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'Subtractive Acts of Creation'What if music wasn’t built up from tones but cut out of noise? Media theorist Friedrich Kittler argued that music was merely a subsection of the world of noise and imagined a music created purely by a process of filtering. This paper explores the technological and aesthetic conditions underlying music sculpted out of complex noise. Taking a broad approach to subtractive synthesis, which not only encompasses electronic music but also instrumental before the emergence of synthesizers, it asks to what extent such a music filtered out of noise might in fact exist – it does so in parts – and concludes by arguing that to understand noise better, music theory would do well to embrace the digital.
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Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, 30 Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6HT, United Kingdom
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