What's All The "Noise" About?

What’s All The "Noise" About?
A Reflection on Jacques Attali’s Essay on the Political Economy of Music

In 1977, Jacques Attali published his 'Bruits: essai sur l'économique politique de la musique'. It was translated into English in 1985 and is now in it's sixth printing. It's considered a seminal text in the field.

I've been actively making music and working with music technology since 1974 and have experienced first hand the ongoing impact of digital technology on music production. I've also been involved in the 'music industry' through running my own independent record label.

Music has always been a passion for me. It's a powerful and fundamental force that has impacted on me personally as well as shaping my own contribution on the local, national and even international level.

I've worked with up-to-the-minute music hardware and software - some of the most cutting edge, commercially available technology – and used it to make music in a creative, dynamic and intuitive way. In fact, making music using a computer is so 'natural' to me that I've never really considered it a programming task - like working with Lingo in Director. It wasn't until the MA that I began to realise I was in fact a programmer – it's just that my first programming language is MIDI and my software interface is E-magic's Logic Audio Platinum.

As such, I am particularly interested in the ideas Attali promotes and explores through 'Noise'. It gives an authoritative academic voice to many of my own notions about music - it's function, form and ongoing development - that I've intuitively felt but not fully rationalised. My own ideas were reinforced by reading 'Noise' and given a form and substance that has helped me shape my thoughts and formulate more questions.

Attali raises many provocative questions through 'Noise'. Of particular interest are his notions of music as prophetic - a herald of times to come - and his assertion that we are moving into a new epoch of music - the so-called 'age of Composition'.

24 years after Attali first published 'Noise', this essay aims to restate, reinterpret and explore his ideas by looking at examples of contemporary developments in music and music technology in an attempt to discover if the ideas expounded by Attali have been realised, by whom and in what ways.

Specifically, it aims to focus on the initiatives of musical entrepreneurs and collectives - such as ColdCut - successful artists, producers, DJs, record bosses and inventors - Pirate TV - a Ninja Tune supported Internet TV station and antirom – interactive design practioners of the mid to late 90s - as case studies in the field.

By looking at the work of these musical innovators it's hoped that the essay will be able to answer the questions: 'Does music continue to herald times to come as Attali suggests?' and 'Is the age of composition underway and what's it like so far?'

The sleeve notes of the Wildlife 'Supersampler', an enhanced CD released in 2000 and featuring interactive musical toys developed by antirom between 1997-99, state the case clearly: "Attali's central argument is that music is not simply a code – '... the principle of giving form to noise in accordance with changing syntactic structures'– but that it is also an economy, and that moreover – 'the political economy of music is not marginal, but premonitory. The noises of a society are in advance of its images and material conflicts. Our music foretells our future'."

Music – or noise – in Attali is a harbinger of new forms of political economy. He proposes that each development in the wider economy is preceded by a similar development in the economy of music. The next stage in the progression – composing – will usher in a revolutionary new practice of music among the people, and presumably (although Attali is short on detail here), go on to overthrow the tyranny of commodity exchange a bit later.1

As Barbrook says, "In his seminal text 'Noise', Jacques Attali celebrates the prophetic power of music. What is pioneered first within music-making is later adopted as the political economy for the whole of society."2 Using Attali's perspective one can look to history and find numerous examples that support this notion.

As early as the fourteenth century and certainly by the sixteenth century, the jongleur, the free craftsman who performed for all - lord and peasant alike, had been banned from the courts and been replaced by the ménestral - a professional musician bound to a single master. Music started to use an increasing number of instruments and the techniques of written or polyphonic music spread from court to court. 3 Music became a commodity; it acquired a use-value and entered into exchange. The musician became one of the first producers and sellers of signs.

The first concerts to draw a profit took place in London in 1672. 4 Musicians emerge as a class with power based on commercial exchange and competition. They signify some of the earliest examples of the economies of sign and exchange, which characterises the entire economy of the competitive capitalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The royalty collection agency, the Union of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers, established in France in 1850 was the first institution of its kind anywhere in the world. 5

The advent of recording at the end of the nineteenth century led to the stockpiling of music and the development of the phonograph record – a material object of exchange and profit. Music became an industry and its consumption ceased to be collective. 6 The constant turnover of hit records in the 1920s prefigured the mass consumerism of late-twentieth century Fordism.

Attali postulates, "If the political organisation of the twentieth century is rooted in the political thought of the nineteenth, the latter is almost entirely embryonic in the music of the eighteenth century." 7 By concurring with Attali and seeing music as prophetic, as a herald of times to come, we can ask the question, 'So what might contemporary developments in music tell us about the future nature of our society?'

Attali suggests that the simultaneity of multiple codes, the variable overlapping between periods, styles and forms prohibits any attempt at a genealogy of music or a hierarchical archaeology. He feels that what must be constructed is more like a map – a structure of interferences and dependencies between society and its music. 8 He traces the political economy of music as a succession of strategic orders, stages or usages of music by power - the stages of Sacrifice, Representation and Repetition.

In Sacrifice, music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt by ritual power to make people forget the fear of violence; in Representation it is employed by representative power to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commerce; and in Repetition music serves bureaucratic power to silence those who oppose it, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises.

As a note here, Attali's notion of music as symbolic death in Sacrifice is a difficult concept to grasp. Perhaps Attali refers here to the intuitive, base response humanity has to music and rhythm – it’s as if we're hardwired for sound. Few activities stir such depth of emotion and passion as music – it's akin to the sensate physicality, rhythmic motions and intense pleasure of sex and orgasm – the 'little death'.

Each stage reaches a point of saturation or exhaustion that forces it to transform into the next, thus Sacrifice led to Representation and Representation led to Repetition. It's the later stages of Attali’s proposed map of the political economy of music that has the most relevance to this essay and is expanded on below.

By the beginning of the 18th Century music becomes a spectacle attended at specific places: concert halls – a confinement made necessary by the collection of entrance fees. In this age of Representation the value of music is its use value as spectacle. Musicians are producers of a special kind who are paid in money by the spectators. Music became a commodity, a means of producing money. It is sold and consumed.9

Marx himself provides a good analysis of the creation of value in Representation. "A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. When she sells her song, she is a wage earner or merchant. But the same singer, employed by someone else to give concerts and bring in money, is a productive worker because she directly produces capital."10

By the beginning of the 20th Century, two factors made the rise of Repetition possible: the exhaustion of the representation of harmony and the invention of recording technologies. Initially expected to serve no more than a means of preserving Representation, recording technologies instituted mass production. While in Representation the commodity was the spectacle of the performance in Repetition the recorded music became the thing to be consumed. Today Repetition is based essentially on control over distribution and of the production of demand and not the production of the commodity.

In analysing the shift between Representation and Repetition Attali states that "once again music was prophetic: it experienced the limits of the Representative mode of production long before they appeared in material production".

In Repetition, record manufacture heralded, through its abuse, a new social system, a new economy and politics. This raises some important questions. What lies in store for us as a result of the invention and subsequent subversion of two mould breaking discoveries - digital audio - the infinitely reproducible and ultimate mould, and the Internet - the uncontrollable means to distribute it globally?

What will happen to the 'record' of the age of Repetition and what will supersede it? Will these changes in the way we engage with and respond to music have as much impact on our future society as the invention of the record had for its time?

As Barbrook says, "According to Attali, each epoch of music-making creates its own specific social, technological and aesthetic forms. For instance, twentieth century music developed some apparently unbreakable paradigms: stars, fans, record companies, copyright laws, pieces of plastic, top 40 singles and experimental albums. Yet, at the beginning of a new century, these fixed Fordist forms are being superseded. What began with a few skilled DJs mixing vinyl now involves almost everybody with access to a computer and the Net. This new situation won't just create new social, technological and aesthetic paradigms for music making. As in the past, music is pioneering a new political economy for the whole of society. Napsterisation is a prophecy of the peer-to-peer future."11

At the time of writing ‘Noise’, Attali postulated that Repetition was creating the necessary conditions to lead into the next stage in the development of the political economy of music – and that there existed in embryonic form the possibility of a fourth kind of musical practice which heralded new social relations based in freedom and opposing normality – the age of Composition.

