Abstract

On this month's episode I discuss the recent book Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism with its author, Marie Thompson. We discuss different conceptions of 'noise', as anti-music or the cacophony of industrial society, competing theories of noise and Marie's powerful argument that noise is neither inherently bothersome nor transgressive. We end by discussing some of the musicians and sound artists that Marie argues transcend the dominant morality by which noise is related to.