“For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an
anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book's title refers specifically to
the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders. Noise is Attali's metaphor
for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum
that express structurally the course of social development.”--Ethnomusicology.