'Noise': Its Concept-Formation and its Conceptual ‘Transduction’

Technology and the arts share with the natural and human sciences a growing interest in ‘noise.’ The term ‘noise’ thereby comes to cover a wide spectrum of phenomena and concepts. It most commonly refers to acoustic and visual phenomena, but equally well refers to purely mathematical problems relating to statistics. As a result the term ‘noise’ refers sometimes to lived experience and sometimes to the statistical nature of empirical data in the scientific sense. Yet the dividing line between lived experience and empirical data, between aesthetics and science, is not the only fault line dividing the many conceptualizations of ‘noise’ across technology and the arts, the natural and the human sciences.

 The aim is to understand some of the conditions of this concept-sharing. With this aim in mind we will treat the conceptual transfer of the term ‘noise’ between the different domains as a process.

 The effects of this process, however, go beyond analogy – if analogy is based on mere similarity between phenomena of disturbance. More is at stake, also, than the ‘translation’ of the concept of ‘noise’ from one theoretical or practical domain into another – if by translation we understand the ideally lossless transposition of a concept from one specialist language into another.

 We will seek to develop this idea of the concept-sharing of ‘noise’ further, into an alternative of both false analogy and the illusion of transparent concept-translation between diverse domains. We propose to do so with reference to the notion of ‘transduction’. The term ‘transduction’ has been known in mechanics and the natural sciences to convey the idea of the conversion of one type of energy into another, or the conversion of one kind of signal into another. The term ‘transduction’ will be used with specific reference to the philosophical sense given to it by Gilbert Simondon, transduction as the mediation between potential energy and actual energy. This process of mediation, Simondon argues, also constitutes an interval between the potential and the actual and this interval acts as a ‘margin of indeterminacy’. ‘Information’, according to Simondon, is what arises from this margin of indeterminacy. (Simondon 2012, 197) We will use Gilbert Simondon’s specifically philosophical understanding of ‘transduction’, in order to understand how the concept-formation of ‘noise’ in one domain ‘informs’ the concept-formation of ‘noise’ in another.