The Future of Music Is Noise

Source: The Future of Music Is Noise, Venus Theory, 26:54, uploaded 2025-04-14, Watch Later position 497.

Venus Theory opens with the memory of hearing a piece that was difficult to recognise as music. The question follows quickly: where did the melody go? Film scores, game music, underground genres and pop have all made more room for texture, atmosphere and unusual sound. The video treats this as a change in what melody does rather than its disappearance. Melody remains available, while timbre begins to carry more of the emotional and structural work.

From overt melody to sound character

The familiar examples are scores such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Harry Potter, whose themes announce themselves through melody and harmony. Venus Theory hears a different emphasis in films such as Waltz with Bashir, The Social Network and The Witch. Their music often settles into an amorphous texture that creates pacing and atmosphere without presenting a tune as the main event.

Popular music shows a similar movement. The video places Mariah Carey and the Red Hot Chili Peppers beside SOPHIE and Billie Eilish, then points to electronic genres that treat sound design as a central part of production. The contrast is a listening prompt rather than a measured comparison, yet it names the change clearly: the sound of a note becomes as significant as its pitch and place in a progression.

Venus Theory explains the shift through the limited supply of familiar notes and chord progressions. Composers can keep rearranging them, although the range of combinations that feels legible eventually narrows. Timbre opens another field. The tone of a sound can change through its harmonics, texture, attack, distortion and movement even when its pitch remains stable. The video calls this the part of music that feels effectively infinite.

The same taste for sound character appears in visual work. Euphoria uses analogue film to add grain and instability. Glitch overlays and disposable-camera effects have become common in social media and video editing. These artefacts imitate the flaws that digital production removes, which gives them a claim to authenticity inside a highly polished medium. Venus Theory connects the pattern to a wider artistic interest in imperfection and recalls Brian Eno’s observation that once something can be avoided, artists will start to emulate it.

Film music and the narrative work of sound

The video traces part of this change through cinema. Silent films depended on music to carry emotion and theme because the medium had no dialogue or recorded sound. As film acquired speech and sound effects, music moved into a more supportive position. Contemporary scoring brings music and sound design back together as narrative material, with the boundary between a musical gesture and an effect often left open.

The examples are No Country for Old Men and the first Paranormal Activity. The former uses sparse soundscapes whose restraint becomes part of the film’s tension. The latter can build suspense from a sustained low sound rather than from a recognisable horror melody. In both cases sound shapes the audience’s emotional response and carries narrative information. A drone can suggest danger, weight or an unseen presence because the sound itself has become meaningful.

This is why Venus Theory calls sound a language. The claim stays intuitive rather than scientific. The video mentions studies that report a decline in melodic content and complexity in contemporary music, yet it gives neither authors nor citations. Its stronger evidence comes from the listening examples and from the creator’s own practice as a composer and sound designer.

Distortion, timbre and the widened musical palette

The history then moves to the distortion of electric guitars in the 1950s and 1960s. Rocket 88 and Bob Dylan’s move towards electric performance appear as examples of sounds that once violated an instrument’s expected character. The video presents this change as artistic boredom with the clean timbre that the guitar was supposed to provide.

Timbre becomes clear through a demonstration. A sine wave, piano, synthesizer and cello play the same note. Their pitch, loudness and approximate duration stay constant, while their identities change. The listener supplies different emotional meanings to each sound because timbre tells us what kind of event we are hearing and how it might behave.

Noise extends this question. Earlier experimental composers such as John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen treated the limits of musical sound as material for composition. Cage’s Water Walk makes the point through action and sound rather than through a conventional melody. The video acknowledges the resistance this work still provokes, then gives the objection its strongest form: many listeners simply value melody and harmony because those elements help the brain attach emotion and significance to music.

Noise and timbre can carry that attachment as well. A listener may hear harmonic ambiguity as empty repetition, whilst another hears a carefully shaped development of sound. Music remains subjective at this level, and noise functions as a tool with its own emotional range. The argument asks for a wider account of musical meaning, with melody as one available means of organisation.

From Futurist noise to electronic practice

Venus Theory places this development well before current electronic music. Tchaikovsky and Respighi appear among composers who expanded the sounds accepted within composition. Luigi Russolo made the argument explicit in his 1913 essay The Art of Noises. The video presents Russolo’s explanation in two parts: a changing, increasingly chaotic modern world creates new sounds, and traditional musical material may have become saturated through repeated use.

The twentieth century continues the expansion. Arnold Schoenberg pushed composition away from familiar melodic conventions. Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens challenged the category of music through industrial sound. Tape recording then made it possible to transform ordinary sounds after capture. The video names musique concrète, serialism, microtonal music, graphic composition and minimalism, alongside Steve Reich, Robert Fripp and La Monte Young.

