Noise

A recent article in the BBC magazine talks about unwanted noise, mentioning car horns, beeping machines and the like.

The French intellectual Jacques Attali, in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, maintains that, even if the sounds are attractive, it is the monotony of repetition - introduced with mechanical musical reproduction - that takes the pleasure out of listening.

I don't know about you, but I like the sound of mechnical musical reproduction. It kind of makes me think of something like this.

Disappointingly, the article does not mention the Italian Futurists, who might be scary and fascistic if they didn't come across as being more than slightly ludicrous:

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

Erm... okay guys.

A thing I have noticed since obtaining a pair of noise-cancelling headphones is that your sense of space when walking about is affected. I kind of like that too, although it does take a bit of getting used to.

I think the best thing to do if affected by noise is to stick some of those earphones in and listen to something with a lots of "frequencies". Something like this, perhaps?