Dr. Dobb's Journal July, 2005
In April, I wrote about noise and the pursuit of silence, especially information noise and the need to filter the flow of information that threatens to numb our senses and, if a report in The Guardian is to be believed, lower our IQs. This month I write in defense of noise, or at least in support of a more tolerant attitude toward it.
What follows here does not hold together as an essay. It's not meant to. In the spirit of form following function, I have attempted to embed meaning in noise, imitating cocktail-party chatter. The linear format of this column does not permit presenting the topic this way, but you're creative. To see what I had in mind, try imagining each of the following paragraphs as a speech by a different speaker, all talking at once. Once you've imagined that, try focusing on each voice in turn, filtering out the others. But if that's too much work, you can just read it as a disjointed essay. I won't mind.
I want an interpreter. If this interpreter looks like Nicole Kidman, that's cool, but I don't even insist that the interpreter be human. I just want it to read my e-mail and, like that recurring feature in Mad magazine, tell me "What they REALLY mean is..."
From a 1975 Powerpoint presentation:
In response to a bomb threat, the United Nations headquarters has been evacuated. This building, normally filled with talk in many languages, is strangely silent. But not entirely silent. There is still enough talk to permit that classic suspense movie trope, the overheard conversation. Nicole Kidman...
The Voice Browser Working Group was chartered by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) within the User Interface Activity in May 1999 to prepare and review markup languages that enable voice browsers. Members meet weekly via telephone and quarterly in face-to-face meetings...
Speech is different from writing, this artificial mode of communication that we invented and pretend is a natural human activity, but that is oppressively linear and requires translation into the natural modality on which it is based—speech. Speech is multidimensional: The mind can make use of various dimensions of speech/sound at different levels of organization, including spatial location (using interaural time differences and interaural intensity differences) and speaker voice or melodic line (discriminating meaningful themes out of a multidimensional manifold of sound)...
In South Carolina today, a voter was arrested for refusing to go to the fenced Free Speech Zone set up for the occasion of the President's visit...
If you've never seen it, you must get your hands on the Coppola classic "The Conversation." It features a fine performance by Gene Hackman and deals with the uses of technology, eavesdropping and the loss of privacy, the technical and perceptual challenge of picking out a conversation from background noise, and the various levels of human connection and isolation. It also manages to use Harrison Ford as beige wallpaper...
How are we able to pick out the thread of a melodic line in a symphony? How do we follow a conversation in a noisy room?
People speak faster than they can type, but listen more slowly than they can read...
E-mail is a linear list or hierarchy of nearly opaque envelopes containing further linear lists of character symbols to be decoded into mental speech. When the filters fail and the subject lines mislead, we have to commit to open the envelope and start reading and interpreting the message before we know if it is deserving of our attention...
The cocktail-party phenomenon is really two phenomena: (1) In the raucous confusion of party noise, we are somehow able to hear the conversation we choose to attend to and filter out the rest; and (2) there appears to be some subattentive monitoring of unattended channels so that significant content (like your name) in an unattended channel can shift attention to it...
What if the defining metaphor for e-mail were not the United States Postal Service but a cocktail party?