Susan McClary, In 'The Politics of Silence & Sound', her Afterward to 'Noise', states, "Attali's use of the term 'Composition' returns us to the literal components of the word, 'to put together'. Attali wishes to remove this activity from the rigid institutions of specialised music training in order to return it to all members of society. For in Attali's eyes, only if the individuals in society choose to re-appropriate the means of producing art themselves can the infinite regress of Repetition be escaped. For the most part this music is far more vital than the music of Repetition, which has deliberately and systematically drained itself of energy." 12

I for one am happy to concur with McClary’s model of an epoch exhausted. That Repetition is ailing, gradually seizing up with a 'crisis of proliferation'; no longer able to guarantee the 'production of demand', gradually loosing its efficiency and winding down, is in a way quite a relief. For me, much contemporary popular music seems tired and grey. The music industry is going through the motions - the domination in the charts of formulaic, manufactured pop (and in the TV programme 'Popstars' a bizarre celebration of this very manufactured quality) - the indubitable MTVisation of American R&B into our national charts alongside the inevitable band-waggoning of UK Garage all illustrate the fact.

Even in the usually innovative area of club music there seems to be a lack of ideas - the revival of trance as a happening scene only five years after it first emerged and the still total domination of house in club land - a music genre now in its 15th year - all point to a 'crisis of proliferation'.

It is easy to be cynical about Attali's propositions and what appears to us now as outmoded political and art theory – utopianism from a bygone era of New Left rhetoric. The idea that where music leads the rest of the economy will follow seems too far-fetched. And yet... is there any sector of the economy which fears the structural transformations brought about by home PCs and the spread of the Internet quite as much as the music industry does? As we are seeing with the current litigation battle between the Majors and Napster, the music industry is absolutely determined to retain its control over the copyright and distribution of music. Is it really that far fetched to suggest, as Attali does, that musical practice was the first to develop a political economy of the immaterial and is the first to face the challenge of an economy without quantity?"

To explore more about the implications of this new age of music, it's necessary to draw out what Attali means by Composition.
Composition is defined by Attali as "doing solely for the sake of doing. Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A concept such as this seems natural in the context of music, but it reaches far beyond that, it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having..."13

For Attali Repetition is also silence - inspired by Situationist Guy Debord’s seminal text 'The Society of the Spectacle'. It is the centralised political control of speech. It is the very process of industrialisation imposing silence and dominating men by organisation and the mass repetition and distribution of uniform models. It gives the false illusion of choice for the consumer because it predetermines what the user can hear, and therefore is a means of social control. Composition will re-establish the communication amongst people ceased by the silence in Repetition. If the silence in Repetition was caused by the order imposed by the industrial mode of production, Composition will question the distinction between worker and consumer. Music will not be made to be represented or stockpiled, but for participation in collective play, in an ongoing quest for a new, immediate communication.

Attali suggests that this is a truly revolutionary approach, "This constitutes the most fundamental subversion we have outlined: to stockpile wealth no longer, to transcend it, to play for the other and by the other, to exchange the noises of bodies, to hear the noises of others in exchange for one's own, to create, in common, the code within which communication can take place." 14

This 'new music... on the rise', is one in which there is no exchange and no alienation – nothing but pure use value. Not music as commodity but as gift. A practice of music where there is no distinction between artist and audience and where 'playing for one’s pleasure' is the only goal.
He also suggests a prophetic vision of the transition between Repetition and Composition. "…the very death of exchange and usage in music, the destruction of all simulacra in accumulation, may be bringing about a renaissance. Complex, vague, clumsy attempts to create a new status for music - not a new music, but a new way of making music."15

Composing for Attali is a form of musical practice in which musical production and musical consumption are dissolved one into the other and become inseparable. It involves a redrawing, or an erasing, of the line that separates the labour of production and the labour of consumption. This has a strong resonance with contemporary ideas about new technologies, and the novel cultural forms that can develop out of them. So is Attali right when talking about Composition? Is this utopian future possible?

Since the first publication of 'Noise' there have been numerous developments in music that support Attali's notion of the age of Composition.
Susan McClary asserts that through 'Noise', Attali locates musical social significance in its channelling of noise and violence. Punk burst onto the music scene in England in the late 70s with precisely the motivation suggested by Attali at his most optimistic and with the mixed results he also realistically anticipated. Many groups were formed by people who'd never played an instrument before but who intended to defy noisily the slickly marketed nonsense of commercial rock. Punk bristles with genuine sonic noise and conveys the energy of its social and musical protest. And its style incorporates through its fashion and art, features that also qualify as cultural noise.

In the mid 80s, the genuinely new musical form of Hip Hop grew out of the violent and noisy reality of life for Black youths in American city ghettos. Using record decks and a mixer, they borrowed from and re-contextualised the sounds and grooves of previous generations of black musicians – using classic soul, funk and jazz records - and voiced the reality of their own lives over it. The exponents of Hip Hop elevated the deck and mixer, the mechanism for playing the simulacrum of exchange in the Repetition economy, to the level of an instrument - which is indisputable when you see the skill and dexterity displayed by great Hip Hop DJ mixers and scratchers. The irony in subverting both the sign and machinery of Repetition is obvious.

