The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk by John Melillo (review)

It’s hard to imagine what your fully paid-up Dadaist would be doing today, noise-wise. Anyone with a computer or iPad and a MIDI keyboard can access and change the parameters of millions of playable noises, melodic or not, from fingernails on a contrabass to underwater trumpets, from Bartók pizzicato to a burnt piano, from German swear words with variable attack and decay to an orchestra of railway station sounds, both ambient and provoked, playable in major, minor and more exotic scales. I suppose they would be doing something else. Words, phrases or syllables can be whispered, screamed or sung . . . Persian melodies mixed with Hollywood choirs and monks singing backwards in virtual reverberation setups ranging from outer space to Abbey Road Number 1 Studio or an anechoic chamber . . . poetry is written on substrates of any and all philosophies and atrocities, but this is hardly revolutionary now. The cultural and theoretical distinctions between noise and music are well and truly demolished. I’ve stayed in the so-called dead-room of Berlin’s Technische Universität, and it’s true what they say: There’s lots of noise coming from inside you. From kitchen implements to the gut, from Mars to intracellular variations in plants, the sources of sound or noise have just about been explored. Or have they?

The theoretical apparatus that surrounds and interpenetrates the poetics of sound and noise gets a thorough workout here, as the comings and goings of noise and sound figures, from a background of sound and noise, are disentangled. It can be difficult going. It is also, paradoxically, quite visceral. The point to hold onto is the constant flux between acoustic figure and ground and the contradictory differentiations between noise and sound: on the one hand is to show how such-and-such is different from its noisy background, or must change language, poetry or sound just to escape from a hell of noise; on the other, is to show that it’s all just/not just noise anyway.

Are these forms important on a day-to-day basis, though? Does a poetics of sounds need to refer to their origins? Is hearing a rapid tap-tap-tap the same as hearing a woodpecker, and is the rat-a-tat-tat of the machine gun the actual, overwhelming fear of the bullet? Many would still ask, “What is a sound, what is noise?” For those not of the North American university department of English cognoscenti, an equally difficult question is “What is, or are, ‘the poetics’ in this case?” But while there are books whose opacity and/or nonsense is egregious, this reviewer finds that there are many more that simply make you do more homework than usual—which is then rewarded. The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk is one such book, although it contains sentences such as “Rather than defining and defending a particular vibrational ontology, phenomenological objectification, or teleological hermeneutic, this book describes material and cultural frames that parse the flowing matrix of sound.” Good chess players can easily remember the position of every piece on the board because they are “chunking,” seeing a few simple structures where a novice might only see the individual bits, and doubtless there are those to whom the above quote makes immediate, obvious sense. For me it was something to leave in suspension in hopes of later expansion and elucidation.

Actually, if you do understand, you are rewarded: This is a very interesting book. And I now see that the above quote means the author is not concerned with, for example, bird or sound per se but rather in the conditions of our perception and theorizing about such stuff, and beyond that to incorporate or find such theory in the works themselves. The philosopher Roger Scruton argued that the nature of sounds is fully determined by how a normal hearer hears them, but from Dada to...