What is it? The question seems simple — yet it’s tough to define. Is noise sound? For some, the answer’s obvious — yes, it is. But what about visual noise on an old television screen? Or, noise in economics? In the book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman describes noise as irrelevant or misleading data and information that can cause misinterpretation of economic indicators, leading to incorrect decisions by investors, analysts, and policymakers. Other noise examples might include computer programming algorithms, psychological noise, and more.

While a complex and far-reaching inquiry, I decided to tackle it from three perspectives:

INDEX

If noise is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, how do we, in fact, define it? As an ongoing research project and resource, this index is a consolidated tool for anyone interested in noise and how it shapes science, audio, culture, and other aspects of our lives. It offers a range of interpretations across media and disciplines, with as many varieties as possible. Here, you’ll find topics from visual noise in graphic design to noise music, a genre characterized by musicians questioning dominant power structures, to Brown noise and how it may help people concentrate or focus.

INTERVIEWS

The subject of noise has become a starting point for me to conduct seven interviews with designers, artists, musicians, and a Tibetan monk. Each interview offers unique insight into personal experiences and ways to approach the world through noise. These interviews taught me considerably about noise and helped me better understand humanity.

PRACTICE

But what are my thoughts on this looming subject? Is this a game of semantics? Why am I attracted to noise? The answer lies in multitudes of forms.

NOISE AS SOUND

From a sonic perspective, noise creates dissonance and fullness in sound, a seeming paradox. Sonically, ‘white noise’ refers to every frequency the human ear can hear played at the same amplitude. Then where does the dissonance come from? My thinking lies in the idea that it’s fundamental to the human condition. From our time in the womb, the human body is surrounded by noise, and so the world appears to be silent.

An example is the “shhh” sound, akin to white noise, which soothes babies by mimicking the comforting, constant sounds of the womb familiar from their prenatal environment. Scientists support its use as part of calming techniques, emphasizing its effectiveness in mirroring the continuous background noise experienced before birth. Culture, music, and language create patterns in our minds; disruptions to those patterns are called noise simply because we are not used to it. But strangely, we need it. The world of sound can be exceptionally sterile without noise, and noise can act as both a catalyst for dissonance and change in music. I am interested in the experimental nature of noise and the surrounding communities. Over the last two years, I’ve been organizing noise shows and bringing people together to experiment with sound and noise. The events, titled Rave by Design, allowed me to try different experimental approaches to sounds and create posters for the show and live visuals for the performances.

Another way I introduce noise in my musical practice is by ambiance. Ambient noise and Drone music might also seem like a paradox: How can ambiance be noise? Consider informational noise. From click-bait journalism to the shortening attention span of the public, we live in a world of information overflow. When an audience member hears a sound whose evolution is to change over an hour rather than a second, many uncomfortable feelings might arrive. Slowness can bring out the noise of the mind and, perhaps with recognition we can improve it. With the help of friends, I organized a live event at the RISD Museum titled Ambience as Noise, where artists came together and performed drone music for two hours—the event created an interruption into a hyper-stimulated media landscape through slowness.

TECHNOLOGY AS INSTRUMENT

I approach design as a musician, where technology becomes an instrument for generating ideas. My interest in typography has led me to create custom software that interacts with language similarly to how I might interact with a synthesizer. Programming languages and writing custom software allow me to expand on this practice because I can create custom tools to tell a particular story and create a larger narrative. An example is a video piece I made with the same title of this book, Variations on Noise.06 The video is an essay exploring the notion of noise and its relationship to the human body. I wrote custom software for this project, which tracks the motion of the human body, outputs the data to live synthesizers, and generates new typographic forms. Using typography and graphic form the same way a musician would use their instrument, I was able to comment on more extensive texts and connect philosophical ideas of noise, such as Micah Silver’s Figures of Air, Damon Kruoski’s Ways of Hearing, and Jacques Attali’s book Noise: The Political Economy of Music.

NOISE AS ALGORITHMS

As a visual designer, I use noise to create pseudo-randomness while maintaining consistency in design work. Thanks to Ken Perlin, who made the Perlin Noise algorithm, I can generate procedural textures and use them to create natural-seeming patterns in visual environments. I apply Perlin noise most in my design practice by creating fluctuation in repetitive typographic design work. While programming, I often use repetitive patterns; and noise helps to create variations in some of those patterns. Visual designers can use noise to create anything from mountains to clouds to the ocean. Without noise, the work of a generative artist would be challenging and tedious.

NOISE AS A METAPHOR FOR INFORMATION

In the current technological era of advanced artificial intelligence and attachment to social media (and to the screen), noise is the information we are surrounded by. Noise is what is fighting for our attention. In my practice, I comment on these ideas through design projects like inourti.me. ​inourti.me​ uses facial recognition technology to monitor the user’s eye movements using their computer’s camera. Each time the user blinks, the system generates a new daily headline from The New York Times and initiates a timer to measure the duration the user spends reading this headline. The time taken to read the headline influences the next interaction: the longer the reading time, the more intense and ‘noisy’ the sound generated upon the user’s subsequent blink. The piece acts as a commentary on how we consume media, click-bait journalism, and surveillance.