Workshop 03: Noise in music and radio

Organisation: Antje Tumat & Jan Philip Müller

The ambiguities of 'noise' and 'noises' – between disturbance, excess and non-musical as well as non-linguistic sounds of things and environments – mark the history of radiophonic cultures in the multiple intersections and convergences of – broadly speaking – two main lines of negotiating and dealing with noise(s). On the one hand the history of 20th century music sees an expansion of the sonic material processed and thus by a transgression of the dimension of the tone – defined by Hermann von Helmholtz as periodic waves, towards an organization of sound that is including noises. On the other hand the handling with 'noise' as a disturbance of the transmission of signals in a technical 'engineering' perspective has shaped concepts of noise, that, especially spreading out from Claude Shannon's theory of communication, have impacted discourses like systems theory and media theory among many others. The workshop set out to explore the different implications and notions of 'noise' between radio technology, musical composition and sonic environments.