Music as Noise: Making Sound Art (MUSI40094)

HonoursPoints: 12.5On Campus (Southbank)

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Overview

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Semester 1
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The notion of noise as potential music has been an enduring preoccupation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Various contexts for noise-based music include performance works, recordings, installation artworks/sound sculpture, radiophonic works and online.

This subject looks at noise art’s development from the Futurists through to Cage’s and Oliveros’s experimentalism, to contemporary postmodern sound art and into the current post-postmodern era. Students will learn how to create a short sound art work in a style of their choosing, and to contextualise their creative approach within the genre’s history.

Intended learning outcomes

On completion of this subject, students should be able to:

  • understand and critically evaluate to a sophisticated level the history and aesthetics of the phenomenon of noise-as-music;
  • demonstrate basic skills in sound art creation;
  • articulate and situate their creative endeavours in this area;
  • demonstrate the ability to evaluate and criticise the different ways in which people write about noise as music.

Generic skills

On completion of this subject students should possess:

  • a capacity to make critical, informed and sophisticated responses to new musical ideas, methodologies and theoretical frameworks
  • the ability to engage with new ideas and respond to them in a thoughtful, critical and personal way, in both written and creative platforms
  • the ability to communicate effectively

Last updated: 4 March 2025