UC San Diego

Throughout this portfolio of works, I examine how my musical practice has been affected by my understanding of noise. I treat noise not as a replacement for musical structure but as a set of pressures applied to my musical language. These pressures stem from four different understandings of noise. The first is timbral, a sound with a greater presence of inharmonic frequencies. The second comes from Attali. To him, noise is some sound that interferes with the ability to understand a message. Drawing from Baudrillard, I understand structural noise as the confusion that arises when representations and imitations of sounds replace the original versions. The last understanding of noise is Hegarty’s relational view of noise. After discussing key figures in the development of noise within music history such as Helmut Lachenmann and John Cage, I present a series of analyses of my own works: Deepfake for cello, electronics, and video, jeanne for vocalist and electronics, Displacement (a sound installation), and Appendages for reed quintet. I show how the structural and narrative construction of these works has been influenced by the four proposed definitions of noise. Finally, I conclude with how these pressures from my understanding of noise illuminate connections between these pieces and present possibilities for future artistic exploration.