Noise music is the hardest genre of music to master the creation of. This may sound ridiculous, but it is true. The reason it sounds ridiculous is because the bar for entry is so low: anyone can make noise music without any training, but the truth is that the potential for noise music is infinite, encompassing all sound that is possible to exist, and as such any knowledge that can be used to produce sound can be applied to noise music, and thus to master noise it is necessary to master all aspects of sound production, a feat which is nearly impossible.

It is definitely true that much noise is dull and unimaginative, and it is also true that much noise seems to be dull and unimaginative until one listens closely. It’s also true that noise has a history of being associated with a nihilistic embrace of misogyny, violence, and anti-intellectualism, which drives away many who would develop the genre to its fullest potential.

A main problem is the distinction between noise and music: music is sound that society accepts as pleasing, and noise is what is rejected. Unfortunately, society is dumb and has a long history of rejecting a lot of creative and talented individuals out of fear of them, and so noise becomes outsider music, music for people who have something to create that society would not accept.

When you think about it, music has noise in it: drumming is a way of creating rhythmic noise. Likewise, the distinction between tonal noise and melody is mostly a matter of taste, as melody is simply a succession of tones in time. The introduction of chaos is what makes something tonal considered to be noise, and so tones lacking a sense of order causes boring ears to reject the sound as uninteresting.

The truth is, chaos is governed by predictable tendencies and can be analyzed, and this was what chaos science brought us toward the later part of the 20th century. Paradoxically, unpredictability and disorder can be classified and understood in various ways, but this seems unintuitive and goes right over the heads of most people. These tendencies can be felt distinctively by the listening of noise music, and so the mind surfs various types of sonic chaos and it comes out of it either bewildered or with a sense of just what type of gobbledygook it had listened to and an appreciation of it, even if only on the level of feeling.

The tendency to reject chaos in favor of order is one thing that society does that makes it boring and stifling. Listen to the sounds of nature, let them flow into your ears: they are the noise music of the universe. The pitter and patter of rain, the violent rustling of leaves in trees in the wind, and the claps of thunder in a storm are like noise music, and only the most boring and stodgy individual would deny their beauty.

For sure, there are many artists who create chaos with no understanding of it, but people assume that all things that are chaotic are like this, when there are many who utilize the various possibilities of sound in interesting ways. Understanding is achieved slowly by the artist over the course of creating many things with many different tools and sound sources; it is experience with life and how it translates to sound that makes a mature artist, and also the ability to take what is within and speak it with the tools at hand.

Ultimately, society rejects the totality of nature out of fear of death, and so those who are more in tune with the stranger tendencies of nature and how they can be translated and demonstrated with the tools of sound production are the most interesting noise artists. It is a shame that society continues to reject the reality of life, as life is an endless stream of noise interrupted briefly by music, and noise music is the ultimate, most interesting marriage of this continuum.