Noise Annoys (and Delights)

Maybe it's because it's the dog days of summer, but I'm wading slowly through the letter N. I've found a bevy of nurses and other N images to add to last week's NEWSSTANDS, but I've been slow in scanning them.


But the folder I wasn't expecting to find is the folder for NOISE. It's not really something you can SEE, is it?


My father's birthday is coming up soon, and he was a guy who loved noise. In fact, I still have a few mix tapes he gave me. There was a little box to check on some tapes that said "noise reduction." On one tape, my dad scrawled in "HELL NO!!!!!" next to that box. He liked it loud, and you can read about it in a collection of his work, Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer, which comes out in paperback in September. So in honor of my dad's birthday, I'm going to just load up a few pictures of NOISE, transcendent and annoying here.

Strangely enough, I found an image in this file made by my father's friend David Katzenstein in this folder. It even, inexplicably, had a stamp on it from Tangier, a city they visited together:

 



This is one of a large group of images about the experience of noises that might make you plug your ears:

There are also a couple of images paired with text about Moms who can't hear themselves think or get their babes to sleep. As a person who's experienced both ends of this, I couldn't resist them:

Cue the Buzzcocks singing," Pretty girls! Pretty boys! have you ever heard your mommy say, 'Noise annoys.'"


There are couple of images about things that block or prevent noise:

 
But I really love the methods and machines for measuring noise:

labeled as "Noise Analyzer"

This last one is one of my favorites, especially since I've been feeling recently that my mission in life is to make remedial music films for visual people (a.k.a.sonically challenged people like myself).I AM a Synthane Noisometer.

Maybe.

Hopefully I'll get the professional help I need at this year's Flaherty Seminar, appropriately titled "Sonic Truth."