The Doof Doof Music:

Noise, Amplified Music, and the Automobile

By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.

Jacques Attali (Noise: The Political Economy of Music 1985)

Without the loudspeaker, we would never have conquered Germany.

Adolph Hitler (Manual of German Radio 1938)

You hear it first, a long way off, much as Chesterton describes the distant sound of an army on the march:

Dim drums throbbing in the hills, half heard

Then, as the car approaches, the slow thudding changes to a punctuated boom-boom-boom. When it is upon you, a massive wave of sound physically assaults your whole body, not just the ears. The sequence goes something like this:

thud – thud – boom – boom – doof – doof – DOOF – DOOF – doof – doof – boom – boom –thud – thud.

Perhaps the Doppler effect is at work here. Mercifully, the assault on the senses is usually brief because the car is almost always travelling at high speed. Of course, the doof-doof music is not confined to automobiles. Record shops thump it out. So do certain other types of retail outlets specifically aimed at selling goods to teenagers. Then there is the home stereo system with huge, coffin-like speakers pouring out highly amplified noise like black, atomic rain. And it falls equally upon the just and the unjust.

The most remarkable aspect of the doof-doof music (the oo of doof as in ‘hoof’: the description is not mine, but I do not know who first coined it) is the fact that, to the innocent victim on the footpath, it all sounds the same. Inside the car, the hundred megaton speakers may be transmitting the unique sound of some howling pop star with an ululating mouth harp and a back-up band, heavy on drums. To us though, it’s just doof - doof - doof. All bands sound the same. There is one minor mercy. We are at least spared the sight of these noise producers cavorting about the stage in a sort of corybantic frenzy – ‘like a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides’, as Carlyle might have said. And there is another thing about these noisome bands. They take special pride in choosing for their group some particularly hideous name – ‘The Mangy Dogs’, ‘The Filthy Swine’, ‘The Loose Sphincter’, and so on. Readers will note that I have here chosen fictitious names. The real ones are far worse but I dare not mention them lest their owners or fans of the owners come around one night and burn my house down or poison my dog.

The world seems to be filling up with noise. Of course this may simply be a function of my entry into the ‘seniors’ category – laudator temporis acti, but I don’t think so. And here’s an interesting thought: many people are now concerned about the extinction of certain plants and animals but no-one seems to give a hoot about the extinction, by drowning out, of certain sounds. My father used to tell of the lovely sound made by a horse-drawn mouldboard plough as it turned the furrow (not to mention the delicious smell). That noise is now extinct. The church bell is another victim. Its audiological niche is being taken over in a Darwinian struggle by the electronic gismo. Indeed, those church bells that still remain in most western cities must themselves be regarded as an endangered species because their dominance of the aural landscape has long been put down by the vast engine noise of the modern city, the blaring sirens, the muzak oozing from shops, the barbed-wire music from ghetto-blasters, and the attenuation of high-borne sound as it is absorbed in the bricks and mortar of skyscrapers. It used to be that church bells fulfilled the same function in an auditory sense as did church spires in a visual one.

The internal combustion engine must surely rank as the main producer of noise in the modern world. And its influence is by no means confined to cities and towns. I doubt there is anywhere left in the world today that is not reached by the sound of aircraft engines thundering overhead. Some years ago I had occasion to be in the middle of the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory. Lying awake in the small hours of the morning, I had supposed that here, at last, I could experience absolute silence. It was not to be. Very soon an aeroplane thundered overhead and, although the noise quickly receded, I had the experience of a sort of ‘aftershock’, imagining that those sound waves, however attenuated they might become, would continue forever thereafter.

And so, it is true to say that the doof-doof music is but a tiny part of a much larger problem. Nonetheless, I believe it to be far more irritating than most other noises because it is a deliberate assault on silence and upon other people’s privacy. Jet engines are louder. So are some large trucks, jackhammers, ambulance sirens, and so on. But we are prepared to tolerate these noises as being a necessary evil. Even other types of unpleasant ‘music’ are tolerable because we can usually escape from them or ‘turn-off’, as it were. I am thinking here particularly of that canned music - muzak - which one hears on airliners or in big department stores. It is a sort of denatured, homogenised product - as if all the musical notes had been thrown into some vast blender or pulveriser and had bled into each other. Another species is the telephone jingle, typically some bastardised classical piece, played after that familiar message: ‘All our lines are busy at the moment. Please hold, as we value your call ...’. I will not even attempt to describe mobile phone ringer tunes. I place certain types of modern ‘serious’ music in the same general category of unpleasant but avoidable noise. For instance, I agree entirely with Bernard Levin’s description of Webern’s music as ‘two plinks, a plonk, and a grrr!’ It sometimes seems that a lot of modern music is deliberately designed to be unpleasant to the ears. The theory is that we live in a very unpleasant world and that art should reflect this. Oh yeah! We might ask if the times during which Beethoven, Bach of Mozart wrote their music were less plagued by wars and other sources of human misery than our own era.

