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WRITING DIRT,  TEACHING N0ISE
STEVEN R. HAMMER
Watch Part One Transcript 

Part One
I would like to start this chapter with some listening. If you have headphones, I would encourage you to wear them. If you are able and comfortable, I would also encourage you to close your eyes for just a few minutes. 
You are hearing a composition titled “Rectum” by Thomas Bangalter for the Gaspar Noé film Irreversible. The film contains scenes of terrible violence and sexual assault, but I will only feature sounds of the film in this chapter. 
Bangalter is doing a couple of things in this piece. First, if you are using headphones or stereo speakers, you should hear some movement of sound from side to side. It usually feels a little dizzying and disorienting to me. The camerawork echoes some of this movement, and makes liberal use of canted shots both in this scene and throughout the film. We know that canted, or tilted shots, especially when combined with movement, creates a sense of instability, chaos, and disorientation. Bangalter is not only varying the position of the sound, though. He is also varying the frequency, or pitch, to match the spatial pattern. You’ll also notice that the amplitude, or volume, changes. A percussive sound enters, though it is not in sync with the swelling movement. Here we have arhythmic sounds in relation to one another that create a sense of irregularity, of motion and change that aren’t easily anticipated like they are in pop music. Finally, Bangalter used a very low frequency sound known as infrasound. Infrasound is any sound that is around or below 20Hz, a frequency that is typically imperceptible to humans’ conscious hearing. And while research varies in its analysis of just how infrasound affects humans, some researchers claim that it can cause unease, nausea, anxiety, and paranoia (Broner, 1978; Landstrom, 1987; Qibai & Shi, 2005; Bolin, Bluhm, Eriksson, & Nilsson 2011). Bangalter used a 27Hz signal in this track, which the director, Noé, describes as an attempt to elicit a physical reaction from audiences that might be more challenging than the images portrayed on screen (Noé, 2003). 
And in this film, again, a film that depicts terrible violence, the sound design does not ease the blow. The sound design makes us feel strange and uneasy and out of control. The sound design aims to make us physically ill when we experience violence instead of sound that might simply communicate sadness or anger or aggression, or simply distract us. We can argue that this sound design is the most responsible and ethical way of portraying this violence: by disturbing us physically. It makes the film difficult to experience, but perhaps violence should be difficult to experience.
This is—at least approximately—pure white noise. As you know or suspect, this noise typically has a much different effect on listeners than the barrage of techniques I just described in the Bangalter piece. Many people use white noise generators to aid in relaxation and sleep. What is white noise? White noise maintains a constant power, but is comprised of random frequencies (pitch) and random movements between those frequencies. In other words, noise contains all frequencies and all patterns simultaneously and randomly. It is pure chaos. But it is calming. If it’s not, try pink noise, in which lower frequencies are more apparent to human hearing. 
And Red, or Brownian Noise.
These sounds help some people sleep because they tend to mask other, more sudden sounds that might emerge. Typically, when we are awakened by sounds, it’s not the nature of the sound itself that wakes us. It’s that sound’s sudden existence or emergence into the soundscape. White, pink, brownian, and other noises, do a pretty good job of masking the soundscape. And because they contain all possible frequencies, any additional sonic stimuli added to the mix therefore tends to be less jarring because it already exists in our field of hearing. Additionally, even when we are asleep, our brains desire stimuli, and for some, giving it a constant stimulus in the form of noise can fulfill that need that might otherwise be accomplished too suddenly, resulting in lost rest.
If your eyes are still closed, I’m really impressed. You can open up now. 
The sounds that I have just played typically have very different effects on listeners. And while—as in all modes of writing—there is no way to generalize the effects of a given communication strategy across all listeners, we might begin moving toward approaches to soundWriting that center on noise. That is what this chapter attempts to explore. I am asking, and attempting to answer, a few questions: What happens if we take noise seriously as a powerful composition tool, as a revealing and essential part of communication systems? What kinds of noise-based language and rhetorical techniques might we develop and practice? And finally, what might a noise-based pedagogy begin to look like?
I will first give a brief overview of noise and a couple of its traditional definitions across disciplines, and offer my own definition that centers around two major concepts: work and dirt. Next, I will move from theory to pedagogy and practices. I will share with you a taxonomy of noise techniques that I share with my students, and then outline some practices that can help us teach noise composition as personal, media- or technology-focused, and tactical.

Part Two
What is noise, exactly? To a large extent, that depends on who you ask. 
Definitions of noise exist within and between many institutions and disciplines. There are legal definitions of noise, medical definitions of noise, mathematical definitions of noise. 
Etymologically, noise comes from the Latin nausea, to denote upset, malaise, sea-sickness, Anglo-Norman for din, disturbance, uproar, brawl, and disquiet, and Old French for quarrel or disturbance (“Noise,” 2015). 
A common definition of noise is some variation on noise as a phenomenon that creates displeasure, or noise simply as an “unwanted or undesired sound” (Taylor, 1970; Kearse, 1975; etc.). In other words, noise may simply be a subjectively negative reaction to sonic stimuli. 
While we might be satisfied with definitions limited to the desirability of the sonic event-agent at hand, we may also wish for a nuanced model of noise that takes into account factors of production, of technology, of politics, and so on. In other words, how can writing with noise help composers and audiences alike be more mindful of composition processes, technologies, and conditions? 
In 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo wrote The Art of Noise (L’arte dei Rumori), a foundational text on the increasing prominence of noise in the wake of urbanization and industrialization, and urged composers to both embrace and write with these new noises. He writes, “We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds. Our sensibility requires it…This need and this tendency can be totally realized through the joining and substituting of noises to and for musical sounds” (11). He provided us with perhaps the first taxonomy of noises, and urges us to make use of these emerging sonic artifacts to more effectively express contemporary experience. Noise, for Russolo, is a byproduct of technoCulture, one that changes our listening habits and therefore our sensibilities. Noises are artifacts that can teach us much about the world around us. 
My conception of noise is similar, though my aim is not to create a new orchestra, but instead to think about what noise might be, and how it acts on us. This brings me to the first characteristic of noise. 
First: Noise requires work. 
Rhetorical noise is an event-agent that demands increased expenditures of energy from audiences in a given communicative situation. 
In his discussion of how many listeners experience noise musics such as Merzbow, Paul Hegarty writes, “The listener struggles to find a way through, in or above the noise music but gives up at a certain point: rhythms are to be found, frequencies to be followed -- it is not just random, but - eventually "the listener" is pulverised into believing there is a link. Noise music becomes ambience not as you learn how to listen, or when you accept its refusal to settle, but when you are no longer in a position to accept or deny.” (“Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music,” 2001). His description of encountering noise music centers on the work that is done both by and on the listener. 
There are many kinds of work that noise may prompt in audiences. Noises may cause physical pain, as in the case of sound cannons used to manage demonstrations and riots (Gayl, 2002), the use of high-amplitude sound to torture prisioners (Hill, 2012). Noises may require a listener to attempt to focus despite competing sounds. As an audience, you may struggle to hear me speak while there is music playing; you expend attention energy. When we must endure irregular frequencies or amplitudes or movement, we must do work to focus or to ignore. We might also discuss noise’s ability to cause discomfort, as in very high frequencies, repetitions and prolonged duration, or psychological torture (Neustadt, 2004). Noise need not reach the heights of torture, of course. Horror films have long used sonic techniques that contribute to suspense, unease, and shock in audiences (Hayward, 2009). 
Noise makes us work harder. 
Now very often, other agents in the communication situation experience an increase in energy expenditure as well. Instruments and speakers and technologies can be pushed to uncomfortable or even malfunctioning limits. Even more importantly to our current concern, however, noise compositions also often require composers to work harder. Unless the noise in a composition is the result of accident or glitch, the composer must think carefully about her use of noise in a rhetorical situation, and also think about how to alter materials, media, formats, and tools to achieve those effects. For instance, a composer might wish to emulate the musical technologies of a particular time. The composer must at least begin to understand the material conditions of the “wobble” or “scratch” of a turntable, or the “whirl” of an overcompressed mp3. If she is to emulate these noises, she must either reproduce them with the actual materials (and therefore get her hands dirty, rather than working with presets so frequently present in audio composition technologies) or by manipulating contemporary media to re-present those effects. 
Second, Noise is Always (Al)Ready
Noise is an essential feature of all nodes and paths within a communicative system. 
Many discussions of noise begin with, or at least refer to an influential paper that shaped not only conceptions of noise, but much of contemporary technoculture: Claude Shannon’s 1948 article titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in which he founds information theory, introduces the bit as a unit of information, discusses entropy and redundancy, and more. But of note here is that he illustrates and describes a “general communication system” in which messages are sent as signals from source to destination. The notable character, at least to the current discussion, is the “NOISE SOURCE.” 
The trouble with Shannon’s model as applied to noise broadly, is the still-prevalent idea of noise as an outside entity that disrupts an otherwise noiseless network of agents and processes. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “signal-to-noise ratio.” There still exists a strong separation between the notions of signal and noise, in the same way that we distinguish mind-body, public-private, and so on. The separation of noise and signal, though, at least as we move from a mathematical to rhetorical model of communication, is both arbitrary and political. In other words, noises are signals, signals are noises. There is no inherent characteristic of sonic phenomena that makes it noise, and there is no system that is free from interruptions, disruptions, corruptions, and the corresponding work it requires to resolve them. Yet many still talk of noise as though it is a distinct and separate event-agent that spoils the communication party. We might call this the myth of noiselessness. It is pervasive, available in nearly every advertisement for contemporary digital devices. It is the promise of functionality, the increasingly clean and polished interfaces, the decreasing ability of users to understand or modify digital tools. It is the user-friendly, intuitive rhetoric of technology that has led many of us to reject the assumption that students are “good at technology” and replace it with “they’re good at (consuming) technology.” I don’t say this to be flippant. It is my experience in classrooms, and precisely why I teach noise and dirt. 
We must come to terms with a post-Shannon model of noise, one in which noise exists in and between all event-agents in a communicative system. Noise is not an external agent, a rogue signal. Noise is inextricably embedded within event-agents, their relations, and communication systems as a whole. 
Third, Noise is Relational 
Noise exists only as deployed in the world among other event-agents. If its relations change, so too may a sound’s existence as noise. 
I have been describing communication systems in terms of “event-agents,” and this is drawing from Bruno Latour’s formulation of Actor Network Theory. For Latour, the basic unit of a thing or object in a network is an “actant.” The salient component of Latour’s actant to the present formulation of rhetorical noise is that an actant (in our case, an audible phenomenon) is neither “the same as or different from” any other actant; is always an event that “happens only once, and at one place” (162). Actants, in other words, are their relations. 
Likewise, noise is not a static characteristic of sound. It is noise only insofar as it is in relation to other sounds, systems, and actants, and as it requires work. As George William Clarkson Kaye articulated in 1931, noise must be defined contextually, beyond the scope of mere desirability or subjective pleasure; he described noise as “a sound out of place” (26). We can take a sound and change the relational landscape say, in terms of time, place, or purpose, and it may or may not be noise. An illustration here might be the paradoxical genre of “noise music.” I like noise music, I like going to noise shows. Is it still noise if I pay for a ticket and enjoy the show? If I play noise music while I write this chapter, is it still noise? The answer, of course, is it depends! Am I expending energy, doing work? Or is it a pleasant and effortless soundscape that helps me focus on writing? The white noise machine some use to help them sleep—is that noise? Perhaps not while it helps them sleep, though we could deepen our understanding of work and determine that the constant stimulation of that noise is, technically, requiring subconscious work. But if we recontextualize noise music or white noise, in relationship to other people, architecture, competing sounds, visual stimuli, mood, time of day, geographical location, media or format, etc., they will require different work. 
Whether or not a sound is a noise depends on its situatedness, its context, its relations, and the work required by others to experience and interpret it. 
Fourth, Noise is Dirty 
Noise is a political performance that corrupts or disrupts one or more systems of which it is a part. 
Douglas Kahn argues that noises “always pertain to a complex of sources, motives, strategies, gestures, grammars, contexts, and so on…noises are never just sounds and the sounds they mask are never just sounds: they are also ideas of noise” (emphasis added, 20). Noise is a complex and political performance, a struggle between that which is valued as signal, and that which is obscured, scrubbed away, so that what remains is a clean signal. 
In her influential work Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas articulates dirt as: 
“…matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (36). 
By calling noise “dirty,” I imply an opportunity to oppose systematic rejection and contravention of order. Writing noise, performing noise, affords us many opportunities to corrupt or disrupt systems. For the moment, as I am focusing in on digital composition practices, I might first say that noise helpfully threatens the cleanliness of contemporary digital culture and its dominant technologies. Clean, smooth, slick interfaces. 
Intuitive. Easy. User-friendly. Seamless. It Just Works. Trademarked. etc. 
There are costs associated with big-W Western big-P Progress. We get thinner laptops, we lose the ability to change our own battery or make internal modifications. We gain greater connectivity between our digital selves and one another, we lose the ability to act without surveillance. And so on. But these costs are still veiled underneath what Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe, more than 20 years ago, first called the “Rhetoric of Technology.” 
The Rhetoric of Technology is a warning against the framing of new media in “overly positive terms,” engendering a false sense of hope and democracy in new media spaces (56). In fact, as Selfe later argued with Richard Selfe, interfaces are never neutral or inert forces; they are imbued with our existing ideological, political, economic, and educational values. Selfe and Selfe write of dominant technologies’ tendency to “value monoculturalism, capitalism, and phallologic thinking, and does so, more importantly, to the exclusion of other perspectives. Grounded in these values, computer interfaces, we maintain, enact small but continuous gestures of domination and colonialism” (433). We are called to resist popular framing of new media as mere tools, and keep investigating our tools’ politics despite their increasingly apolitical and objective appearances. 
Likewise, in her foundational Glitch Studies Manifesto, Rosa Menkman argues that though we continue to seek noiselessness, technologies will always bear the markers of its makers. She writes, “the dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel…[is] regrettable and ill-fated” (11). She calls us to action as artist-activists to participate in glitch: bend, break, misuse technologies to reveal their imperfections, their values, their vulnerabilities. The moment of glitch, for Menkman, is much more instructive than moments of functionality. 
Dirty New Media (DNM), coined by jonCates, is likewise concerned with disrupting dominant & utopic narratives of technologies that are clean, sterile, and finished. He argues that “the corporate logic of our consumer computing devices relies on false promises of—or rather belies broken hopes for—functionality” (2011). Of DNM, Erika Peplin writes, “Technology is a field typically associated with smooth screens, organized interfaces, and on a larger scale, with the pride and “progress” of western civilization. Dirty New Media, a branch of New Media Art, seeks to subvert these unquestioned assumptions by problematizing, rather than idealizing, common technologies” (“Dirty New Media Art,” 2011). DNM practitioners respond by critically engaging with and corrupting clean and dominant language, gender, power, sexuality and pornography, and identity performance. 
The big idea here is that “clean” and “dirty” are political performances in our technocultural landscape. Cleanliness denotes presicion, clarity, the excision of ambiguity, the erasure of material and economic production, deviation from cultural hegemony. I’m arguing that, especially in digital spaces, we have an obligation to work with noise, with dirt. To work with that which is always present within a system but is systematically excluded, repressed, filtered. 
