18 August

Like Serres, my first love is music. But I’ve mentioned before, it’s starting to feel like noise. Noise is the way to occupy territory, as birds and other animals know. Music is about territory, that’s its main function, the homilies about Aretha Franklin this week reminded me of that again, how much peoples’ personal identity and territory is defined by their music. Challenge a person’s favourite music and you will ignite anger in them faster than in just about any other way. It took me 50 years to understand that, to hear music as a highly repetitive tiny territorial subset of the vast soundscape of the world. I think others are arriving there too, for example the ASMR movement, and its focus upon the exquisite sounds of our everyday world. It was through Serres that I started really listening to the world, like right now, with a wind blasting outside. There are complex messages and meanings in that sound, which we push away in favour of our repetitive musical refrains. It takes enormous time to understand those other sounds, you have to listen and learn, and the more you do, the more annoying the repetitive refrains of music become. (I still love music by the way, but it’s a much more nuanced and sparing love.) What Serres says below about noise chasing out other noise was so prescient, look today at how people have retreated to the noise inside their headphones to shut out all the other noise. Serres: “Music has been a fundamental part of my life. I could not conceive of life without music. But now, I’ve begun to hate it. It is everywhere nowadays, trapping me everywhere. I knew that we had entered the motor age when the noise coming from motors filled space everywhere. There was no space without a motor...Noise is stercoral: it makes the occupation of an expanse intolerable and thus gets it for itself...A noise is not chased out but covered. From this point, (we) make motors that backfire in the street. (Others) counterattack with loudspeakers. Hi-fi, full-strength, earphones: the motor is beaten.”