Introduction: special issue on ‘noise’ and Chinese media

A noise is… ‘confused’ in the same way a language seems confused to someone who has not yet learned to decipher it, that is, to structure it. -Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise

In the early sound film City Scenes 都市風光 (1935), a pawn shop owner gets back to his storefront and begins berating one clerk, then another, before asking for the accountant. They point upstairs, so he proceeds to the stockroom, where he has another exchange with this more senior colleague, apparently asking for an advance out of business funds for his personal use. We cannot know the precise content of his conversations, because the dialogue is rendered as gibberish: repetitive grunts by the actors of the syllable ‘la’ in the form of a four-beat measure, paralleled by string instruments performing the same rhythm on a single note. In lieu of information, we as viewers are provided with a stylistic rendering of communication as form.

This particular snippet of film sound experimentation gestures towards the continuum of noise, music, and speech, and playfully toys with the hierarchy of significance amongst them (Chion [2010] 2016, 57). Noise would continue to be an important field to navigate from that point onward in Chinese cinema, whether it was something deliberately injected into sound design as foley art and recorded environmental sound, or something contingent and mechanical that recording engineers sought to eradicate for the sake of clarity. But noise is not a unique property of the cinematic medium. In fact, as the articles in this issue will demonstrate, noise has implications for urban and media environments, for the conceptualization of communication, and for social and cultural history. By centering the study of noise, we embed Chinese cinemas within a broader media ecology.

This special issue gathers studies that approach noise from the various perspectives of media technology and history, affect, infrastructural studies, and information. We have asked authors to re-conceptualize ‘noise’ by beginning with Chinese media objects and with the rich Chinese language of describing noise, noisy experiences, and noisy forms. In short: we embark upon the search for an ‘epistemology of noise’ (Malaspina 2018) that arises out of Chinese media and historical contexts. If we do not yet know the language of noise yet, we begin, here, with an attempt to decipher it.

First, scholars in various disciplines, ranging from music and sound studies to information science and urban geography, mobilize ‘noise’ to describe the interstitial remainders produced in the functioning of aesthetic, technological, and urban media systems. Attention to noise reminds us of the materiality of these media ensembles and allows us in turn to consider the materiality of technological and social relations that emerge together with noise. Media emergence thus serves as one of the organizing rubrics of this issue (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Turning Shanghai Inside out’ comic by Hu Xuansheng, as it appearsin a 1932 issue of Amateurs Home 無線電問答彙刊 (Hu 1932).

Our cover image, ‘Turning Shanghai Inside Out’ 鬧翻上海灘, demonstrates just how noisy media emergence can be. It is an illustration from a Republican period radio journal extracted from our contributor Xiangjun Feng’s ‘Birth of Noise’. The picture is located directly beneath an article on the ‘Shanghai Radio Situation’, that bemoans the ‘mess’ 稀糟 and grating political ‘discord’ 齟齬 that high wattage radio signals competing in a single airspace portend. In the image, such signals are rendered legible, materialized as visual chaos, criss-crossing lightning marks annotated with various stations’ call signs. They overwhelm the sky, shooting out of antennae on city rooftops that line the bottom of the frame. Signed by Hu Xuansheng 胡選聲, a pseudonym that translates cheekily to ‘wildly picking out sounds’, the image is peppered with incomplete signals denoted by ‘XG??’, ‘X??’, ‘XX!?’, ‘XX?’, and ‘?’ (in one corner, a bird expresses its own confusion: ‘??’). The moment of new media is complicated by competing signals, noises, and technopolitical affects–users overwhelmed by such chaos had to learn to tune themselves to this material reality.

Here and in Feng’s piece, we see noise emerge from the air together with a new media network and the politics of a new Chinese Republic. Raymond Kun-Xian Shen’s piece on ‘Urban Noises and Decadent Music’, in turn, chronicles another moment of emergence. In the 1980s, noise gains a new mobility, no longer the pesky parasite of radio signals, but the sonic disturbance of electric tape (Walkmans and boomboxes) that circulates the fin de siecle of a displaced Chinese republic in Taipei.

