interference with transmission as well as embodying an effort to receive.
noise occasions presence.
retro filtering allows us to hear the recording as a type of narrative world, reconfiguring music as a type of place. The recording becomes a fictional space....
noise can create a context
in drawing our attention to the technology itself, its machines and media, noise becomes a metaphor attaching a kind of tactility to sound.
noise, then, reinforces the authenticity of listening even as it destroys that of the reproduction. This interaction itself is quite significant, as it produces another subsequential component of listening through noise -- that is, a tangible experience of time.
noise tends toward the quality of memory. The interference of noise parallels or even mimics the resistance to recall imparted by temporal remove.
Noise renders everything past tense.
noise evokes orgin.
reproduction separates sound from its acoustical, spatial, and temporal orgins
noise makes us aware of media not only as a document, but as a source and a type of action: mediation.
Sound becomes more overtly the effect of an event or object that is itself embodied in noise.
In providing a mechanism for sustaining coherence as well as parsing it; noise provides a type of syntax for both sound and listening. In many ways, noise is the grammar of recording.
noise as a type of sound
noise as noise -- rather than noise as "signal" -- represents a reevaluation of aesthetic context as well as material.
no longer extraneous, noise did not -- in fact, could not -- do what defines it: interfere and degrade.
Distinctions between "sound," "noise," and "music" have evaporated into larger modernist preoccupations with material and structure.
modernist aesthetic, which tends to emphasize the creation of compositional strategies over reception strategies or, more accurately, to vie them as congruent.
recognition of noise as an aspect of reception as well as simply a type of compositional material.
noise occurs not merely passively as something to hear, but emphatically as how we hear something else.
modernism aside, noise embodies relationships between a source and a listener rather than between components of the source.
noise may suggest ways of composing, thinking, and hearing even without its explicit participation: noise as mediator.
the piece is an utterly compelling imposition of musical order on common sounds and noises....
narrowly transcends it's modernist acquisition of sound and noise as material.
rhythm and intonational inflections of speech without necessarily conveying its verbal meaning.
mediating and obscuring
the token of verbal communication in "Smalltalk," on the other hand, confronts the listener with a loss of concrete understanding.
The perception of the intrinsic interference of noise is then heightened when heard to obscure specific meanings, as opposed to the more generic signification of sound and noise.
By what mechanism would a noise model of composition ultimately abandon compositional models of noise?
Noise thinly and seductively partitions perception and meaning, recognition and understanding.
Noise is a style of distance -- a distance that can be meaningfully confused or exchanged with location, memory, presence, absence, temporality, and experience. For listeners, the application of noise, whether literally or as construct, then, represents the activation of the SPACE BETWEEN them and the object. Conversely, for the composer, it is the control of such activation that matters. The crossing of that distance is a drama all the more beautiful for its lack of a stage.