ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the ‘noise of the new’ in popular music is neither a purely sonic phenomenon nor a mere transgression of a dominant musical regime, but rather a kind of communicational noise that overwhelms the current limits and norms of social communication and ushers in an unanticipated future that extends beyond the purely musical or sonic. When Shannon and Weaver introduced their ‘mathematical model of communication’ in 1949, both communication and noise were seemingly considered an engineering issue, while at the same time presented in a highly generic and abstract form. The concept of noise as premonitory also resonates with the idea of hyperstition as developed by the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit in the 1990s to account for the ways in which aesthetic works such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer could not only anticipate the future but engineer it.
