Nothing but Noise

Abstract

This book explores how timbre shapes musical affect and meaning. Integrating perspectives from musicology with the cognitive sciences, it advances a novel model of timbre interpretation that takes into account the bodily, sensorimotor dynamics of sound production and perception. The contribution of timbre to musical experience is clearest in drastic situations where meaning is itself contested—that is, in polarizing contexts of reception, where the evaluation of “musical” timbre by some listeners collides headlong into a competing claim that it is just “noise.” Taking this commonplace reaction as a starting point, the book explores affect, reception, and timbre semantics through diverse cultural-historical case studies that frustrate the acoustic and perceptual boundary between musical sound and noise. It includes chapters on the racial and gender politics in the reception of free jazz saxophone “screaming” in the late 1960s; an analysis of contested timbral ideals in the performance practices of the Japanese shakuhachi flute; and an historical examination of the overlooked role of “brutal” timbres in the moral panic over heavy metal in the 1980s and 1990s. The book closes with a discussion of the slippery social fault lines that separate perceptions of musical sound from perceptions of noise and the ethical stakes of encountering another’s “aural face.”

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