I · THE CONDITION

Noise as the Defining Metaphysics of Our Moment

Aldous Huxley’s verdict, issued as epigraph across the pages of Issue 51, carries an almost eerie prescience: “The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them.” Read in 2026, that sentence has not aged into historical curiosity. It has ripened into prophecy. The contributors assembled by editor-in-chief Zan Boag do not merely catalogue the decibel count of modern civilisation; they diagnose the philosophical, neurological, political, and spiritual consequences of a world that has never been noisier — and has simultaneously lost the vocabulary for what it is losing.

Silence, the editors observe, feels rarer than it once did. Most of us move through the day accompanied by a continuous stream of sounds and signals: notifications, podcasts, music, televisions, traffic, voices. Even moments that appear quiet often carry a kind of anticipation — as if another interruption is about to arrive. But some of the most consequential forms of noise have little to do with sound at all. The mind, left alone for even a few moments, often rushes to fill the space with worry, rumination, regret, and the replaying of past conversations. In silence, we encounter not only the absence of sound but something more unsettling: ourselves.

The issue’s core philosophical wager is this: noise is not a neutral backdrop against which life occurs. It is an active condition that shapes attention, behaviour, emotion, politics, and identity. To understand noise — truly understand it, philosophically — is to understand something essential about how power operates, how minds degrade, how communities dissolve, and how meaning itself becomes difficult to sustain.

II · THE NEUROSCIENCE

The Brain in Sound: Daniel Levitin on Organised Perception

The issue’s most expansive intellectual interview is with neuroscientist, musician, and bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin — Founding Dean of Arts and Humanities at Minerva University and James McGill Professor Emeritus at McGill — whose career bridges the laboratory and the recording studio. His central claim, drawn from his landmark work This Is Your Brain on Music, is deceptively simple: music is organised sound. The definition, borrowed from composer Edgard Varèse, transforms the question of what counts as music from a matter of aesthetic convention into one of intent. “I think in many things, intent matters,” Levitin tells interviewer Zan Boag. “If I’m holding the door open for somebody and it slams on their face — if my intent was to help them and not to hurt them, it’s not just legally different, but morally different.”

When sound enters the brain, its first task is survival-oriented categorisation: is this safe or unsafe? Human-made or environmental? The auditory system evolved not as a passive receiver but as a rapid threat-assessment engine, hardwired to the body’s stress and movement centres. Hence the startle response — the involuntary flinch at a sudden loud sound — which cannot be suppressed through rational effort. What is remarkable is what happens after this initial triage. Once a sound is categorised as safe and human-made, the brain begins asking deeper questions: does it contain recognisable patterns? Does it match the tonal grammars and tropes — the twelve-bar blues, the sonata form — embedded by a lifetime of listening? Wittgenstein’s concept of “family resemblance” applies precisely here: we hear something new and locate it within a cognitive-emotional neighbourhood of things we already love.

On the health implications of music, Levitin is direct. Musicians, as a category, tend to have longer lifespans and healthier lives. The reason is cognitive reserve: mastery of an instrument requires tens of thousands of hours of whole-brain engagement — motor coordination, auditory discrimination, emotional interpretation, memory, social attunement. The resulting neural redundancy creates alternative pathways that can buffer against the cognitive degradation of ageing. Learning an instrument, Levitin argues, is one of the most reliably neuroprotective activities available to human beings at any age.

On AI-generated music, Levitin is measured but clear. He compares the best current AI music to plastic flowers in a hotel lobby: convincing at a glance, hollow upon approach. Authenticity is not sentimentality; it is philosophically substantive. We care whether Chopin wrote the étude, whether Shakespeare wrote the play, whether Da Vinci painted the canvas — not because we can empirically detect the difference in every case, but because the pedigree of a work carries information about human interiority that cannot be replicated by a system that has never suffered, waited, hoped, or grieved.

III · THE THEORY OF INFORMATION

Signal Versus Noise: Tom Chatfield and the Limits of Meaning

Tom Chatfield — philosopher of technology and author of Wise Animals — anchors his contribution in Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” one of the founding documents of the information age. Shannon’s central insight was that noise is not merely an annoyance but the inescapable companion of information. In any noisy channel, perfect transmission requires redundancy — repetition, error-correction, the deliberate padding of messages to ensure their survival across interference.

The counterintuitive implication is this: the closer a message is to chaos — to maximum unpredictability — the more “information” it technically contains in Shannon’s mathematical sense, while the more structured and meaningful a work, the less informationally novel. Shakespeare’s complete works contain vastly less Shannon-information than a comparably sized sequence of random characters. Meaning, structure, and redundancy are intimately related. We can compress audio and video efficiently precisely because they are full of subtle regularities. Noise, properly understood, is that which cannot be compressed — the irreducibly unpredictable.

