Good music isn’t all melody and beauty—sounds that are uncomfortable have their own role to play
The view from the back of the room at the New York club, TV Eye, in July with The New Blockaders. Major noise musicians since the 1990s, they produce many intentionally—and literally—abrasive sounds by sawing, scraping, and pounding on an amplified wooden door, accompanied by a torrent of noise and feedback. Photo: Joseph Auner
President Kumar’s advice to the entering class at matriculation a few weeks ago—“Don’t be afraid to be uncomfortable”—made me think about my own path as a scholar of music and sound. While I listen to and love all kinds of music, I have always been especially attracted to—and unsettled by—sounds that are unusual and sometimes very uncomfortable. Among my earliest memories are strange sonic dreams of surging shapes and sounds.
I perplexed my parents as a young child by pounding on the low strings of our piano, which motivated them to start me on piano lessons. But my mother understood me well enough to take me, when I was in junior high, to a presentation about a strange new instrument (particularly strange in the wilds of southwest Missouri): the electronic music synthesizer.
It was a complex device with many cables, sliders, and dials, said to be able to create any sound you could imagine. Inspired, I later headed to Colorado College, with its electronic music studio full of all sorts of strange gear to figure out.
In college and then graduate school I became increasingly interested in the intentionally uncomfortable music of Arnold Schoenberg, famous for what he called “the emancipation of dissonance” and his 12-tone method, and the near-riots his music provoked. I was drawn to the way his music offers emotional experiences that are transformational, despite, and perhaps because of, its difficulties. It evokes the feeling of a phrase that appears in one of his pieces: “I feel the air of another planet.”
My latest project is a book about feedback, a sound that most of us try to avoid at all costs. It’s the disruptive and sometimes powerfully cathartic sound produced when the output of a loudspeaker amplifying a microphone is picked up by that same microphone, feeding the amplified sound back into the input.
People’s reaction to feedback is visceral and nearly universal—the embarrassing intrusion of the sudden screeching sound serves as a plot device in countless films and TV shows, and we have all experienced the chaos it can create in Zoom meetings.
While technology is “designed to serve silently and invisibly in the background, feedback gives voice to the sound of the system itself, including the acoustics of the specific space where it occurs, a space that we also impact with our resonant bodies.”
But instead of the understandable response to make the sound go away as quickly as possible, I am interested in musicians who listen to and learn from it. This is most familiar in the transgressive and transcendent guitar sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, as my music department colleague Melinda Latour has discussed. My book explores how feedback has been used across genres, repertoires, and artistic scenes since the 1960s to explode the boundaries of music and noise.
I argue that underlying our experience of feedback—why it is so upsetting and why it has been such a powerful creative tool—is the way that it makes us vividly aware of the networks of technologies in which we are immersed.
While they are designed to serve silently and invisibly in the background, feedback gives voice to the sound of the system itself, including the acoustics of the specific space where it occurs, a space that we also impact with our resonant bodies. Feedback networks now involve far-reaching threads of the internet, including data centers, satellites, and increasingly the AI systems that listen and learn from us, and teach us in return.
As part of this project, I have taken what is for me the uncomfortable step of exploring the feedback-heavy “noise music” scene. (To get a sense of the sound, listen to the 2021 release Exclave by Cryocene.) I’ve attended concerts in Boston and New York, ranging from underground events at tiny secret locations to large, jam-packed clubs.
In every case the music is incredibly loud and aggressively abrasive, produced by electronic devices pushed past their breaking point, creating a powerful and often overwhelming and transporting physical effect. The concerts are intense and exciting. They are stressful, too: I usually only know one or two people there, and often feel like I don’t fit in, given my age and absence of tattoos.
The music is quite different from any I have written about, and the project is requiring new research tools, closer to the ethnographic approach of several colleagues in the Department of Music. But I feel fortunate to have this opportunity to be a beginner again, to develop new ways to analyze and understand these disruptive and fascinating sounds, and to experience again what we can learn by being uncomfortable.
Joseph Auner is Austin Fletcher Professor of Music, and has served as music department chair, dean of academic affairs, and dean of University College. This fall he is teaching the courses Music, Art, and Culture in Paris and Vienna at the Turn of the Twentieth Century and Music, Technology, and Digital Culture.