Electronic music, early sampling and the Fluxus movement carry the same pressure into new media. Punk produces related branches in no wave and New York’s underground noise scene, with Merzbow representing a deliberately abrasive and atonal extreme. Other composers bring unusual sound into more recognisable forms. The video points to Philip Glass and to Tristan Murail’s spectral music as cases where extended sound remains connected to larger musical structures.

The sequence matters because noise does not enter music in one clean break. It moves through extended technique, recording, composition, performance and genre. Each step widens the range of material that a composer can treat as intentional.

Tools, platforms and the sound of the present

Modern sample libraries, synthesisers and plug-ins have made complex timbres available to producers working at home. Sampling and deeper sound manipulation require less specialised access than they once did. Field recordings bring organic and accidental sources into the same workspace, where a simple sound can become an unfamiliar instrument.

Social platforms have helped circulate these sounds. Venus Theory refers to music that critics call TikTok pop or streambait, where a striking sonic element can travel quickly through short-form media. The video leaves the judgement open. A strange sound may express a real compositional idea, or it may exist as a shallow gesture designed to trigger recognition inside an algorithm. The source does not offer a way to measure the difference.

The most effective music often joins timbre to older musical elements. Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the original Planet of the Apes uses extended instrumental techniques to turn the orchestra into something more abstract while keeping a firm musical shape. The video also describes a growing use of samplers and digital software in the 1990s, when industrial music and related styles could combine melody with harsher electronic material.

Atmosphere as musical form

Horror has long used atmosphere as a source of tension. Ambient, techno and industrial music carry the approach into popular listening, sometimes allowing grinding or churning sound to replace melodic development. Pop production has absorbed it too. In Halsey’s song “Drive”, a car-door warning beep leads the track and establishes its sonic world. Venus Theory treats the production of the album Badlands as a wider example of pop giving unusual sounds a leading role.

The change also appears in what the video calls tape-loop music. A simple chord progression may continue for the length of a song while timbre supplies the movement. Film and game scores often place repeating loops or pad-like textures beside traditional instruments to create a cinematic atmosphere. Percussion can become a question of character rather than a fixed rhythmic obligation: a producer may foreground an odd drum sound, or remove percussion altogether.

Venus Theory calls a recent family of soundscapes “Instagram ambient” or “liminal ambient”. These works blur music, sound design and ambient noise. Sound effects and environmental textures take the melodic role, while instruments that usually lead become supporting layers. Rippling string textures in recent streaming-era film scores illustrate the same use of timbre as an emotional device.

The video makes the point through direct comparisons. An 808 and a distorted 808 carry different emotional pressure. A plain instrumental performance can become more evocative after processing. A small plucked sound can acquire a new identity through a guitar pedal. The work lies in choosing what the processing makes possible and what it leaves intact.

Noise as intentional performance

Creating sound becomes a form of performance art when the producer combines disparate elements into a sonic world. An artefact or mistake can enter the work once someone gives it a deliberate place. That process looks easy from a distance because software can produce an atmospheric texture with a few gestures. The video insists that the result depends on taste, selection and control. A hazy soundscape can remain empty when its parts have no relation, while a small number of unusual sounds can hold attention when their timing and character have been judged carefully.

Other art forms have moved towards the same abstract and characterful space. Experimental film, visual art and online media have made noise, dissonance and imperfection easier to encounter. Material that once belonged to the avant-garde now circulates through mainstream formats. Recent genres such as hyperpop, colour bass, experimental rap, electronic music and post-rock place strong emphasis on the tonal character of sound, and accessible tools give newer producers more room for trial and accident.

The conclusion turns this history into a speculation about order and chaos. Philosophers have examined that relation throughout human history, and Venus Theory borrows the second law of thermodynamics as an image for art becoming more complex. This is a metaphor rather than a physical explanation of musical development. The proposed future keeps melody and harmony in play while asking producers to shape increasingly unfamiliar sound into something meaningful.

Limits and source details

The video has no chapter list in its metadata. Its English captions are automatic and misrecognise several names and terms, so this note standardises obvious spellings such as Respighi, Avraamov, Reich, Fripp, La Monte Young, Merzbow, SOPHIE and Halsey where the surrounding examples make the intended reference clear. The historical sequence remains Venus Theory’s account rather than an independently checked music-history survey.

The video refers to unnamed studies about melodic decline and complexity, and it makes broad claims about current genres, film scoring and platform circulation without supplying a method or dataset. Those claims work here as the speaker’s interpretation of a listening trend. The examples support the argument’s direction, while they cannot establish how representative the trend is.

Further reading / references

• Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, the 1913 essay linked in the video’s description.