Bring the Noise

Drew Hemment

Volume is the weapon of noise. In an age where solitude is defined in decibels and policed by officers of environmental health, a turn of the dial is a call to arms. But with the on-going mutations in modern media, the point at which the battle lines are drawn is no longer simply a matter of amplification or speaker placement, as what constitutes a turn of the dial is no longer clear.

Each of the four pieces in 'One Bit Louder' present an intervention into the field of possibilities - and limitations - of contemporary media. They simultaneously stage and unravel what a turn of the dial might mean at the dawn of a new millennium, turning up the heat - if not the volume - at the point at which wires and synapses meet. Each is a tool or a strategy that can be inserted into the melee of mass media, which together present an alternative vision of 21st century sound to the monolith of corporate net.music(tm).

What is at stake is perception itself. Media do not simply connect to bodies, delivering sounds and sights, but are extensions of the senses, altering the kinds of experiences of sound and image it is possible to have. With the means of distribution, consumption and communication undergoing such radical change, the way the body hears - and sees and feels - is now up for grabs. What would a cybernetics of 21st century sound be like? Would it be heard, seen, or felt? McLuhan - the old man of new media - heralded an age of tactility, understood as an inclusiveness of sense that would displace the linear gaze of print media. But the interface of media and perception is a contested space, where all too often sound comes to be read through the screen and the body dances on the back of a mouse.

Sound has long inspired dread. Always evading any frame, seeping through walls and resonating within the flesh, even eluding the capture of a single sense - at once heard through the ear and sensed across the skin, resonating in bones, organs and through the soles of the feet. Sound is also a tactile medium in a conventional sense. Unlike image, which in Western culture remains dominated by perspective and the linear gaze, sound allows a different perception of the environment as at once immersive and sensual, interconnected and communal. There thus could be said to be a convergence between the connectivity and mutability proclaimed at the digital frontier, and the subaltern medium of sound. Ironic then, that the digital and electronic spheres pay such an avid homage to the image. Computation has been a victory of the screen. Perspective flattened out and transferred into a 2-dimensional space. The revolution has been televised. Simultaneously, sound itself becomes a stranger to itself, transposed into a representational world of digital protocols.

And yet this unheimlich abode offers sonic secrets of its own. Just as the eternal sound images of Edison's phonograph became detonated by the remixology of musique concrete, dub and disco, so sound in digital media becomes a field of unlimited transmutations and unheard potentials. In introducing a little friction into the smooth façade of corporate music and e-commerce, One Bit Louder both reveals unseen potentials for contemporary sound, and provides a sonar reading of the subterranean spaces beneath the field of vision.

The videodrome is dead. Long live the new sound.