Annihilating Noise

Description

Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar. It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today's technological ecology.

Paul Hegarty teaches Philosophy and Visual Culture at University College Cork, Ireland. He is the author of Noise/Music (Bloomsbury, 2007) and co-series editor of the Ex:Centrics series with Bloomsbury. He jointly runs the experimental record label dotdotdotmusic, and performs in the noise bands Safe and La Societe des Amis du Crime.

Annihilating Noise is an excellent contribution to sound studies, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the intersection of noise and broader social processes. * The Journal of Sonic Studies * Annihilating Noise disrupts the ways we have previously thought about noise and its relation to music, silence and culture more generally. Hegarty combines his previous theories of sonic disturbance with an astonishing array of theoretical approaches, turning the idea of noise every which way in order to re-energise discussions of gender, race and the technological economies. Japanese noise, Hip-Hop, sonic ecology, improvisation, video art and a whole lot more are used to rethink what it means to listen-and through which devices-to sonic disturbance. Poetic, eclectic and bold, this is a theoretical tour de force that will make you hear differently, a skill that has never been so urgently required. * Holly Rogers, Reader in Music, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK *