Noise Signal Noise Noise

Is your intention more noise than signal?

I’ve been reading

Damon Krukowski

’s book The New Analog. The book explores how changing technologies in recording over the past 100 years have influenced our relationship to music. He raises many questions worthy of reflection but one that caught my attention in his chapter “Surface Noise” was about how our changing attitudes of signal and noise, qualities once inseparable by virtue of the recording and playback media, might inform our experience of a recording. He follows this thread through tape, vinyl, and cassette to digital files, which by default are absent of audible noise or hiss. His observations circle around an underlying mindset of modern recording - that there should not be noise unless it is entirely intentional. In digital recording, noise is your enemy. This perspective counters that of the pre-digital era simply because it wasn’t an option when the machinery used to capture or convey sound was much noisier.

One of the references Krukowski makes is to the Beach Boys song “Here Today” from one of the best recorded pop albums of the 20th century, Pet Sounds. As the author points out, several of the songs on this record have noise ghosts in them, including side conversations that leaked into one microphone or another during the overdub process. These noises were either missed or tolerated through the entire effort of recording and mixing. Given the artistic statement, commercial success, and historical significance of this album, the embedded noise ghosts raise some questions around how much noise actually matters. And maybe noise doesn’t matter in the sense of good or bad so much as it does in terms of the emotion conveyed by the recording. How is noise furthering the intention? Or at least, is the noise insignificant or tolerable enough that it does not detract from the recording, as with the Beach Boys example?

Early in the pandemic I worked with a group called Golden Hour as, in a time of no live shows, they attempted to recreate their performance experience through recording. The group is a collaboration of two bands, David Wax Museum and Lowland Hum, and their unique concept is intimately tied to the spaces in which they perform as they sing/play without amplification. In performance, the four musicians walk through the room around a stationary (and blindfolded) audience. As they move around a given space their collective singing and playing variably excites room acoustics. We tried a few different spaces and I experimented with several ways of capturing surround sound. I was the audience and they were musical sharks circling me. Instead of a blindfold I wore binaural microphones on my head. Capturing this type of dimensionality in sound was challenging, but relevant to the current thread, the relative signal to noise clarity of the recording was just as challenging. Our collective favorite rendition was fraught with microphone self-noise, my binaural mics being susceptible in that way, but after I filtered and processed it the result had a feeling to it that made sense. When I first opened the recordings back in my studio I was in a panic, convinced that the noise was a deal breaker. After processing, one of the band members, Suz Slezak, beautifully described the feeling of that sound with the term PM Radio (not to be confused with AM Radio). The noise and graininess in the sound falls like moonlight through passing clouds.

An album I love called Ewe Music of Ghana (recorded by S.K. Ladzekpo) kicks off with what sounds like background conversation and a baby crying before the lead drummer and vocalist sets the group into motion. By later in the record on the track “Atsiagbekor” it’s clear we’re outdoors and the singers are in motion with certain quieter moments of group singing set in the distance against wind noise and the self-noise of tape or the microphone. Still, seven minutes later I’m thinking about several things, none of them being the “noise” of the recording. I have had this experience many times over with field recordings from various parts of the world as well as early American blues recordings done in hotel rooms, on front porches, or in other non-traditional recording environments.

Then there is the idea of enhancing the noise on instruments themselves. Electric guitar with distortion is an obvious example, but less publicized distortions follow from modified acoustic instruments. There is an excellent collection of Shona mbira music recorded by ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner and released on Nonesuch under the name Zimbabwe: The Soul of Mbira. The mbira is a thumb piano and the musicians on this album play the lights out of it. There are several different singers and some tracks also include what sounds like a calabash shaker. On the track “Mbiriviri” singer Simon Mashoko moves between what sounds like rapid fire speaking and a cascading vocal line that registers to my ears as impeccable hook writing. What’s interesting about the signal and noise question here is that the mbira itself is often fuzzy sounding, intentionally distorted by the addition of metal bottle caps that rattle against the keys or the sound board of the mbira. In this case, the music is well recorded but the distortion happens through modifying instruments at the source. Legendary recordist/mixer Tchad Blake is big on this approach as well, and you can hear it throughout his work such as on the Latin Playboys self-titled debut album.

So if the music can still pack a punch and deliver emotion even when there is more so called noise relative to signal or even intentionally embedded in the signal, as in the examples mentioned above, what are we after in a recording studio environment? If the Beach Boys, a band operating with a massive budget and access to the top recording gear and rooms available in the mid-60’s, made a definitive and incredible sounding record that has various extraneous noises embedded in its seams, what does that say about the pursuit of sound isolation? I recognize that hearing a lawnmower in an intimate vocal track is unlikely to boost the emotional impact of the music (right?). I also acknowledge that often we as recordists are in pursuit of a pure sound from a source with as few interrupting noises as possible, a blank canvas that we can pour a can of paint on if we so choose. But maybe this is just another obsession with an ideal that has lost some relevance to the deeper purpose. Can recordings be too clean? I recently tried to define the genre Adult Contemporary while in conversation with a teenager. I fumbled through a lame definition until I landed on something like, “too much signal, not enough noise.”

In recording we’re dealing with ideals that can lose touch with the purpose of the art and its emotional palette. This is not to say that recording ideals don’t matter but that the act of focusing on them sets in motion various other assumptions, and may take us away from remaining present with the material at hand. Time and again as I try to reckon with my sense of idealism in various musical standards (gear, room acoustics, musicianship, chops), and as I work to keep growing and expanding my sense of sound, I try to return to what I see as the most important question of all in music - what is your intention? And to that essential question, I might add a few more: what are you trying to say? How noisy do you want it to be?