Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

5. Energy, Noise, and Information

79 CHAPTER 5 ENERGY, NOISE, AND INFORMATION “Do you like white noise?” she asked him. “I don’t know what it is.” “It’s like the rain,” she said, gesturing toward the window. “It’s good for you.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Come back if you like,” Dr. Glass said as he went out. “Tell us what’s on your mind. Try the white noise.” —Robert Stone, Outerbridge Reach There is always at least one radio going, and half the time a tape hums in the Walkman. Noise fills the house and squirts outside under all the windows that won’t shut flush and through the TV antenna hole in the roof where rain gets in. I swim through commercials and on-the-air auctions and news updates and pick hits like a fish in a crowded dimestore aquarium. In every room my head buzzes with voices twining in Montana accents, and outside the wasps and mosquitoes are so thick that I can’t find a place to think. —Michael Dorris, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water In a century dominated by communications and telecommunications— such as newspaper, film, telephone, radio, television, and Internet—the performance of those systems is of paramount importance, for ineffective functioning and interference can be annoying and costly, at times even destructive. Because unwanted signals and inappropriate information expose the limitations of systems and undermine or degrade their poten- tialities, systems that depend upon reception of signals or “sound” try to keep intrusive noise to a minimum, though it may be impossible to eliminate . In addition, according to some scientists, “excessive noise can cause behavioral and chemical changes in the human body” (Barnes-Svarney 475), and so are harmful to the individual and detrimental to the functioning of society. Generally speaking, noise is unwanted sound, auditory turbulence (a muddled, interrupted, or suppressed transmission), or “a wide range of disturbances that might affect a signal anywhere between the encoder and the decoder. The term noise applies to any unwanted fluctuation in the signal level . . . “ (Smol 109). This “unwanted fluctuation” may be predictable or unpredictable, internal or external, and periodic or aperiodic. More specifically, noise is random, “generated within or outside system components ,” “the unwanted influence of other signals being transmitted simultaneously ,” and “signal degradation arising from the practical limitation of system components” (Bissell 6). White noise, a term often used for unwanted background noise, is, says Tom LeClair, “aperiodic sound with frequencies of random amplitude and random interval—a term for chaos” (Loop 230). Others, however, refer to it as “sound having a continuous spectrum in which the sound pressure in bands of frequency one cycle per second wide is substantially constant over an appreciable range of frequencies ” (Burns 32) and may indeed consist of “powerful pure tones against the background of roaring and hissing” (Burns 32). This understanding of white noise approximates LeClair’s assertion that “in music . . . ‘white noise’ is the sound produced by all audible sound-wave frequencies sounding together—a term for complex, simultaneous ordering that represents the ‘both/and’ nature of systems . . .” (Loop 230). White noise, then, is another manifestation of complexity and bears within it the germ of different kinds of information, which, like all “sound,” is not restricted to air as a medium but can also be transmitted as vibrations, compressions, and rarefactions through water and solids. It is the most intriguing of sound, for it is potentially full of information, though such information may be difficult to unpack and decode. Various theories of communication have arisen to account for noise, white noise, and the processing of information. As William Paulson notes, “the mathematical theory of information, worked out by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, defines information as a quantity, a particular probability function. The more improbable the arrival of a given message element, the more uncertainty its actual arrival resolves in its receiver, the more information it conveys” (Noise 46). Improbability and uncertainty are inextricably related to the concept of white noise, which is roughly equivalent in information theory to turbulence in chaotics for it may heighten the possiBEAUTIFUL CHAOS 80 bilities for new and diverse kinds of significance; it can convey or communicate order or information along with or through turbulence and noise (Moon 6). Shannon points out that white noise is information rich because it can appear in so many frequencies or registers at once. He posits that the information source selects a message out of a set...