Paul,

Thanks, this is an interesting edge for me to consider, that of sound art, given that I'm a pretty trained composer who has studied conventions of the western tradition. I'm squarely in the tonal tradition, and I think that the rebelliousness of the 20th century, encapsulated by John Cage and others, will ultimately serve to not demolish, but renovate. Not reconfigure, but retool.

From a wide perspective, experimentalism with Noise Art and the like is functionally an experiment in timbre, for the basic tonal structures of beat, harmony, and melody are in some respects settled matters (that is to say, settled as far as ethnocentric composition is involved, for as W.A. Mathieu has demonstrated, when you examine how traditions from around the world have treated beat, harmony, and melody, each becomes far less settled matters of practical application in new music). Electronic equipment allows us the futz around with the way things sound, in terms of timbre/tone. That is where most of the action has been for the last 80 years of experimental music -- a 'producer's music'. The rest of the action was caught up in serialism, which failed due to excessive intellectualism and reliance upon mathematical formula. And, well, because it was boring to most people.

Here's the passage I found most interesting from the article you sent me.

The chief argument for Noise would be that it opens up sonic channels that 'music' closes down or off, but that case is immediately invalidated if the same few sounds are trotted out ad infinitum. This kind of Noise, like a great deal of Sonic Art, doesn't break out of the tyranny of music because it remains in a negative relation to it - it defines itself by assiduously purging any so-called 'musical' elements. The austerity is admirable but the effect of this hair-shirted self-punishment is too often not the revelation of a new affective range, but a dutiful boredom.

As a brief sidenote, the criticism of Sonic not breaking the 'tyranny of music' (whoa, I'd nit pick this to death, but not now) because of its 'negative relation' to music is the same point I make, in a much larger context, about the so-called 'postmodern' strain of art -- a good deal of 'postmodern art' is simply a reaction to the tenants of modernism, and thus ought be consider as 'late modernism' for that reason. Only a genuinely new set of tenants ought be central to a legitmately new epoch of art.

Whether 'integral art' is what the epoch is going to be called, I don't know, but the experimentation with 'full-spectrum polysemy' in fact is genuinely new, if for no other reason than our working definitions of 'full-spectrum' are constantly evolving. The idea to 'honor the spectrum' is perhaps the basic imperative from the otherwise flawed theory of Spiral Dynamics. But that idea is worth salvaging, because to 'honor the spectrum' is both a moral gesture at the planet-centric level, and likewise a gesture to honor our own roots as individual people who come from distinct but related lineages of our ancestors.

So creative/visionary representations that honor the phenomenological spectrum could indeed function as the basis for a new epoch in art. This is why, even though I have strong reservations about Ken Wilber, I have continued to develop my integral art philosophy. 'Integral', in the tradition of McLuhan, Dewey, Paglia and others, is where I draw my primary material from. Wilber, when you strip away the shoddy scholarship, has provided a useful basic shell -- quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types -- which I use in my work as touchstones. None of the other thinkers just named attempted to trademark 'integral' and it is repugnant that Wilber has made that attempt.

But back to the issue at hand, that of Noise Art.

The first clause of the first sentence is most revealing to me. "The chief argument for Noise would be that it opens up sonic channels that 'music' closes down or off." I'm all for sonic art experiments. I do think that pure sound can be arranged in an artful form that serves as a conduit for contemplation. There is sublime in the ugly.

At the same time, there will likely always be a rather limited audience for this kind of experimentation -- as well as a limited amount of time that one can actually sit down and listen to Noise Art without wanting to scream -- because Noise Art tends to employ an abrupt break with tradition. Fundamentally, the potential of any piece of art is that it can simultaneously entertain, educate, and enlighten, and this goes for music. Some people are entertained by the sound of metal on metal, but not too many overall. That might change and certainly aesthetics is not a fixed concept. It is pretty simple. If people like Noise Art, then more of it will be made. Supply and demand is a basic feature of the art world.

Musical tradition is made of many factors, but importantly, the history of music is also the history of the human ear's capacity to recognize resonance. Semiotically speaking, when one hears sound art (beit tonal or nontonal), 'meaning' is in part generated by the unconscious comparison of the track at hand with the music one has heard in their life. You can't get around the human ear's need to hear holons -- aural recognition of a whole as a narrative in time, and aural recognition of the aesthetic/stylistic lineage of which any 'sound object' is a part.

In my own philosophy, there is sound, tone, and music, in that heirarchy (holarchy). Any of the three can be done artfully, to trigger signifieds in the listener that spring from the semantic responses. "Resonance" is basically when an interior signified or signifieds is elicited in the consciousness of a listener by means of sound, tone, or music (which is a heirarchy based upon organization, from least organized to most organized by a human musician/composer). Something outside (the sound/tone/music) matches with something inside or interior to the listener. Boundaries disappear.

The question is, 'what signifeds are represented in sound art?' And to me, the basic answer is that of the dissonance people can feel from the ambiguity that arises from disconnects from functional fit in society's workings. as well as sub-personality signifieds that appreciate pre-conventional sonic representations, the sheer rebelliousness of it. Are there postconvetional examples of sound art? Undoubtedly -- usually when a trained composer gets his/her electronica groove on. Steve Reich is an example of this. Others are surely coming down the pipe.

Finally, it is important to consider, as a sound artist, not that the world is a 'dissonant place', and thus ought be looked at as an inevitable response to that cacaphony of our age. But rather, what is the artist's commentary upon that cacophony? What is the attitude towards it? How can sound art be used not just for illustrative purposes, but for redemptive purposes? For to see, as an artist, that the world has dissonance is actually quite naive-- the world has ALWAYS had dissonance. Moderns exhibit ignorance when they claim social/cultural dissonance as their own.

Artists of yore created their music, in part, as a pleasing means of diversion and aural relief from a confusing world. (The world has always been confusing, too.) It is not the actual content of sound art in which I seek meaning, but the more subtle commentary upon it. Otherwise, we might as well just hit everyone over the head with a hammer. It would a lot quicker of a death, and there's a certain pleasure we get from hearing a hammer slam down on our own head. Bam, bam.