When the signal is noise
I am trying, once again, to resolve to write and share the things that are preoccupying me. The thing that tends to get in the way is the background noise of my life: attentional diffusion, ADHD. There's a personal level on which I have to approach this. It helps, I think, for me to recognize that for me parenthood, and more specifically being with young kids all the time, exacerbates the issue and requires extra mitigation while allowing for me to be present for the kids. Last year I also found a medication that really seemed to help. Unfortunately, the prescriber's practice has since closed and I'm trying to be seen by another psychiatrist so I can get back to that medication.
I remember that at some point in my teen years I became aware that my parents had kind of missed several years of mass media by being parents. There was a good chunk of their lives where they basically didn't watch movies or read books or consistently follow TV shows or stay current on new musical releases. And it was basically just for logistical reasons. They couldn't make the time for that stuff. But they have the time for all of that now, so I try to remind myself that there's a component of this that's contingent on where I'm at in my life, and not so much a fixed component of who I am.
The politics of forgetting
But there's also a broader social side to the issue of attentional diffusion; it's driven in a lot of ways by cultural context. I've found two very smart sources on this recently. First, there's Chris Hayes making a guest appearance on the Know Your Enemy podcast to promote his book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. And then today I managed to steal enough time to read this article on a blog I'd never read before: “The Violence of Absence” by Lolo on the Vanishing Points blog. Chris Hayes and the Know Your Enemy hosts approach attentional diffusion as an issue at the intersection of spirituality and political economy, and Lolo looks at the problem as a mechanism of the collective amnesia common to repressive regimes. Rather than the “memory holes” of Nineteen Eighty-Four we have an environment where there is simply too much going on, too many demands on our attention, for us to remember even very recent history.
Relatedly, Know Your Enemy also has a more recent (and subscriber-exclusive) episode with David Wallace-Wells on the political legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Sates. [Update, 2025-04-08: This episode of the podcast is now available to non-subscribers.] The pandemic, like other pandemics in history, had no discrete end; the disease itself is still around, and furthermore the days where it was causing the most death and upheaval were less than five years ago. It should be obvious that the consequences of the pandemic and how we responded to it shape everything about the current sociopolitical landscape, and yet we have had to collectively forget a lot of things about the pandemic in order to move on from this thing that didn't end. I've been wanting to write about this problem, about how the collective heroic struggle against the pandemic was followed by a collective giving-up, a scramble to forget and leave all of that behind us, that left me feeling bitter for a few years, but the voices on this podcast are a lot smarter than I am and I feel they basically have it covered. For those not subscribed to the podcast, David Wallace-Wells wrote an essay replete with statistical data for the New York Times, “How Covid Remade America”. I listened to the podcast rather than reading the essay because, well, see above regarding parenthood and attention.
Listening to noise
In the past few years I've discovered noise music. It's essentially what it sounds like; the noise musician makes or orchestrates noise and people listen to it as music. Someone who founded a small niche internet social space I used to frequent, working as a noise musician under the name graveyard theory, released a noise album in February called Drowned In My Heart Blood. I find it difficult to describe a noise recording without resorting to obtuse metaphors, but graveyard theory's own description of the album notes that it began with a documentation of personal grief.
Noise is entropy. In audio signal analysis, it's relatively random oscillation. Digital audio signals are usually recorded as samples representing the position of a diaphragm at specific snapshots in time, very small fractions of a second apart. (For an audio CD there are 44 100 such snapshots per second.) If each of these samples has a completely random value, the result is white noise. White noise contains all the audible frequencies at equal amplitude (volume), but because of the nature of human hearing, the upper-treble frequencies often sound louder and more prominent than other components of the spectrum. The human brain likes to pick up patterns in sound; true white noise is distinct in that it has no such patterns for the brain to pick up. This is perhaps why many of us find it tiring to listen to white noise; we have an instinct to find an organized signal or pattern in the noise but there isn't one for us to find.
Noise music exploits this compulsive pattern-seeking behavior of human hearing by working with different timbres of noise. Noises produced by rushing air or metal rubbing on metal and so on are not so neatly organized as the melodic sounds produced by the strings of a piano, but they are not as purely random as white noise, and the human auditory process will pick up on subtle rhythms and spectral signature to distinguish different forms of noise from each other. The process of listening to noise music, then, is about meditating on the sound and contemplating fragments of order amongst the chaos, picking up shifting timbres and pondering how they feel as we listen to them. It is, I find, demanding of a different kind of attention than other genres of music because there is relatively less order and more chaos.
Sometimes, noise is the signal we are looking for. And paying attention to that signal can be a political act.
Where not otherwise noted, the content of this blog is written by Dominique Cyprès and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.