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Static/White Noise Music
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Image from Bernd Helfert

Some records of the period before the Technocalypse contain fragmentary and contradictory references to an Information Age music craze, sometimes called 'Static Music' or 'White Noise Music'. Allegedly, the phenomenon was the ultimate pre-singularity triumph of music corp marketing. For years the corps financed hundreds of acts in hope of finding a single hit. Tired of this completely inefficient approach, executives of the FNJ corporation approached the leading experts at the Institute of Advanced Psychology on the New Israel sea habitat (or sometimes, orbital habitat) to develop an innovative solution to this problem. Instead of concentrating on the tired approach of overmarketing an attractive but untalented performer, they used the feelings of alienation in the adolescent population as the hook for the campaign. The initial music for testing on the populace made much use of tones of random static noise.

Unfortunately for many music lovers everywhere the campaign's effectiveness was unparalleled. For a year or two sometime in the mid 80s to early 110s AT (mid 2050s to the early 2070s CE), the most popular form of music in the 11-24 year old demographic was Static Music. Music corps were delighted; never before had they done so little work to create a hit. Surviving records variously name different bands formed to exploit the trend, including Active Noise Cancellation, Aliasing Filter and Bi-Linear Design.

Several accounts of the phenomenon state that the Static craze died out thanks to a counter-campaign created by an independent entertainment entrepreneur, Elvis Presley fan Ryu O'Connor, despite numerous lawsuits on behalf of the entertainment corps.

According to one almost certainly apocryphal account recovered from Eden Torus' databanks, it was briefly revived by an interview with the AI Kilburn in 136 AT (2105 CE) in which e listed eir favourite music:

InterviewBot: So Kilburn, what tunes do you crunch numbers to?

Kilburn: Well there are of course the older classics, and among those I prefer Bach. For popular music I'm quite a fan of middle to late twentieth century rock bands: U2, They Might Be Giants, Bowie and Tom Waits. From more recent music, well, I enjoy looking for patterns in Aliasing Filter's last MP9 "Random Electrical Discharges". Nothing too radical...

A significant number of historians of the Information Age posit that the fad never existed at all and that the story was instead a satirical Jovian parable from the early 6th century AT about the foolishness of baselines that Technocalypse infoplagues later wrote into some records as an actual event.
 
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  • Kilburn
  • White Noise - Text by M. Alan Kazlev
    Noise that uniformly distributed in the frequency domain; randomness that is uniformly distributed; thus, a white noise process with a range of 0 to 1 would yield a random number in this range with probability equal for all possible values. Brown noise is a result of cumulatively adding white noise. Some clades and subcultures use white noise for various aesthetic or audio-sculptural purposes. In an audiosculpture for example white noise could be used to mask a soundscape when heard from a certain angle, thus creating a 3D sonic topographic.
 
Appears in Topics
130 to 400 AT: The Interplanetary AgeMusic
 
Development Notes
Text by Ben Higginbottom
Amended by ProxCenBound, 25 January 2023
Initially published on 05 October 2001.

Renamed from 'Static/White Noise' to 'Static/White Noise Music' (2023-02-03, by The Astronomer)
 
 
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