But let us return to the doof-doof music. In attempting to explain it, where does one start? Perhaps as good a place as any is with the writings of Theodor Adorno (1903 -1969), a philosopher and social theorist who was a leading member of the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’. Adorno is generally considered a Marxist, but his philosophy deviates markedly from the classical Marxist line. Whereas hard-line Marxists see all social phenomena as secondary to a sort of strict economic determinism - ‘the means of production’ - the Frankfurt School believed social phenomena, such as culture, mass entertainment, and education, played a direct role in stifling true individualism and maintaining oppression. Capitalist oppression, of course! I’m not quite sure how they would have viewed agitprop, the Soviet Writers Union. Not the same as Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov anyhow.

Adorno wrote extensively on cultural matters and, although he died long before the doof-doof music appeared, what he had to say about popular music in general is highly relevant to the situation today. In the first place, he recognised that the whole structure of the popular music of his day was standardised. Each hit tune beats out a standard scheme:

This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that, regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.

Moreover, this structural standardisation of the music produces a correspondingly standardised reaction in the listener and this ‘mechanical’ response is wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. For Adorno, such standardisation has nothing to do with the simplicity of the musical scheme. Popular music can be ‘complex’, but such complexity merely acts as a disguise or embellishment behind which the standard scheme can always be perceived. In fact, the listener, when faced with the complicated, ‘actually hears only the simple.’ He or she represents and perceives the complicated only as a parodistic distortion of the simple.

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of Adorno’s ideas concerning popular music was his theory about the frame of mind of the listener. He supposes that such a person is attracted to the music because it makes no demands upon their attention while at the same time providing a distraction from the demands of reality. This dual need (distraction and inattention) comes about because of what Adorno calls ‘the present mode of production’ - the wholly rationalised and mechanised process of labour. The repetitious nature of the work combined with fears concerning unemployment, loss of income, leads to a situation where ‘leisure time’ needs to be free of any sort of concentration:

A fully concentrated and conscious experience of art is possible only to those whose lives do not put such a strain on them that in their spare time they want relief from both boredom and effort simultaneously. The whole sphere of cheap commercial entertainment reflects this dual desire.

Adorno further develops this whole idea by supposing that this use of music as a means of ‘adjusting’ to a mechanised and impersonal workplace takes two different psychological forms, the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type.

In relation to the doof-doof music, it is the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type that is of particular relevance. In Adorno’s day (1940s) this type was represented by the young of ‘the radio generation’. Today, their equivalent would be the young of the ‘boom box’ generation. For Adorno, such young people were particularly susceptible to ‘a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism’. He expands upon this as follows:

To be musical means to them to be capable of following given rhythmical patterns without being disturbed by ‘individualizing’ aberrations, and to fit even the syncopations into the basic time units. This is the way in which their response to music immediately expresses their desire to obey. ….. The cult of the machine, which is represented by unabating jazz beats involves a self-renunciation that cannot but take root in the form of a fluctuating uneasiness somewhere in the personality of the obedient. For the machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions – where men are appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one’s own human feelings and at the same time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes obscured thereby.

The term ‘fetishism of the machine’ is particularly relevant when we pause to consider some of the recent ‘types’ of popular music - metal, heavy metal, thrash metal, death metal, and so on. These category names are highly suggestive of machine power. Album names are sometimes revealing too. As an example, one well known band has an equally well known album titled ‘Machine Head’.

Adorno’s mention of the machine as an ‘end’ is also significant. The whole concept of means and ends in modern society has been taken up by another commentator, Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, Duckworth 1981). MacIntyre’s thesis revolves around what he sees as the destruction of the traditional Aristotelian concept of the moral order. In this tradition, MacIntyre supposes, ‘there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature’. In other words, the traditional concept is a teleological one and the means-ends relationships involved in human work require a practice where the goods are internal to themselves - ‘man-as-he could-be’. Modern work is, of course, generally not of this kind. MacIntyre puts it thus:

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labour force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness on the other. … The means-end relationships … are necessarily external to the goods which those who work seek…

To my mind though, Adorno’s theories regarding music fail to adequately define certain aspects of the doof doof music and its listeners. An important missing element, for instance, is the question of sound intensity. This is understandable since the means of popular musical reproduction in Adorno’s time was fairly limited and certainly did not include the massive speaker systems that are now ubiquitous in both public and private places. We must add to this the huge industry in personal devices for reproduction of sound - the portable CD player and the newer mass storage devices that enable huge amounts of noise to be stored in tiny gadgets. Of special importance though, has been the development of the modern car stereo system.

