The Impossible Temptation of Noise in Late Eighteenth-Century English Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Hogarth’s famous print, The Enraged Musician, makes clear, “sound” and “noise” are antithetical notions. Noise is defined negatively as a disruptive element. “It works as a deconstruction”, Paul Hegarty claims. Historically, in the Aristotelian tradition, music used to be thought of as an art based upon harmonious sound and correct proportions, that is, as fundamentally opposed to noise, which did not depend on harmony or mathematical rules. Such a conception was, however, to be gradually overruled by theories of the sublime which accomplished a shift from the object (i.e. music) to the subject (i.e. the listener). Music was gradually “freed”, as it were, from its dependence upon mathematics, and since – for Burke – terror was considered the main cause of the sublime, the temptation arose to suggest sublime terror in music by procedures of imitation of natural noises. This, however, clashed with another dominant aspect of the theories of musical expression that directed that whatever was harsh or discordant could not claim the title of “music.” This paper attempts to analyse the epistemological and aesthetic crisis that resulted from the eighteenth-century theories of expression and of the sublime in England, and which made “noise” both something that one was tempted to introduce into music to create sublime effects, as well as something that was fundamentally incompatible with harmonious sound and expression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".