"I usually create sounds and have different generators running over it. You know you can open a word-file as a picture or the other way round. I do the same with sounds"
About this Quote
Alva Noto is describing a studio practice that treats data like clay: not just recording sound, but stress-testing it, translating it, misreading it on purpose. The throwaway “You know” is doing work here. It frames something genuinely alien to most listeners as an everyday computer trick, collapsing the distance between office software and experimental composition. That’s the subtext: the modern creative act isn’t conjuring a melody from thin air, it’s navigating systems, formats, and glitches that already surround us.
The word-file-as-picture example isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a model for how his aesthetic operates. Open a text document as an image and you get scrambled pixels, a visual artifact of the file’s hidden structure. Noto’s point is that sound has an equally legible skeleton: code, sampling rates, errors, compression, electrical noise. By running “different generators” over a base signal, he’s staging collisions between orderly process and unpredictable output. The artist’s hand is present, but it’s more like a curator of conditions than a romantic auteur.
Context matters: Noto comes out of a post-digital moment in electronic music where the click, the stutter, and the glitch stopped being accidents and became signatures. His work with raster-noton and collaborations like the one with Ryuichi Sakamoto made that sensibility feel almost architectural: minimalist surfaces built from computational behavior. The intent isn’t to make sound “warmer” or more expressive in the traditional sense; it’s to make the machine’s internal logic audible, then turn that revelation into style.
The word-file-as-picture example isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a model for how his aesthetic operates. Open a text document as an image and you get scrambled pixels, a visual artifact of the file’s hidden structure. Noto’s point is that sound has an equally legible skeleton: code, sampling rates, errors, compression, electrical noise. By running “different generators” over a base signal, he’s staging collisions between orderly process and unpredictable output. The artist’s hand is present, but it’s more like a curator of conditions than a romantic auteur.
Context matters: Noto comes out of a post-digital moment in electronic music where the click, the stutter, and the glitch stopped being accidents and became signatures. His work with raster-noton and collaborations like the one with Ryuichi Sakamoto made that sensibility feel almost architectural: minimalist surfaces built from computational behavior. The intent isn’t to make sound “warmer” or more expressive in the traditional sense; it’s to make the machine’s internal logic audible, then turn that revelation into style.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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