The need for the listener of the doof-doof music to experience the sounds at maximum decibels is, I think, linked to the whole question of power. The owners of these machines wish to assert themselves by establishing a sort of aural dominance. The noise from the speakers is a perfect complement to the snarling car engine, the squealing rubber, and the lurid paintwork. It is jack-boot music, emblematic of raw power and contempt for the feelings of others. One person who has written very convincingly about this aspect of noise is Jacques Attali (Noise: The Political Economy of Music). An economist by training, Attali was founder and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1991-1993, and a special adviser to François Mitterrand from 1981-1990. Not surprisingly, he elaborates a theory of the relationship between music and money. Part of his account traces the history of music in a very novel way. He supposes that there are three stages in the strategic use of music by ‘power’ – sacrifice, representation, and repetition:

When power wants to make people forget, music is ritual sacrifice, the scapegoat; when it wants them to believe, music is enactment, representation; when it wants to silence them, it is reproduced, normalized, repetition.

It is the stage of repetition which is of particular significance in the case of the doof-doof music. Here, the silencing of all opposition is achieved by ‘mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises’. This, it seems to me, is a perfect description of what is going on with the doof-doof music. Power is asserted by aural dominance - something like an aggressive display in those animal species exhibiting a hierarchical social structure. The young petrol heads with their mobile sound systems see themselves as dominant ‘alpha’ types. Attali also has something very pertinent to say about the motor car, even though his book was written before the widespread appearance of ‘car audio’:

Simultaneously noisemaker, mask, and instrument of death, it is a form of individualised power. The automobile is therefore

doubly powerful: the noise it makes is a form of violence, and its camouflage guarantees it impunity.

We must now add to this description the ability of the modern automobile, through the ‘car audio’, to hugely amplify noise and thereby also to amplify power/violence.

But I think there is something else at work too in the doof-doof music. It is not just inattention and lack of listening effort as Adorno supposes. It is the abhorrence of silence. Silence is a real problem because it makes one vulnerable to reflective thought. It might, for instance, lead to uncomfortable questions – the sort of questions that come naturally when the mind is allowed to turn inward upon itself. Better to let the jungle rhythm take over both mind and body. Thus, when the doof-doof people leave the car, a portable CD player and headphones are almost mandatory. They remain permanently plugged in to the rhythmical beat. But these are not really Nietzsche’s Dionysians, caught up in the rapture of the animal beat. They are much more like the Lotus-Eaters. Noise for them is a drug - a means of forgetting or ‘turning off’ to the real world around them. Taking this line, it may be that the effect of the doof-doof music is largely physiological whereas the effect of true music (‘popular’ and ‘serious’) is upon the human intellect. The one negates reflection, the other stimulates it.

All that aside, I don’t know what can be done to abate this modern menace to ordinary civil society. Each State has some sort of environmental protection agency with laws regarding noise pollution but I very much doubt that they would pursue the doof-doof people. Likewise, it would take considerable police resources to hunt down and prosecute the owners of these high-speed noise boxes, even though they constitute a threat on the roads and a public nuisance.

I have often thought of employing some sort of counter-measure of my own. Perhaps I could purchase and install a set of these hundred megaton speakers in the back of my old ute. Then, having tracked the doof-doof people to their homes, I could direct into their living rooms the Bach Chaconne for unaccompanied violin, hugely amplified. There is double satisfaction here. Amongst the petrol heads, a particularly noisy vehicle is deemed to be ‘barky’. Well, I’ll give them Bachy! But, of course, that would be resorting to the same sort of electronic gadgetry that has allowed these people to threaten us. A more traditional approach is needed. I have, in moments of idle fancy, pictured myself mounting significant elements of a full-sized church organ horizontally underneath the chassis of the old ute. Now, given the fashion for very large twin exhausts on the doof-doof cars, such an installation would be the envy of the district. Sixteen foot Trompete and Prestant pipes could be complemented by the smaller Cromhorne, Nazurd, etc. with pedals and miniaturised keyboard on the passenger side. This anti-terrorist measure could then be employed when any doof-doof car approached - a weapon of mass instruction. A mighty surge of valiant sound would overwhelm the jungle beat and send the shell-shocked driver limping away to the nearest therapist. The best part would be choosing which music to play. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor is an obvious choice, but the ‘Dorian’ would be hard to pass over too. I might even have someone of the stature of the late E. Power Biggs in the passenger seat to carry it off.

In my dreams.

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