Melle Kromhout

Netherlands (residence) °1984
en

Melle Jan Kromhout is PhD Fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. His research project entitled “Noise Identities” focuses on the revaluation of noise in recorded sound and music. The project aims to develop noise identities as a concept for assessing the relation between recording media and musical significance. He presented his work at conferences around the globe and published several articles including “‘Over the Ruined Factory There's a Funny Noise': Throbbing Gristle and the mediatized roots of noise in/as music” (2011), “As Distant and Close as Can Be. Lo-fi Recording: Site-specificity and (In)authenticity” (2012), and “'Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains’: Listening to the ‘Other Music’ in Friedrich Kittler” (2015).

research

research expositions

  • An Exceptional Purity of Sound: Noise reduction technology and the inevitable noise of sound recording (2014) author(s): Melle Kromhout published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    The phenomenon of noise has resisted many attempts at framing it within a singular conceptual framework. Critically questioning the tendency to do so, this article asserts the complexities of different noise-phenomena by analysing a specific technology: technological noise reduction systems. Whereas Sterne describes how engineers have sought to eradicate noise in order to reach what Dolby Laboratories called an ‘exceptional purity of sound,’ Serres and Kittler repeatedly stress that the presence of noise is not only inevitable, but even fundamental to sound and sound recording. Working at the crossroads of noise as a concept in information theory and noise as a physical and sonic phenomenon, a close reading of technological noise reduction shows how it not only produces its own notion of noise in the very process of reducing it, but even generates noise itself. Ultimately, this analysis offers valuable insights into the complexity of noise and the multiple levels on which it operates.
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