The New Yorker:

Sometimes we embrace it, sometimes we hate it—and everything depends on who is making it.

By Alex Ross

“Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace the word to “nuisance” and “nausea.” Noise is what drives us mad; it sends the Grinch over the edge at Christmastime. (“Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!”) Noise is the sound of madness itself, the din within our minds. The demented narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” jabbers about noise while he hallucinates his victim’s heartbeat: “I found that the noise was not within my ears. . . . The noise steadily increased. . . . The noise steadily increased.”

Yet noise can be righteous and majestic. The Psalms are full of joyful noise, noise unto the Lord. In the Book of Ezekiel, the voice of God is said to be “like a noise of many waters.” In “Paradise Lost,” Heaven makes “infernal noise” as it beats back the armies of Hell. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” marshals forces for a different kind of battle. At the same time, the word can summon all manner of gentler murmurs: “The isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs.” Tennyson speaks of a “noise of hymns,” Coleridge of a “noise like of a hidden brook.” In Elizabethan England, a “noyse” could be a musical ensemble, such as the one that supplied a “heavenly melodie” for Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation pageant. Any hope of limiting the scope of the term evaporated when information theorists detached it from acoustics altogether and applied it to any ambient activity that hinders a signal. Noise has come to mean an engulfing barrage of data—less an event than a condition.

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