I gave the presentation that I posted about earlier on free improvisation today and the reception wasn't too great, as I expected. Probably because I did a good job of pointing out the negatives of free improv - the way it always produces the same forms and gestures and so on. Composers don't like the idea of completely "un-composed" music, I guess. I kind of agree with them.
But, one dipshit in the group raised his hand and asked me to define noise. So I said, more or less, "Unpitched or disorganized sound." He told me that he had a different definition. He said that noise was sound that wasn't inentional as music, that is, noise is sound without an artistic intention. He said that birds singing is noise, using his definition.
So I asked him, if someone sculpted unpitched screeching sounds and called it music (and I played him some Merzbow), was it no longer noise? And he just sat there not saying anything. He doesn't fucking get that his definition is a negative definition of
art and not really a useful definition of
noise. A bird singing isn't art, but it's also NOT NOISE. It's
pitched sound without a human artistic intention.
When you decide to call all non-artistic sounds "noise", you're mixing different definitions of the word noise. There is an acoustic definition and then there is the everyday definition - noise being any unpleasant non-artistic sound. This guy really pissed me off.
There is nothing more annoying than a dumbass who is parading his personal definition of "art" as an alternative to something it can't be an alternative to. My acoustical definition of "noise" was well-suited for what I was talking about, but he was acting like his silly idea of what "art" is is better. They're two different things. Jesus.