Noise about Music
Earlier this week, the artist Chris Kallmyer gave a talk at the Berkeley offices of Terremoto, a landscape architecture design studio. Kallmyer makes sculptures and installations located on the spectrum between art and design: bells, chimes, and site-specific sound-things intended for everyday use. He thinks about them as an invitation to pause, to attend to the moment. At several points during the talk, he played short excerpts of music, three minutes at most, and everyone in the room went quiet and listened together. The intervals gave the talk a sense of rhythm, but for me the effect was like traveling back in time to the days before pervasive screen-culture.
Early in the talk Kallmyer introduced Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement—furniture music—a series of compositions he made between 1917 and 1923 that were intended to be background music. The painter Fernand Léger, recalled that after the two of them had been subjected to “unbearable vulgar music” in a restaurant, Satie spoke of the need for “music which would be part of the ambience,” music that might “soften the noise of knives and forks without dominating, without imposing itself.” At the premiere of musique d’ameublement, Satie walked through the crowd inviting guests to continue talking. He was trying to invite a new relationship with music, demarcating a space of casual attention. Vinyl records had only just arrived and wouldn’t find wide distribution for a few decades, and radio was just beginning to appear in people’s homes, so music was mostly still experienced live. The narrative that remains is largely thanks to Léger’s memoir and more recently John Cage’s spotlight on Satie.
One of my favorite Japanese musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto faced a similar problem a century later. Sakamoto adored a Japanese restaurant in Murray Hill, NYC called Kajitsu (now closed) that specialized in vegan shojin ryori, zen buddhist temple cuisine. He ate there often, but he found the music unbearable, and one day he decided to tell the chef. In an email, he compared the chef’s cooking to Katsura Rikyu, the thousand-year-old palatial villa in Kyoto, and the restaurant’s background music to Trump Tower. He offered to build a new playlist for the restaurant for free. Working with the producer Ryu Takahashi over multiple drafts, he built a soundscape in tune with the gastronomy — solo piano, film scores, the first movement of John Cage’s “Four Walls,” music that occupied what the critic Ben Ratliff described as “a particular angle with regard to the listener: riveting, moderate and unobtrusive.” The conversation between Satie and Léger began in a restaurant and Sakamoto took it a step further, a hundred years later. The difference was agency, Sakamoto was able to send an email to the chef.
Later in his talk, Kallmyer mentioned how birdsong has changed in relation to the noise of cities like New York and San Francisco — that birds have adapted their songs in relation to the persistent cacophony of humanity. He was alluding to a body of research that originates here in the Bay Area. A 2020 study by Elizabeth Derryberry at the University of Tennessee and Jennifer Phillips at Cal Poly looked at white-crowned sparrows across the San Francisco Bay Area before and during the COVID-19 shutdown. When traffic dropped during the shutdown to levels not seen since 1954, the sparrows responded by singing more softly, but with a wider range of pitches (what the researcher described as “sexier” in terms of vocal performance) and could be heard at over twice the distance. Many people reported hearing birds during the pandemic, but the birds weren’t louder. It was just quiet enough to hear them. The sparrows were communicating more elaborately because they weren’t competing with traffic.
The French philosopher Jacques Attali, writing in Noise: The Political Economy of Music in 1977, argued that music is organized noise. Noise is what gets excluded from the category of music; the act of organizing sound is also an act of control and containment. What the pandemic revealed was how much of what we hear as ambient sound had been accumulating, like a rising tide, incrementally in the background of life in the city. When you visit Mexico City for example, the longer you stay, the more you recognize that the noises are part of a language—the whistle of the sweet potato vendor releasing steam via a metal pipe built into a roving cart. And isn’t the hum of traffic organized noise, rising during rush-hour and falling again after? While ‘organized noise’ is evocative and undeniable, I prefer the phrasing of (another Frenchman) the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when he refers to music as a “certain schemata of being — its ebb and flow, its growth, its upheavals, its turbulence.” I don’t think tracing the edges of noise accounts for the emotional range and embodied response that’s undeniably part of humanity’s relationship to sound and music.
A Harvard Medical School physician, Patrick Whelan, describes the brain’s relationship to music as a vestige of early evolutionary necessity: nocturnal mammals developed hypersensitive hearing as a survival mechanism, an adaptation to a turbulent world, and the modern experience of listening reactivates that ancient alert system. Music lights up nearly the entire brain simultaneously — hippocampus, amygdala, limbic system, motor cortex — which is why it ends up encoded, saved as a memory-worthy experience. And it reaches us whether we’ve opted in or not. “We don’t have ear-lids” as Kallmyer put it during his talk. Or as Whelan suggests, music captures our attention in a way that simply “cannot be negotiated.”