The 'jackdawing' of sounds and grooves so fundamental to Hip Hop was furthered with the advent of relatively cheap, commercially available sampling technology. Public Enemy took a James Brown grunt, mixed it with a Miles Davis trumpet sample and stretching it to make the piercing blare in ‘Rebel Without A Pause’. As Public Enemy say, "We believe that music is nothing but organised noise. You can take anything - street sounds, us talking, whatever you want - and make it music by organising it."16

It's approaching 15 years since cheap samplers first emerged in the UK, radically simplifying music production for the untrained masses and in the process spawning no less than two new musical revolutions (Hip Hop and House). And ColdCut, a.k.a. Matt Black and Jonathan More, started out (and remain) as central figures behind the expansion of both scenes. Whether remixing Eric B and Rakim's 'Paid In Full' or discovering Lisa Stansfield and Yazz, ColdCut wrote their own templates, many of which now find fruition in their acclaimed indie dance label, Ninja Tune.

As Matt Black says "Sampling is now a very widely used tool in the production of music. In fact there is probably not a record in the charts in any country today that does not use sampling in some way. Hence its use in music production appears to be legitimised even though there was considerable opposition to it when the technique was first introduced. If one agrees that sampling is a tool in music production, all tools are legitimate." 17

The music industry has, perhaps not surprisingly, responded with considerable opposition to these musical trends because they undermine and subvert the principles of the Repetition based economics of the industry.

Even for the genuinely innovative Ninja Tunes, who proactively trail blaze many of the new developments in music technology, there's a tension, perhaps even a hypocrisy, in being both the traditional Record Label selling Records according to the traditional model of Repetition and in actively promoting the tools and attitudes of the age of Composition.

Matt Black explains "I do believe that there is such a thing as a currency of ideas and I earn a living trading in that currency. However, it's not possible to own ideas in the same way that someone can own a record. I think that to a certain extent, by sampling you are stealing someone's ideas. When James Brown named a track 'Funky Drummer' and created a drum solo in the middle, he didn't do it by mistake. In some ways the whole track revolves around that section. Saying "I'm just taking a small piece" isn't really justification. However, James Brown himself has seen what we do with samples and he's a great enough artist to let other people feed off his energy and, in return, he gets the love and respect of a new generation influenced by his music." 18

Attali suggests that the age of Composition is heralded by the development of new, technologically democratic, music making tools. "If Representation is tied to printing (by which the score is produced) and Repetition to recording (by which the record is produced) Composition is tied to the instrument (by which music is produced). We may take this as a herald of considerable future progress, in the production and in the invention of new instruments." 19

Like the ages of Representation and Repetition before it, Composition needs its own technology. Recording was intended as reinforcement for Representation, but it created an economy of Repetition. Similarly, the technology upon which Composition is based - digitised audio and the Internet - was not conceived for that purpose. Originally developed by the American military as a failsafe communication system in the event of nuclear war, the Internet has expanded into into a ubiquitous communication, publishing and file sharing mechanism for much of the developed world. It's doubtful whether the scientists at ARPA, the US state funded research project that developed the Internet in the 50s and 60s, envisioned a future where everyday folk would use the system to freely exchange their music collections.

Attali also suggests "these new instruments, will find usage only in the production, by the consumer himself, of the final object. The consumer will become producer and will derive at as much of his satisfaction from the manufacturing process itself as from the object he produces." 20

Attali's line of thinking does seem to be prophetic. There has been a huge expansion in music making tools available to musicians and non-musicians alike due to the developments in computing and software design. There are now a huge range of affordable hardware and sofware solutions for making music outside of the traditional music studio and this explosion of hard and soft synthsethisers, sequencers, samplers and their spawn has led to a dramatic democratisation in music making. Anybody with a computer and an Internet connection can download the software and the raw sounds to make a musical composition and then exchange it with others or publish it on the Web. In MusicMatch 2000 the mechanism has even crossed into the video gaming world of the Sony Playstation.

Susan McClary states 'Noise' poses so many provocative questions that to try to respond adequately to it would require.. new modes of creating, distributing and listening to music.” 21 15 years on from her response to 'Noise' those new modes of creating, distributing and listening to music have become actuality.