Tuning, listening, and devising strategies of noise reduction (technological and regulatory fixes) at these historical junctures makes sonic and cultural disturbances become audible as historical affects. But if particular constellations of noise mark these periods, and if we consider listening to noise as a form of recovery and a historical methodology, we must contend with not only the emergence but also the disappearance of noises and the historical conditions they subtend.

In some cases, the reproduction of noise is actually central to the project of salvaging lost or suppressed memories. Junting Huang’s piece, for example, takes a look at the re-enactment of labor in Taiwan’s sugar factories in the video installation art of Hong-Kai Wang. The carefully recorded ambient sounds that result from this process of re-enactment, as well as the more deliberately re-created sound of protest song, bring attention to the forgotten history of labor activism in the colonial Taiwanese sugar industry. Noise, in Wang’s work, becomes an agentive sensual force that gives the past presence. As such, it cannot be broken down into the sum of its parts, but gains its power from its enveloping totality, its contingency, and its basis in the materiality of the industrial sugar-production process.

Similarly, Dayton Lekner and Joseph Lovell’s piece examines how the Maoist period lives on in the present as sensual memories of revolutionary noise. Lekner and Lovell piece together fragments of these memories from memoirs and rock music of the reform era to show the multivalent affective power of noise. Though the state could and did direct noise towards its revolutionary purposes, the individual experience of noise was much more dispersed and ideologically ambiguous. A mass media signal may appear to be a singular communication vector, when in fact it is embedded in noise, which is an affective field.

Our second organizing rubric, then, is noise as affect. As Marie Thompson helpfully defines in her book, Beyond Unwanted Sound, noise is a field that we may affect, and be affected by in turn, with varying intensities (Thompson 2017). It may not be linguistic, and it may be stubbornly non-representational, but it does have the potential to bring about relation between individuals and human–or non-human–collectivities. It is in this sense that the noise of the revolution, be it the clanking din of trains, the hum of the big city, or the reverberation of loudspeakers, may exceed and overflow ideological content.

Our last contributor, Anatoly Detwyler, examines the affective qualities of noise from the historical juncture of the post-socialist era, but begins with the affective and thermodynamic concept of noise as re’nao 熱鬧. Though re’nao is a term with a longer history, Detwyler brings it to bear upon the heat and rising chaos of the stock market in reform era China through the Hong Kong film Shanghai Fever. The noise of the market, like that of revolution, swells and falls with the input of collective actions, and emerges at a moment of tremendous social transformation.

But noise is not something that presents itself before our observations or begs our attention at all times. More often, it remains latent in the background, a dynamic infrastructure storing energy for future tectonic shifts while quietly underwriting the pulsing flows of ongoing signal traffic. In acknowledgement of these qualities of noise, our third rubric is noise as infrastructure.

Here again, our cover image provides a vivid ‘infrastructural inversion’, rendering the ‘inside out’ of infrastructure and making an underlying noisy technics visible (and graphically ‘audible’) as a noisy network. Feng’s piece, for one, considers infrastructural logics of noise in conversation with Brian Larkin’s theorization of ‘signal and noise’ and the technics of modernization, recasting the birth of noise alongside the birth of the nation through the figure of such a network.

Shen’s article on Taipei’s noisy 1980s reads the ambient hum of highways in the background of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter of the Nile (1987) against the aural disturbance of portable music players as a new assemblage of urban sonic infrastructures and the political mobilites that they allow. One type of urban noise is concretized in the form of roads, while the other points to a pop cultural circulation that pivots around the Japanese music industry. In fact, the perceived ‘noisiness’ of Japanese music, or its affront to middle-class Taiwanese sensibilities, is a fig leaf for the compromised position of a developmental state that relies upon maintaining unequal trade relations with a former colonial power. Not only were media commodities such as the Walkman assembled in Taiwan (among other countries) for Japanese corporations at the time, they were sold back to consumers in these nations at high prices. Reading ‘against the grain’ of such distasteful cultural noise makes visible a hidden labor politics of techno-modernity and mobility. Perhaps Daughter of the Nile was Hou’s least successful film because it pushed too hard on this painful point.