This is what makes thoughtless music in public spaces such a violation for sensitive listeners, and why Sakamoto couldn’t tune out Kajitsu’s Trump Tower soundscape. It’s also what makes music such a potent therapeutic tool. The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin’s research documents that patients with Parkinson’s disease who have lost the neural circuits for walking can recover their gait by listening to music at the tempo of their natural walking speed. Neurons throughout the brain synchronize to the beat within about two and a half seconds, providing an external scaffold for movement. The brain appears to have specific mechanisms to respond to organized noise.
How connected are our ears and eyes? In her introduction to Pauline Oliveros’s book Quantum Listening, Laurie Anderson writes “the ears direct the eyes,” a beautiful counterpoint to the assumption that vision is dominant and a vivid example of an embodied response. When hearing a loud sound, one’s eyes search it out. A 2018 study from Duke University backs this up with science: when your eyes move, your eardrums produce faint, measurable sounds, and the brain reads those sounds to reconcile where you’re looking with what you’re hearing. The ears stay in constant conversation with the eyes, calibrating where-in-space things are happening.
In November 2025, Erykah Badu presented Monday Ceremony in the Reethaus, a building designed by Austrian architect Monika Gogl in Berlin inspired by contemporary and ancient temples, with a hand-thatched roof and an inner chamber, a ritual room, built using the principles of wabi-sabi. The event was limited to twenty-five guests per session. Participants lay on floor mats after donning high-resolution Audio-Technica headphones while Badu guided them through thirty minutes of fragments from her personal archive, unreleased material from an upcoming album, and live improvisation. The following day, she performed to an arena of thousands. Badu’s event evokes the Japanese word keichō (傾聴). While normally translated as “deep listening,” 傾 means to lean or incline, and 聴 means to listen.
I didn’t have the pleasure of attending the Monday Ceremony but it’s interesting to me as a new model for gathering, a call to settle into attunement. It’s also a non-negotiable (borrowing from Whelan) experience, conducted in an intimate setting where the collective attention approaches ceremonial-grade. At the close of each session, Badu asks a question: how can we live the rest of our lives truly present and fully focused?
This question matches the aesthetics of Kallmyer’s work and the spirit of his talk. His informal conversational style and pauses for listening also evoked a casual ceremony, in the backroom of an airy office in Berkeley, populated with plants and Kallmyer’s sculptures which included custom speakers. He mentioned that the talk was intended to be in-conversation with the landscape design of Terremoto, so implicitly thinking about sound and music in relation to space and landscape. In an email exchange days later, Kallmyer noted he’s still searching for a key text, “one that [helps an artist] build an intimate relationship with place and creates a practitioner’s guide to reading and intervening into a site via sound.” Between the lines it was inferred that neither he nor Terremoto had much affection for the term ‘soundscape,’ associated with Michael Southworth in a 1967 paper “The Sonic Environment of Cities.” Kallmyer thinks the term is too inexact, “when we name the sound of a place, we stop examining its texture and meaning so closely.” He suggests there’s a tendency to design and diagnose a place visually “without digging into the sonic identity or relationship to a site.”
Another word that sprang to mind during Kallmyer’s talk was soundtrack, a term originally used to described the narrow strip along the edge of film where audio was recorded (ending the era of silent film). I wonder if we might think of Satie and Sakamoto, whose music is often heard in movies, as “soundtracks for seeing or talking or eating” and the music in Kallmyer’s presentation as “soundtracks for everyday life”? Implied here is imagining one’s life as a movie.
Near the beginning of his talk Kallmyer played Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, the 1978 album that aimed to formalize what Satie had proposed. Eno conceived the album after hours stranded at the Cologne Bonn Airport, annoyed by the atmosphere, an echo of Satie’s encounter with the vulgar. Eno’s stated aim was for music that’s “as ignorable as it is interesting,” able to accommodate any level of attention without demanding focus. The album was played in a handful of airport terminals over the years. More recently, attention to music and sound in airports has begun to shift. Here in the Bay Area, the San Francisco International Airport is the US pioneer of what designers call the “Quiet Airport,” a policy of eliminating terminal-wide PA announcements. Boarding calls happen only at your specific gate; flight updates appear on screens and phones. The overhead voice that interrupts, that triggers the ancient alertness Whelan describes, is subdued.
What Satie conceptualized in a restaurant in 1923, Eno proposed for the airport in 1978, and Sakamoto enacted in a restaurant in 2014. Almost a hundred years later, we’re just starting to catch up to what artists have long known: music has a spatial presence, an embodied effect, and listening collectively (even bad music in a restaurant or airport) invites heightened attention. Framed as an experience or just attention to listening, sound is always present, whether birdsong over traffic, ambient furniture, gastronomic accompaniment or ceremony. Lean back and listen.
Thanks for reading.
If you’d like to read my some of my previously published art writing, see First Blush, Last Laugh. Thanks to DF, CT, and other friends who helped.