The Art of Noise

In this paper, I aim to find out how noise music (Noise) can be art, and how it relates to other music, i.e. whether it is in fact music, or another form of aural art. I explore the possible solution provided by the institutional theory of art, which I find lacking, leading me to seek further conditions for something being a work of art. I then discuss what separates artworks from other artefacts, relying on Arthur Danto's work on the indiscernibility problem, which in turn leads me to explore Nelson Goodman's notion of the identity of musical works in order to see whether musical works can have indiscernible counterparts that are not artworks. Goodman finds the identity of a musical work in its score, which would make any indiscernible counterpart an actual performance of the work. However, Noise cannot be transcribed in traditional musical notation, and often bears a likeness to naturally occurring sounds, leading me to introduce the term 'virtually indistinguishable counterpart', which is a sound that is so like another that it would be quite problematic to tell the two apart. This lets me ask what separates a work of Noise and a virtually indistinguishable sound that is not art. Having done this, I test Noise against Danto's conditions for something being an artwork, arguing that what separates art from other artefacts lies in the non-manifest properties of the artwork. This includes a discussion of meaning in artworks and the intention of the artist, as well as the cultural and historical context of artworks, and how these together form Danto's idea of “aboutness”. Finding it problematic to understand how Noise in itself can be said to be about something, I turn to Goodman's notion of expressive meaning, or exemplification, arguing that Noise can metaphorically express simple predicates such as emotions. This leads to Goodman's definition of the aesthetic attitude, where emotions are used cognitively to find meaning in artworks. Hence, I argue that the meaning in Noise is found in the experience of the work, rather than the intention of the artist, or the titles and descriptions applied to it. I then set out to see how this actually works, exploring how Noise can be expressive as well as discussing issues from the contemporary debate about meaning in music. In the end I argue that Noise is indeed art, in the sense that artworks are meaningful symbols. Expression is discussed as a defining characteristic of artworks. Further, I argue that Noise is music, as it is experienced in the same way, and any categorical distinction between the two appears to be unnecessary – all aural art is music