The University of Salford's conference, ‘Bigger than Words, Wider than Pictures: Noise, Affect, Politics’, was a productive one indeed. Two broad-ranging volumes have emerged from it, each with an ambitious remit and rich assortment of perspectives.

The first, Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, features music in something of a supporting – although regularly recurring – role as part of a larger discussion that attempts to reconsider the normative perception of noise as an innately undesirable category of sound and reframe it as a part of a wider system of communication. It is beneficial to this end that contributors include practising musicians, a sound engineer and an improvisatory collective, as well as scholars of philosophy, musicology, media studies and sociology.

The opening section on the ‘The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Noise’ opens with a discussion of noise in relation to time – through the prism of Deleuze, Nietzche and Guattari – before moving on to the topic of amusia – the pathological experience of music as noise – that builds from Oliver Sacks’ neurological work to derive a psychoanalytic ‘theory of the audio unconscious’ wherein noise is the ‘othering’ of music.

The catholic parameters of the collection thus set, the other essays in this section encompass disciplines from communications theory to cybernetics in an attempt to provide an ontological foundation for an understanding of noise as one of a variety of signals whose meaning depends on the physical, technological and cultural processes via which they are received. The examples range far and wide, as demonstrated by Dean Lockwood's description of H.P. Lovecroft's use of sonic affect to describe unease at the invasive property of noise from media like radio, and José Cláudio Siqueira Castanheira's account of the information-carrying properties of digital and analogue sound.

‘Audiovisual Noise Practices’ form the basis of the second section, which adopts different theoretical approaches to noise in the visual arts, from theatre and cinema through to the use of sound in practice-based communication design research outcomes, like a CD of audio recordings housed in an illustrated book to explore the ‘grey area located somewhere between noise and silence’ (p. 146), as experienced in libraries. Entertainment, the avant-garde, the underground and their physical locations serve as the launch-pad for an exploration of the different deployments of noise in modern media forms.

The third section, on ‘Noise, Ethics and Politics’, shifts gear to a consideration of the various ways of making and experiencing noise as a performance in modern social life, along with its political contexts. Here the role of both noise and silence as ‘gestures’ is explored in relation to capitalism's commodifying tendencies, along with the disjunction between noise perceived as a ‘threat’ or as a positive experience depending on its frame, as in Marie Thompson's comparison of a car alarm and a performance by Japanese noise-rock band Melt-Banana (p. 207).

Given the volume's titular emphasis on ‘politics’, head-on examination of direct policy interventions is rather thin on the ground, albeit ably represented in Syeed Hydaralli's explanation of the World Health Organisation's definition of noise, and how public policy played out in the case of Toronto nightclub The Docks versus the local residents' association (pp. 228–31). However, the fact that the political is woven throughout in more discursive fashion goes some way towards mitigating this.

Due to its wide span of source examples and theoretical approaches, Reverberations may frustrate and fascinate in equal measure. But a volume that, at times, risks becoming a rather disparate selection of individual discussions actually builds into a thoroughgoing conceptualisation of noise, as both a sonic and social phenomenon and as a component of a numerous expressive practices. Of perhaps secondary interest to scholars of popular music, it nevertheless provides valuable insights into the contexts of sonic production that may otherwise be taken for granted and is a useful corrective to temptations to reject noise as an inherently problematic component of our cultural soundscape.

Its companion work is Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. As the title suggests, music is much closer to the heart of the matter here. Like Reverberations, interdisciplinarity is a central feature of the book, but musical examples, musicology, critical musicology and missives from the field of popular music studies are more prevalent. Indeed, the editors' mission statement includes a call to take greater account of noise in these very fields. They set out the gap they wish to fill: ‘[I]nvestigations of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic aspects still typically feature above more cursory explorations of some elements. So forms of music which privilege noise and rely on high levels of sound manipulation continue to remain, to a significant extent, an unmapped territory in terms of contemporary musics’ (p. 6).

As with Reverberations, this book's attempt to address the imbalance is eclectic in terms of both disciplinary vector and subject matter, and also folds essays by practitioners into the academic mix. Here the structure employs a relatively straightforward division between ‘Noise, Rock and Psychedelia’, ‘Punk Noise: Prehistories and Continuums’, ‘Noise, Composition and Improvisation’ with a final section that, notwithstanding detailed case studies of acts like Filthy Turd, caps the book with a look at ways of ‘Approaching Noise Musics’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the shadows of Adorno and Attali loom relatively large, although generally, given the breadth of referents on display, more as place markers than anchors. There are exceptions, however, notably Erich Hertz's explicit contextualisation of Philip Jeck's turntablism against Adorno's prescription that ‘art must carry the fundamental brokenness of Modernity’ (p. 247). Ultimately, in fact, the scope of the book and its readings of artists from MC5 and Lou Reed, through Ride and Pussy Riot to Iannis Xenakis, leave one with a sense of noise not so much as Attali's ‘image of subversion … repressed, monitored’ (Attali Reference Attali1985, p. 123) as an irrepressible component of modern creativity.

But, as with Reverberations, it is somewhat difficult to generalise about the individual pieces in this book. By its very nature, the animating thread that ties the chapters together resists homogenising tendencies, and so the reader must navigate a potentially bewildering portfolio of readings. Fortunately, the organising principle of grouping essays – roughly – by subject matter rather than theoretical emphasis, while progressing from broader examinations to more tightly defined case studies, facilitates the journey. The cumulative effect is ultimately enlightening and not, ironically given the topic, cacophonous.

As with any anthology, no single reader will be served by every contribution, but there will be something for everyone across its 19 chapters and the book's overall success lies in its ability to straddle not just the divergent ways in which noise emerges in musical practice but the different motivations for this, and different ways of describing it. Eric Lyon's detailed examples of his own deliberate use of random tempo selections and noise-controlled rhythmic elements to create ‘impossible’ passages in his scores (p. 224), for instance, is a clear contrast to Benjamin Halligan's historicisation of the evolving affective strategies of guitar noise in psychedelia (pp. 37–63). The attention to inclusivity even spreads to pictorial representations beyond standard illustrative matter in photographer Julie R. Kane's section comprising photographs of noise gigs in England between 2009 and 2012.

Yet for all that this book is an attempt to ‘posit noise as an essential category in and for the writing about music’ (p. 9), there is also the occasional welcome refusal to festishise its subject as a standalone musical or even auditory property. Rafael Sarpa, for example, points out that the material effect, as well as affect, of noise in industrial music, is that it is ‘only possible to acknowledge levels of sonic exploration within this universe once one considers the point where bodies get extremely affected’ (p. 285). George McKay goes even further in a chapter whose focus is the damage caused by excessive volume and ‘the causative place of popular music in hearing impairment – the terrible irony of music-induced hearing loss for rock musicians and pop fans’ (p. 76).

Ultimately, while popular music is front and centre in neither of these volumes, Resonances, in particular, places it neatly into a framework of contemporary musical practice from the 1960s onwards, with both books drawing out the relationship between music, visual media and aesthetic mores. Since the study of popular music, in any case, draws on disciplines from sociology, musicology, history and across the humanities and social sciences, these anthologies make for a useful point of access to its theoretical neighbours.

Reverberations stands as a thoroughgoing map of the overarching philosophical terrain while Resonances offers a conceptually diverse yet simultaneously minutely detailed investigation of noise that draws a line between popular music, cultural and sound studies and will be of value to scholars across each of them. Taken individually, each of these constitutes a meaningful contribution to the study of musical aesthetics. Together they are a significant achievement, a comprehensive collection of thinking to date about where noise fits into our cultural lives, pointing forward towards a fertile development of the field.