Attali notes that the process of inventing new instruments, after a pause of nearly three centuries, is gathering speed again. Such instruments are rarely traditional, based as they are on digital recording and synthesising technologies. In their innovation, diversity and ease of use, they hold out the promise of unprecedented new social and aesthetic formations.

The advent of computer based sequencing software, digital recording, loop based music production tools, stand alone 'grooveboxes' and sequencing samplers have all aided the democratisation of music making. Attitudes to music have also shifted through the rise of DJ culture and the increasing availability and popularity of musical games and toys.

Matt Black concurs, but with a reservation "Playing with sound is fun and people should try having a go and if they do have a go enjoy themselves and do mess around with other peoples sound if you want. I think people should be aware that sampling is very easy and making an original composition is very difficult. I think sound is free, but if you have a hit record with it and money becomes involved, then you will have to pay money for the use of the material that you have borrowed. That's only fair. If you're just using it for your own purposes for play, then I think you can get away with a lot. That's why ColdCut say 'Let Us Play'!"22

In the late 80s ColdCut pioneered the use of samplers and other affordable music technology and combined them with the art of DJing. Through the early 90s and their Hex project they experimented with applying these ideas to visuals and interactive multimedia via VJing, games, music CD-ROMs like Digital Dreamware, and art installations for Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA and the Barbican. These were perhaps some of the most successful early experiments mixing technology, music and art with the idea of interactivity and attracted a good deal of attention from the art world, though the commercial sector was slow to catch on to the significance of this direction. In 1996 ColdCut teamed up with Camart to develop a MIDI controlled AVI player, Vjamm. ColdCut with Hex first used early versions of Vjamm on the 1997 ‘Let Us Play’ audiovisual club show.

Vjamm is simply a new kind of instrument that lets the user play with audiovisual samples – AVI clips. It's like a piano for sound and vision. With the addition of real time functions like speed slow up, slow down, reverse and loop, the user has a lot of control. The very fast response of the program and the inclusion of MIDI support means that rhythmic audiovisual collages – whole video pieces where the sound and visuals are perfectly in sync – can be constructed. ColdCut hoped that by releasing the Vjamm software they would catalyse AV collage as an emerging pop DIY art/tech/appropriation/info tool, and help reclaim a medium which is ripe for remixing: television.

Of course, making music has always involved interactive technologies and new developments in these technologies have always given rise to new ways of composing and performing. One of the most exciting of these new modes of creating music in recent years has been interactivity, developed since the mid 90s by interactive design practioners such as antirom.

As the sleeve notes from the Wildlife ‘Supersampler’ state "The music has been disassembled into short samples which the player reassembles into a new musical experience in real time by interacting with the mouse and or keyboard. Authorship is therefore shared between the Wildlife artists who played and recorded the original music, the antirom designers and programmers who selected and cut the samples, designed the graphical interfaces and programmed the engines, and the player who puts it all back together again. There is no provision to save the resulting sequence – each interactive is designed not as a composition tool, but as a simple and intuitive musical tool, to be played and experienced in real time."23

Interactivity gives rise to a new type of representation in which doing is added to looking and listening and reading. An interactive representation is essentially a game (i.e. process), rather than a sign (i.e. product). Interactivity creates new kinds of relations between audiences and artefacts. An interactive music piece, for example, might encourage the user to play with and change the music itself, becoming composer, performer and audience all at once.

New means of listening [top]

Within cyberspace, market competition is disappearing for entirely pragmatic reasons. Instead of the fixed divisions between producers and consumers of Repetition economics, the Net encourages people to create and swap music and other digital information. While commodified information is closed and fixed, digital gifts are open and changeable. The rise of the 'gift economy' fostered by the Net can be seen as another herald of the age of Composition.