Herbert Simon’s maxim — “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” — frames what Chatfield identifies as the core epistemic challenge of our era. The modern information environment is, in David Foster Wallace’s phrase, one of “Total Noise — the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to.” Chatfield’s prescription is what the psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman called “decision hygiene”: the deliberate culling of the information one relies upon whenever it is more likely to activate cognitive biases than to reveal genuine patterns.

The deepest problem, Chatfield argues, is that human minds are exquisitely adept at pattern-matching — which is precisely why we are so prone to finding patterns that are not there. Strange smells, familiar faces, large animals with sharp teeth: our survival instincts evolved for a world far less informationally saturated than ours. The result is systematic over-fitting — the construction of compelling narratives from noise. “Chaos can be transmitted across the planet with perfect clarity,” Chatfield concludes. “But human understanding, at its best, is an act of creative subtraction.”

IV · THE POLITICS

The Noise of the Rabble: André Dao on Rancière and Democratic Silence

Among the issue’s most politically urgent essays is André Dao’s examination of how the concept of noise functions as a mechanism of political exclusion. Dao — whose debut novel Anam won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction — draws on the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s distinction between political speech and mere noise.

For Rancière, politics is not simply the management of interests within an agreed framework. It is the act of challenging the framework itself — the “distribution of the sensible,” the culturally enforced partition that determines which bodies, which voices, which modes of expression, belong to the public sphere and which are relegated to the private. In Western liberal democracies, political speech must be “reasoned” and “reasonable” — must look, sound, and feel a particular way — to register as legitimate. Those whose speech does not conform to this aesthetic register are heard not as making political claims but as producing noise.

The implications for contemporary political culture are acute. At a moment when populist movements and authoritarian governments alike claim to speak for “the people,” the question of whose speech counts as signal and whose as noise is not merely academic. It is the constitutive question of democratic legitimacy itself.

V · THE SOCIOLOGY

Group Noise: Tiffany Jenkins on Collective Effervescence

If Dao addresses noise as political exclusion, Tiffany Jenkins — author, academic, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh — addresses it as the foundation of social belonging. Her essay opens at an ABBA Voyage concert in East London, where the crowd’s collective eruption at “Dancing Queen” becomes a meditation on Émile Durkheim’s concept of “collective effervescence”: the special excitement that arises from shared ritual — worship, sporting events, political marches, concerts.

Jenkins contrasts two traditions in crowd theory. The first, associated with Gustave Le Bon, sees the crowd as a site of contagion and irrationality, where individuals lose their separateness and fall into a primitive, suggestible collective mindset. The second, Durkheimian tradition sees group noise not as the erasure of individuality but as the condition of genuine social connection — a civic glue that signals and reinforces what Robert Putnam calls “bridging social capital”: the links that join different groups and create shared identity.

Jenkins’s data is sobering. In-person socialising in the United States declined by more than twenty per cent between 2003 and 2023, according to the American Time Use Survey. The soundscape of public life has quietened: cafes where once there was conversation now feature workers in headphone-induced solitude, commuters sitting physically proximate but socially separate. Jenkins names this the “privatisation of everyday life” — and suggests that the disappearance of shared noise is not merely a cultural shift but an accelerating erosion of social cohesion. The silence between us is becoming structural.

VI · THE PRACTICE

Listen Up: Marina Benjamin on the Attentional Economy of Hearing

Marina Benjamin — arts editor, senior editor at Aeon, and author of the celebrated memoir The Middlepause — opens her essay with a quietly devastating observation about her ninety-four-year-old mother: a woman who owns state-of-the-art hearing aids but prefers, as her light fades, not to wear them. Benjamin reads her mother’s progressive deafness as chosen metaphor — a turning inward that refuses the pull of the world and its demands. It is, she writes, “a stark metaphor for her awareness of mortality.”

From this intimate scene, Benjamin unfolds a rich phenomenology of listening. Listening, she argues, is not passive reception but an act of profound attentional commitment — what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy calls the move from “hearing” to “listening,” from the mere registration of sound to the intentional straining toward meaning. Nancy identifies this straining in the French expression tendre l’oreille: to extend the ear. We lean in. We reach toward meaning.

Martin Buber’s concept of I and Thou enters Benjamin’s analysis as the relational theory that makes genuine listening philosophically intelligible. To hear another person — truly hear them — is to encounter a “Thou” that cannot be contained, appropriated, or reduced to an object in one’s cognitive world. The relation between I and Thou is one of meeting. Community, Benjamin suggests, following Buber, is only possible if we acknowledge this irreducible otherness.

Crucially, Benjamin notes that sonic experience differs from visual experience in its permeability. We can turn away from a painting, close a book, avert our eyes. But the ear remains open even during sleep. Sound enters from all directions; we cannot selectively block it the way we can narrow our visual field. This vulnerability — the permeability of the ear — is both the source of noise’s power over us and the reason genuine listening is such a profound act of ethical openness.

VII · THE METAPHYSICS

On Silence: Nigel Warburton and the Music Between the Notes

Nigel Warburton — one of Britain’s most widely read popular philosophers and New Philosopher’s Editor-at-large — takes as his text John Cage’s notorious composition 4’33”, in which performers are instructed not to play for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is not, Warburton insists, a joke. It is a wise Zen intervention that forces audiences to hear what is always already there: the ambient world, the incidental sounds of a room, the sound of their own breathing and restlessness.

Cage’s insight — confirmed when he entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard in 1951 expecting to hear nothing and instead became aware of the sounds of his own nervous system — was that silence is not a condition of the world but a condition of perception. What we call silence is merely what happens when we stop attending to the ongoing sonic texture of existence. As Warburton writes: “There is no silence; only the sounds we have stopped listening to.”

The musical rest becomes Warburton’s central figure: the written silence that holds back what is to follow, building tension precisely by withholding sound. Great music works on our emotions partly because it raises expectations and then either satisfies or thwarts them. The rest is not empty time; it is structured suspense — perhaps the most powerful rhetorical device in Western music. Warburton’s final turn is genuinely beautiful: on the gravestone of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, a fermata is carved — the sign indicating a pause to be held — with the direction fff, three degrees above fortissimo. Beneath it: death as a silence held at full volume for a very long time.

VIII · THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION

Where Sounds Are: Casey O’Callaghan on the Ontology of Hearing

Casey O’Callaghan — Professor of Philosophy and Director of Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University — brings rigorous philosophical precision to a question most of us have never paused to ask: where, exactly, are sounds? Are they in our minds, in the air, at their source, or in the relationship between listener and world?

O’Callaghan’s answer is that sounds are events, not objects — happenings in the world that take place over time and possess properties such as pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration. More specifically, they are located at or near their sources — outside our heads, at a distance, in the direction we hear them to come from. The sound waves that travel through the air are the carriers of information about the sound, not the sound itself. We decode that vibrational information to perceive the event.

This has significant consequences for understanding multisensory perception — one of the most important discoveries of the past two decades in cognitive science. The ventriloquist effect illustrates the principle: we hear the puppet’s voice as emanating from the puppet’s mouth, not the ventriloquist’s lips, because the auditory and visual systems collaborate in real time to construct a unified perceptual account of a single event. The “beep-beep flash” illusion — in which two quick beeps cause subjects to report seeing two flashes when only one occurred — demonstrates that sound actively shapes visual experience. Our senses are not separate channels; they are cooperative strategies for answering one question: what is happening out there?

O’Callaghan raises a concern with direct implications for contemporary life. Our perceptual systems evolved to interpret multisensory information on the assumption that temporal and spatial coincidence of visual and auditory signals indicates a common real-world event. When sound and image arrive together from the same apparent location, the brain concludes they refer to the same thing. This is an excellent heuristic for ecological environments — and a serious vulnerability in environments flooded with manufactured audio-visual content. As deepfake technology and algorithmically generated media become pervasive, our evolved perceptual architecture is being systematically exploited. “We ought to be less trusting of how things appear to us on the basis of our senses,” O’Callaghan says — a remarkable statement from a philosopher who simultaneously insists that sounds are genuinely real features of the world.

IX · THE AESTHETIC

A Noisy Future: Luigi Russolo and the Art of Organised Turbulence

The issue includes a masterful retrospective on Luigi Russolo, the Italian Futurist painter and composer who, in 1913, published The Art of Noises — one of the founding documents of experimental sound art. Russolo’s argument was that traditional orchestral music had become acoustically insufficient for a civilisation reshaped by machines. Factories, trains, turbines, combustion engines, and electrical systems had created an entirely new soundscape. The modern ear had adapted; art had not.

Russolo and his collaborator Ugo Piatti constructed extraordinary experimental instruments called intonarumori (“noise intoners”) — wooden machines that could produce buzzing, hissing, roaring, crackling, and rumbling sounds, their pitch and intensity controlled by cranks and levers. Performances provoked outrage, confusion, mockery, and occasional physical fights. Russolo interpreted this response as evidence not of failure but of the depth of inherited aesthetic assumptions. Noise, to him, represented liberation from exhausted conventions.

His legacy, traced through John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Eno, and countless experimental electronic artists, confirms his prescience. The issue situates Russolo’s vision against our present condition: today’s soundscape is shaped not by factory machinery but by engines, traffic, aviation, construction, alerts, algorithms, advertising, and streaming media. Noise is no longer merely industrial; it is informational and psychological. We remain simultaneously drawn to noise and exhausted by it — a paradox Russolo could not have anticipated but would have recognised immediately.

X · THE EXISTENTIAL

Hiding Acoustically: Mariana Alessandri on Authentic Speech

Philosopher Mariana Alessandri — Professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and author of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods — contributes the issue’s most personally demanding essay. At a barbecue where conversations evaporate into pleasantries and no one says what they actually mean, Alessandri diagnoses a civilisation that has institutionalised inauthenticity. We are, she argues, the walking wounded — and we have designed a social architecture in which expressing true feeling in public is actively discouraged.

Kierkegaard’s condemnation of “idle chat” — which he saw as fear of the silence that would make the emptiness plain — resonates across nearly two centuries. Heidegger named the same phenomenon “passing the word along”: the chatter that is the skin of conversation, necessary for social cohesion but lethal to genuine encounter. The existentialists may have despised this covering-up, but Alessandri is generous enough to acknowledge its function. Revealing ourselves is genuinely exhausting. Inauthenticity offers relief.

Her pedagogical experiment — subjecting philosophy students to Arthur Aron’s “36 Questions” protocol — reveals how quickly genuine encounter becomes possible when the social contract of small talk is suspended. By the third round of increasingly intimate questions, the classroom is whispering. The deepest exchanges happen in near-silence. Her modest proposal: wherever and however we gather, we push ourselves to be one per cent more honest, one per cent more vulnerable, one per cent more present. The silence we are most afraid of is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of the unfiltered self.

XI · THE PHENOMENOLOGY

Noises from the Deep: Patrick Stokes on What We Have Stopped Hearing

Patrick Stokes — Associate Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University and specialist in personal identity and narrative selfhood — opens his essay with a remarkable piece of forgotten science. In the 1890s, the Italian meteorologist Tito Alippi surveyed correspondents across Italy about a strange phenomenon: unexplained booming sounds, like far-off cannon fire or distant thunder, occurring without apparent cause. He collected a rich inventory of local names — brontidi, from the Greek for thunder-like — for what turned out to be a global phenomenon. Similar sounds had been documented on every inhabited continent: the Barisal Guns of Bangladesh, the Seneca Guns of New York, the Moodus Noises of Connecticut, the Uminari of Japan.

The extraordinary thing is that these sounds, which had been documented frequently enough to acquire dozens of regional names, appear to have gone silent — or rather, to have gone unheard — around the middle of the twentieth century. Stokes’s question is sharp: did the brontidi stop, or did we fill the world with so much clamour that these geological murmurs were simply drowned out?

The COVID lockdowns offered an inadvertent experiment. When urban noise dropped precipitously, seismologists found they could detect faint signals previously overwhelmed by the ambient roar of human activity. Californian sparrows, freed from the need to compete with traffic noise, began singing across greater distances, shifting their vocalisations to exploit the sudden acoustic opportunity. The “anthropause” — the involuntary quietening of human civilisation — was simultaneously a revelation and a rebuke. We do not merely make noise. We have built a world that can no longer hear itself.

XII · THE RELATIONAL

A Relational Moment: Salomé Voegelin on Sonic Thinking

The issue’s final major interview is with Salomé Voegelin — Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication and author of Listening to Noise and Silence — who offers the most philosophically radical reframing of noise in the entire issue. For Voegelin, noise is not an object to be defined but a practice to be inhabited: a “relational moment” that comes together with other moments and defines itself, if it defines itself at all, through those meeting points, contingently and relationally.

Voegelin’s critique of Western visual culture cuts deep. We live in a world structured around objects — named, categorised, measured, owned. Vision enables this separation: the glass here, the water there. Sound, especially noise, resists it. When she claps her hands, we do not hear her left hand or her right hand — we hear everything that is co-present in the space: the architecture, the infrastructure, the resonance of the room. The Zoom video-conferencing software that filters out all sounds except her voice — stripping the clap of its relational richness in order to deliver only the “signal” — is, for Voegelin, an emblem of everything that is reductive about the visual-informational paradigm.

Her most provocative claim is ecological: that sound’s “connecting logic and sense of the indivisible” could generate a fundamentally different ethics — one attuned to interdependence, co-determination, and relational responsibility. In a world of “sonico-relational thinking,” the climate crisis becomes not an abstraction but something that can be heard in its plurality and interconnection. Silence and noise are not opposites on a spectrum; they are the same perceptual reality encountered under different conditions. And the world we cannot hear — because we have flooded it with signal overload — is the world whose consequences we cannot adequately imagine.

XIII · SIX THINKERS

The Philosophical Canon on Sound, Noise, and Silence

XIV · SYNTHESIS

Ten Governing Insights for the Age of Noise

1. Noise is not merely acoustic but structural. The most consequential noise of our era is informational and psychological — the endless surfeit of signal that fragments attention, colonises consciousness, and makes sustained thought increasingly difficult.
2. Silence is a condition of perception, not of the world. John Cage and Nigel Warburton concur: what we experience as silence is merely our failure to attend to what is always already present. The world is never actually silent. The question is what we have learned to ignore — and what it costs us.
3. Sound is the brain’s primary threat-assessment channel. Before music, before language, before meaning — sound is survival. The startle response is hardwired; the attentional filter is always active; the ear remains open even during sleep. To understand noise’s power over us is to understand the architecture of the mammalian nervous system.
4. Listening is the most radical act of democratic ethics available. Buber’s I-Thou, Rancière’s dissensus, Rogers’s active listening — each, from a different disciplinary angle, arrives at the same conclusion: genuine hearing of the other is the foundational act of ethical and political life. A society that does not listen is a society that produces only noise.
5. Group sound creates the neurochemistry of belonging. Oxytocin, the social bonding hormone, is released when we hear music together — a biochemical confirmation that shared sonic experience is not peripheral to community but constitutive of it. The privatisation of listening is not neutral. It is the dissolution of the bonds that make collective life possible.
6. The noise of exclusion is the silence of power. Rancière’s insight is indispensable: determining what counts as political speech and what registers as mere noise is one of the primary mechanisms by which existing power structures reproduce themselves. The question of whose voice is heard as signal and whose as noise is the question of democratic justice itself.
7. Music is organised sound — and human beings are a musical species. Levitin’s neuroscience confirms what every culture has always known: we are hardwired for music in ways that predate language. The musical instinct is not a luxury of civilisation; it is one of its foundations. To impoverish musical life — through technological replacement, through the privatisation of listening, through the reduction of music to background noise — is to impoverish what makes us human.
8. Information overload is not a communications problem; it is an attention problem. Shannon solved the engineering challenge of transmitting information reliably through noisy channels. He explicitly set aside the semantic question — what the information means. That is the question we now face. The bottleneck is not bandwidth but discernment.
9. We have built a world that can no longer hear itself. Patrick Stokes’s brontidi are the sharpest metaphor in the issue: geological sounds that once inspired enough awe and fear to accumulate dozens of local names across dozens of cultures, now inaudible not because they have stopped but because the din of human civilisation has overwhelmed them. What other signals — ecological, social, spiritual — are we failing to hear?
10. To listen relationally is to inhabit a fundamentally different ethics. Voegelin’s sonic thinking offers the most radical possibility: a mode of perception and understanding grounded not in the separation and categorisation of objects but in the indivisible connectedness of events. A sonico-relational world is one in which climate, migration, political violence, and economic precarity are heard as what they are — not isolated crises but the simultaneous, interdependent consequences of a single civilisational trajectory.

CLOSING REFLECTION

The Signal Worth Attending To

Arthur Schopenhauer, represented in the issue through his vitriolic essay “On Noise,” compared a great intellect to a large diamond: cut into pieces by constant interruption, it loses its value as a whole. The modern world has become, in this sense, an engine of intellectual fragmentation — not because it lacks extraordinary thinkers but because it has constructed an environment in which sustained, uninterrupted thought is almost structurally impossible. The notification is the whip-crack of the twenty-first century.

And yet Issue 51 refuses the counsel of despair. Across its one hundred and thirty pages, the recurring gesture is not withdrawal but reorientation — a call to develop what Voegelin names “perceptual boundaries,” what Chatfield names “creative subtraction,” what Benjamin names the extension of the ear. The challenge is not to escape noise entirely — Cage showed us that escape is impossible — but to learn to hear within it: to discriminate, to attend, to make meaning from what is genuinely worth attending to.

Pascal’s famous diagnosis — that all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone — is not, in this reading, a counsel of passivity. It is the recognition that the capacity for genuine attention is the precondition of everything else we aspire to: clear thinking, authentic relationship, just politics, spiritual depth, and the making of work that endures. In an age that has monetised distraction and weaponised noise, the deliberate cultivation of listening is, quietly and quite literally, a revolutionary act.