And so when I say noise is dirty, that it corrupts one or more of the systems of which it is a part, there are multiple possibilities. The noise could be a production artifact—a sound that refers explicitly to its own production, like an overcompressed mp3 file. 
It could be a disruption of dominant language, akin to Helene Cixous’ plea for “woman [to] write her self” (875). A new language, or at least a disrupted language, allows us to subvert dominant cleanliness and express the repressed. 
Or the noise/dirt could be a corruption of the ways a particular instrument should be used, like the philosophy-practice of circuit-bending, in which instrument designers rewire and repurpose old instruments to create new, strange, dynamic instruments. 
Or the noise could be a common focus of DNM practitioners: engaging with what might be the cleanest of new media in terms of hegemonic representation and new media innovation: mainstream pornography. Many working in DNM consider mainstream pornography to re-present misogynistic ideals, identities, and performances of gender, and corrupt such media using techniques like pixel drifting, data bending, and data moshing. Introducing noise to the medium brings our attention to the medium itself, to more closely examine narratives and representations hiding beneath. 
We could extend this list of possibilities for some time, of course. But the point here is that noise is dirty; noise composition employs methods of irregularity and corruption and disruption. 
I’ve talked through the theory—at least some of it—and now it’s time to get to some concrete ways we can perform noise. 

Part Three
Whispers toward a Taxonomy of Noise 
In all of my sound design assignments, I require the use of noise. One example I will use for the sake of illustration in this chapter, is an assignment in which I ask students to redesign the sound of a short scene from a film. Here is a short description of the assignment I provide to students in this second-year undergraduate course focused on multimedia production. 
You will reimagine the sound design for a short scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Conversation, or The Shining. Your goal is not to reproduce the sound design, but to thoughtfully rethink the design. You must produce some form of three categories of sound: dialogue, music, and sound effects. Your new sound design must also make use of noise as defined in course materials and discussions. You will be evaluated based on a) the quality of your sound design (levels, sound quality), b) creative and effective use of noise, c) collection and use of new recorded sound (you may use prerecorded sound for 20% or less of the project), and d) your ability to articulate your sound design based on principles and readings we have used in class. Submit your finished project with a 500+ word essay that describes your decisions, process, and influences. 
This assignment follows several weeks of studying sound design, from music to sound effects, from film to podcasts. We learn theory, and then turn to using professional recording equipment and editing software. So students’ main task in this assignment is to perform the theory and techniques of sound design in a way that re-thinks these scenes, and that employs noise to communicate something to the audience. The films I choose for them all employ noise in unique ways and to different ends, so they will have already thought through these techniques and effects to a large extent. 
I’ll now share with you a kind of taxonomy of noise techniques I share with students as a guide. As I discuss them, you might think through how you would approach redesigning a scene from a film. In terms of work, consider a few questions. How would noise help shape the audience’s experience? What do you want them to feel? Fear, worry, boredom, stress, suspense? How do you want to shape their sense of time and space? What kind of work could you make them perform? 
Next, think about dirt. How can you use noise to call attention to the dirt? Do you want to reveal something about cultural narratives of violence, for example? Or gender representation? These questions are well-suited to the shower scene from Psycho, for instance. Or do you want to comment directly on the medium of film or digital video? What kinds of noise allow you to accomplish this? 
Here, I have six major categories, or characteristics of sound, that can be altered to make noise—those sound-events that make our audiences do work. That give us—the sonic explorers—and our audiences a somewhat dirty new media experience in which we might see the media, the tools, the processes, and so on. 
1. Amplitude 
For purposes of this discussion, amplitude can be best understood as the volume, or loudness of a sound. And so first, we might think about the volume of a sound and the work that that volume requires of materials and audiences. While we often associate noise with loudness, we might also consider the effectiveness of very quiet, just-audible sounds to create a sense of irritation, mystery, and distraction. 