The Internet and associated developments such as Napster, MP3 sites, Internet radio stations and streaming technologies have revolutionised the distribution of music and are beginning to affect the way people listen to music too. As McClary says, "At the very least the new movements seem to herald a society in which individuals and small groups dare to reclaim the right to develop their own procedures, their own networks."24
This is particularly true in the UK that seems to have a veritable proliferation of Net based radio stations. Pirate TV respond: "Here in UK we have a long and honourable tradition of 'radio hamming' and pirate broadcasting... We have ourselves passed many weekends broadcasting our own radio station from the roof of a squatted studio. Now, thanks to Internet, we can share our planet's culture, a new global pirate medium that has true freedom from censorship and enforced play lists."25

And they have seized these opportunities: "The channel [Pirate TV] was born out of the excitement of early London pirate radio days, frustration with the dumbing down of legal stations and the straightjacket of commercial television. ColdCut has consistently been about pioneering new methods and materials for artistic expression. Having the foresight to see the Internet as the medium of true free expression, they made a showcase for the creation and display of quality zentertainment free from the financial and creative restraints of the industry. PTV is one channel on a global station, broadcasting on what is quickly becoming the all encompassing entertainment system - the PC."26

Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can now make, distribute, share and swap music. But the potential of this transformation within music making has to be understood.

As Matt Black says, "If you sample the whole of a Beatles' chorus and stick a big beat under it and have a hit, they're gonna sue your ass. You've taken too much and been too greedy and you haven't actually added anything of yourself into the idea. It's like putting an old idea into cellophane wrapping. Generating a new idea involves the hybridisation of material. Ideas should collide, bite, and have sex with each other in the same way that genetic DNA does. Can you measure the depth of an idea? One useful index is to measure how much of your own original material has been injected into what should be a new and exciting offspring, a new organism."27

What does the burgeoning of new instruments, as great as that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that announced the industrial revolution, foreshadow?

It is hard not to share Attali’s excitement at the prospect of new musical practices and new musical economies, which have the potential to elide the difference between musician and non-musician, performer and audience, and which makes Russolo’s old dream of arte dei rumori ('the art of noise') a real possibility for the future.

But this raises many issues. As Barbrook points out, "We need to examine the impact of this transformation within music-making - and its consequences for the rest of society. Since copyright laws and technological fixes can only slow down this process, we need to concentrate on analysing the emerging social, technological and aesthetic paradigms. The spread of new music technologies reflects the emergence of new methods of making music. However, when peer-to-peer computing becomes ubiquitous, how do musicians get paid for their work? How do people receive acknowledgement for their ideas? What happens once the existing legal and economic structures of music industry are no longer viable. Can the copyright laws be updated for the new situation? Can music exist as both commodity and gift? What will be the sounds of the age of composition predicted by Attali?"28

As Attali himself surmises on the means to realise the transition to the age of Composition. "Composition appears an abstract utopia. There is only one way [to realise it] - recovering in the units of production and of life, in undertakings and collectivities, some meaning for things. Neither will there be Composition if it is not clearly willed as a project to transcend Repetition, in other words, if the State does not stop confusing well being with the production of demand. The State can play a positive role only by encouraging the extensive production of means of doing rather than objects, the production of instruments rather than music. In this case the transition is very different from the two previous transitions - [Sacrifice to Representation and Representation to Repetition] it is not in the interest of the economic apparatus."29

On a personal note, I think it’s truly exciting to reflect on Attali’s 'Noise' - a 25-year-old political economic theory - and find many examples of contemporary music development that seem to support and vilify his reasoning and predictions. What's more, I find it empowering to be working with the pioneers of this new age and to consider myself part of this process - an agent of change that encourages the coming of the age of Composition.

However, in light of Attali's own reflections on the means to realise the transition and my intuition that the music industry will fight tooth and claw to maintain its economic status and control of music distrubution I'd advise you to not hold your breath.

1. Sleeve notes: Wildlife Supersampler, Wildlife Records, Cat. No.: WILDCD1, © 2000

2. Email: Barbrook R (2001), net.music Cybersalon and symposium proposal

3. Book: Attali J (1985), Noise, The University of Minnesota Press, p. 15

4. Book: Attali J (1985), Noise, The University of Minnesota Press, p. 50

12. Essay: McClary S, The Politics of Science & Sound, Noise, The University of Minnesota Press, p. 156

21. Essay: McClary S, The Politics of Science & Sound, Noise, The University of Minnesota Press, p. 149

24. Essay: McClary S, The Politics of Science & Sound, Noise, The University of Minnesota Press, p. 158

25. Website: PirateTV interview in La Spiral, <http://laspirale.org/pages/afficheArticle.php3?id=64&lang=en>

26. Website: PirateTV interview in La Spiral, <http://laspirale.org/pages/afficheArticle.php3?id=64&lang=en>

Essay: McClary S, The Politics of Science & Sound, Noise, The University of Minnesota Press

Website: La Spiral, <http://laspirale.org/pages/afficheArticle.php3?id=64&lang=en>