If the idea of noise as cultural pollution hides the infrastructure of neo-colonial commodity flow in Hou’s film, Hong-Kai Wang sound art transforms the ruins of colonial infrastructure into strident political critique. Huang’s article closely analyzes how Wang re-sounds not only the ‘music’ of work in a sugar factory, but also the rumble of Japanese-built train networks that make the sugar trade possible. Trains appear too in Lekner and Lovell’s article on Maoist noises. The authors track how noises of (cultural) revolution, alternatively joyful and tearful, carry on the rail networks of the PRC as sent-down youth disperse to the far-flung regions of the nation in what may well be recast as a performance of infrastructural prowess–frictionless connectivity of national space connected by train and loudspeaker networks.

Finally, Detwyler’s piece ‘Shanghai Fever’ tracks the resurrection of the Shanghai financial infrastructures that went silent after the 1949 revolution, speculative fervor replaced by revolutionary noise. The post-Mao mainland connects to a networked economy mediated by Hong Kong information modernity. Rereading ‘hot noise’, or re’nao 熱鬧 through the logic speculation and the performance of the marketplace, Detwyler proposes the emergence of postsocialism in noise.

The stock market, after all, can also be understood as media form, emerging from and in contention with the ubiquitous presence of noise. In City Scenes, the Shanghai stock market appears as an expressionist, almost surreal sequence. Shot from the bird’s eye view, the sequence begins with a circle of investors (gamblers?) dressed in dark colors, placing bets by extending their arms into the bright center. They alternate their offers in a neat pattern around the circumference, matching the rhythm of a bright marching tune, until their circle fades into a graphic match image: a spinning roulette wheel filled with rocks. In the 1930s as in the 1990s, a rational game of calculated risk devolves quickly into the winds of speculation, from which key characters cannot extricate themselves; they are embedded, despite themselves, in the ‘hot noise’ of the market.

Varied in their approaches and theoretical tools, the articles in this issue all ultimately track historical turns in their attention to noise. In the early twentieth century, we see the noisy emergence of a new Republic in China and a colonial labor consciousness in Taiwan (Feng & Huang). The disappearing noises of leftwing politics in socialist China and colonial Taiwan, in turn, are the subject of aural excavation and affective memory in the postsocialist and postcolonial periods (Huang, Leckner & Lovell). And finally, the Sinophone’s shift to the electronic neoliberal, global economy in the late 80s and early 90s is also marked through new noise emitting media ensembles (Shen & Detwyler).

In the issue as a whole, we take up Greg Hainge’s call to think about noise, ultimately, as ontology. As Hainge notes, noise is not only ‘multi-medial’, but it is fundamentally medial: ‘it is always in-between, produced in the passing into actuality of everything, both animate and animate’ (Hainge 2013, 13) Noise brings forth a relational ontology, and directs us towards new models of emergence and transformation. Beginning with Chinese cinema studies, this issue opens up into thinking about the relationality of media and shifts in the nature of being. In short, we figure modern Chinese media history as an ‘ocean of sound’: following David Toop, sound has become a ‘shifting, open lattice, on which new ideas can hang, or through which they can pass and interweave’ (Toop [1995] 2018, 1).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evelyn Shih

Evelyn Shih is a scholar of Sinophone and Korean literatures, media, and cultures who frequently works in a comparative mode. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese at the University of Colorado-Boulder, with a book project on comic communication and transnational media environments during the Cold War. Her work on Taiyupian and other subjects has been published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and the Journal of Korean Studies, as well as various anthologies.

Julia Keblinska is a postdoctoral scholar at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University. She writes primarily on modern Chinese media history but is broadly interested in the late socialist media ecologies of Eastern Europe and in East Asian popular culture. Her first book project, “New Era, New Media: Reverse Engineering the Future in 1980s China,” explores emerging media and notions of futurity in China’s decade of post-Mao reforms. In her recent and forthcoming articles and chapters, she’s considered Chinese comics as intermedial forms, the VCD format as a media aesthetic in millennial China, and television as an object of nostalgia in contemporary South Korea. She is the content co-editor of Chinese Theater Collaborative, a digital humanities resource that explores the multimedia afterlives of classic Chinese drama.