Secondly, we might think of the envelope of the sound. An envelope describes—or in production, dictates—how a sound’s amplitude acts over time. Perhaps the sound occurs very suddenly, perhaps it takes several seconds to reach peak volume from silence. Perhaps a sound ends very abruptly or decays over several seconds. All scenarios will affect the audience’s experience of the scene differently, from a jump-scare to a slow build of suspense. 
Right now, we are hearing a cinematic breakthrough in the use of what’s called nonlinear sound—any sound that exceeds the intended capabilities of the instrument with which it is created or transmitted. Nonlinear sound involves both amplitude (volume) and frequency (pitch). In the case of amplitude, we hear violins played at a volume beyond their design, creating a sense of distortion and strain. We also, though, hear a distinct and sudden change in amplitude, going from the white-noise-like sound of the shower to the sharp, howling violins. 
Silence, of course, can be just as powerful as any sound, particularly as its duration increases. This power can result from a number of factors, from forcing audiences to hear their immediate surroundings, a la John Cage, or by changing our sense of time. Often, extended silences make audiences perceive of time as passing much more slowly than if accompanied by music and other sounds. 
2. Frequency
The frequency of a sound, in plain terms, is the pitch of a given sound. 
As I discussed earlier, infrasound is any sound around or below 20Hz, the lower limits of typical human hearing. Hypersound is any sound that exists around or above typical human hearing. And so our first opportunity when discussing frequency is to explore and flirt with the boundaries of human hearing. We might use very broad frequencies (as in white noise) or very narrow frequencies. 
Let’s return to the shower scene from Psycho. In terms of frequency, we are affected by both the relatively high pitch of the violins, but also the pitch range, going from very a wide range of frequency with the sound of the shower (as you’ll remember, white/pink noises contain a full frequency spectrum) to a relatively narrow but rapidly changing frequency. The violins are also playing harsh, dissonant chords. 
Another Hitchcock film’s sound design also makes use of nonlinear sound, highlighting its physical-rhetorical effects. 
Research shows that nonlinear sounds in many horror films tap into our instincts, mimicing the distress cries of animals, and thus inspire various levels of fear and empathy. In this scene from The Birds, we are presented with both screaming children and a “horrifying avian language” artificially produced for the film, resulting in a score with a “rich sound of nonlinear characteristics” (Blumstein, Davitian, & Kaye, 753). 
3. Time
Time offers us several opportunities to make work. We might take this piece by Sun Ra titled “Space Probe,” and consider how important periodicity is to our ability to easily encounter music. Periodicity is simply the regularity of an event, like a consistent beat or tempo. Elements in this track do not seem to follow rules of tempo. It’s difficult as a listener to find something to nod our heads to, there is no easy groove to find. It requires work. 
But also in terms of time we might think of endurance, in other words, how long something lasts. As is true with silence, we can greatly affect our audiences’ sense of time by extending or stretching or repeating a given signal or phrase. 
4. Space
We have already talked through space at the beginning of this talk when I played the Bangalter piece. Movement in stereo space can work a careful listener into a strange sensation of movement. But we have many other options, such as panning dialogue in video production. The classic approach to dialogue in film involves positioning all dialogue in the center channel. Films like Children of Men break that tradition, by panning the dialogue to match actors’ positions on the screen (Freemantle, 2013). 
We can also decontextualize, or make strange, sounds by both where we record them (perhaps outdoor dialogue in a tiled bathroom) or where our audiences hear them. Or we may record sounds, then re-record them as played in very different acoustic spaces. 
5. Process
Right now you are hearing a track titled “spamoflauge” by stAllio! stAllio! is a Indianapolis-based glitch artist that has, for a long time, been creating music that is comprised of overcompressed Mp3 files, failing hard drives, and other digital malfunctions. 
There’s a long history of using corrupted devices and sources to make pseudorandom compositions, like circuit-bending, a precursor to glitch and other software-based practices. 
In circuit-bending, the artist rewires an existing instrument to create very new sounds, sounds of malfunction. These are good examples of a process-based noise compositions. The processes, to a large extent, dictate the composition. The composer enters into a kind of unpredictable relationship with her instrument, and neither has full control. 
And so we might corrupt or alter materials, from digital files to physical instruments. We might welcome a degree of randomness or pseudorandomness. We might adopt aleatoric composition processes in which we relinquish full control over outcomes. We might work with translation artifacts, which I might define here simply as a perceivable object resulting from some kind of conversion or translation of data, such as the whirl associated with mp3 compression. Or we might use external audio effects like distortion or bitcrush or echo, processing audio signals to alter their character and create more work as composers and for audiences. 
6. Relation 
Finally, relation. By relation, I mean the (re)action of sound with other agents, elements, avenues, and actors within a system. The classic example of relation might be feedback, in which a signal is fed back into its source to create a feedback loop, which is self-generative and, most often, results in an offensive howl of high pitches. But we might also think of competition: how two or more sounds act in relation to one another in a mix. 
This sound is from David Lynch’s film Fire Walk With Me. The sound design is unique in that in order to hear the dialogue, you must work very hard to hear through the loud music. The mix, or relationship between sonic elements, presents the challenge. 
At the beginning of a workshop or class, I ask students to consider these questions, reflecting on noise on a personal, spatial, and physical level. Where and when do they encounter noise, and why is it noise? Can they identify factors like frequency or nonperiodicity or listening location? How do they cope with that noise? What work does it require, and what are the effects of that work? Next, where does noise happen in their interpersonal communication lives? Think of your last family holiday, for instance? What are the points of strain, of work, of disconnection, of interruption? Finally, as a bridge to thinking critically about ability and disability, I ask students to find the noise in their bodies. This is typically a very easy discussion, once I begin disclosing. I might be tired or ill, I can discuss anxiety or depression, worry, the way my hands tremble. Even short discussions are typically very beautiful moments not only in terms of disclosure, but in realizing that one of the major sources of pressure to comply—or pretend to comply—with a rhetoric of functionality, of perfection, of cleanliness, is our bodies. We measure bodies, after all, against a radically unreachable ideal. Diagnoses signify abnormality, variations from a perfect body which does not exist. We are noisy bodies. 
Then, students start to get their hands and digits dirty, digging into sounds and sound filetypes. First, I ask them to field record or sample a beautiful sound. The birds’ morning songs or the cicadas on campus, or to simply sample one of their favorite songs. How can they make that sound noisy? How can they destroy something beautiful? Then, can they do the opposite? I ask them to field record one of the noises they encounter, and to make it beautiful. 
Then, students are ready to turn this awareness and these sonic practices outward as political action. Where do they see injustice or exclusion, where do they see the myth of noiselessness being promoted, applied, and enforced? Where is the noise in the seemingly noiseless system? How can they find ways to corrupt or disrupt, in order to expose and spread awareness? How might they remind themselves of the systems in which they live and are expected to function noiselessly? The outcomes of these practices vary wildly, from very personal narratives of mental illnesses to deep investigations of the technologies they use everyday, noting their failures as juxtaposed with the promises of functionality featured in advertisements. 
Studying in Philadelphia also offers us the dubious luxury of witnessing gentrification and the sounds that accompany it. The sounds of a single block in parts of the city offer us the noises of dislocation and the promise of new, quiet, apartments. 
Noise philosophy-approaches offer composers a range of techniques to create captivating and highly affective multimedia narratives. And if we want both our student-composers and their audiences to engage critically not only with ideas but also the media used to convey them, noise can provide the kind of anti-environment necessary to provoke that work. 
There are many ways to approach these ends, but I hope this chapter has offered a few suggestions and ideas about the value and opportunities of working with and around noise and dirt. 
Thanks for listening. 
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