In recent years, there has been a noticeable 'turn' toward questions of sound's ontology in sound studies. Apropos of this ontological turn, there is self-professed move away from questions of culture, signification, discourse, and identity; and toward questions of materiality, affect, potentiality, aesthetics, and abstraction. Moreover, the ontological turn in sound studies can be understood to mark a move away from the specific to the general. Yet, general models are not neutral models. Though they often appear abstract, the theoretical and analytical tools through which sound is heard, experienced and understood are inextricable from cultural and political histories, economic imperatives, aesthetic priorities and gendered and racialized epistemologies.

Over the past thirty years in the UK, Canada and the US, classical music has come to function as a sonic weapon. It is used a means of dispelling and deterring 'loiterers' by making particular public and privately-owned public spaces-such as shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts and car parks-undesirable to occupy. In this article, I present weaponized classical music as a 'revanchist', audio-affective deterrent. Drawing upon Neil Smith's description of the revanchist city (1996, 1998), I examine how weaponized classical music works to affectively police neoliberal 'public' space. While credited with the capacity to 'soothe away' deviant behaviour through its calming influence, weaponized classical music ultimately aims to 'remove' the figure of the threatening and menacing 'loiterer' insofar as it is heard as repellent. Though affect has often been understood in contradistinction to social determinisms, weaponized classical music exemplifies the capacity of musical affects to function as a technology of social reproduction. Western European classical music has frequently been celebrated as a pinnacle of human achievement: it is said to have the capacity to enlighten, to move, and-as proponents of 'the Mozart effect' suggest-improve listeners' mental capacity. However, over the past thirty years in the UK, Canada and the United States, classical music has come to function not just as art or entertainment but as a sonic weapon. It is used a means of dispelling and deterring 'loiterers' by making particular public and privately-owned public spaces-such as shopping malls, bus stations, shop fronts and car parks-undesirable to occupy. The practice is thought to have begun in 1985, when a branch manager of a 7-Eleven convenience stores in Canadian province of British Colombia began broadcasting 'classical' and 'easy listening' music into the store's parking lot to prevent teenagers from congregating there. (Hirsch, 2006) In the US and Canada, classical music has been used as a deterrent on public transport systems (the regional transit department in Portland broadcasts instrumental music and opera at its light rail stations, for example, allegedly resulting in a reduction of

Drawing from Michel Serres’ notion of the parasite, this article provides a nuanced explanation for noise that distinguishes itself from prevailing negative narratives, which often seek to define noise as unwanted, undesirable or damaging sound. Such narratives have left noise vulnerable to moralising polemics, which construct silence and noise as a dichotomy between the past and present, natural and cultural, relaxing and disturbing, and, fundamentally, good and bad. This article facilitates a reconsideration of noise’s ethical connotations by proposing the notion of noise as affect.

Noise is so often a ‘stench in the ear’ – an unpleasant disturbance or an unwelcome distraction. But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Beyond Unwanted Sound is about noise and how we talk about it. Weaving together affect theory with cybernetics, media histories, acoustic ecology, geo-politics, sonic art practices and a range of noises, Marie Thompson critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise music, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Beyond Unwanted Sound instead aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

This article outlines various intersections of noise and femininity, through which noise has been feminised and the feminine has been produced as noisy. Feminised musical genres, such as mainstream pop, have been dismissed as excessive, banal and extraneous noise. Noise has also been feminised by a number of recent historiographical and curatorial projects that have sought to amplify the creative work of women in experimental and electronic music. Using a cybernetic understanding of noise as an explanatory metaphor, I suggest that these projects threaten the integrity of a patrilineal 'dotted line' that characterises histories of musical noise and sonic experimentalism. This cybernetic metaphor is also applied to Pauline Oliveros' Willowbrook generations and reflections (1976) and the performances of noise artist Phantom Chips, so as to identify the production of a feminised noise in and through music. I suggest that these curatorial projects and musical practices raise important questions as to if, when and how feminised noise becomes feminist noise.Keywords: Noise; Gender; Feminism; Sonic Arts; Experimental Music; CyberneticsIn September 2014, a YouTube video of Courtney Love went viral. The video shows Love's band, Hole, performing their hit Celebrity skin at a show in New York four years earlier. The audio that accompanies the video, however, does not sound right at all--it sounds (and is intended to be heard as) 'bad'. The video shows the whole band playing but what we hear is, allegedly, Love's isolated guitar and vocal tracks. The guitar playing sounds particularly 'off': it is out of tune and out of time. The audio was supposedly leaked by a sound engineer who had been hired to record the show but had not been paid (Ladd, 2014). This 'shaming' YouTube video was met with sneering, mockery and performative outrage. Love's vocals and guitar playing were described in the media as 'cringey ' (Huffington Post Canada, 2014), 'even worse than you'd imagine ' (Ozzi, 2014) and 'horrible', 'truly awful' (McGinley, 2014).The leaked audio and subsequent reactions exemplify how female artists are often received, particularly when playing with instruments or in musical genres coded as 'male' or 'masculine'. As Gibsone notes, isolated performances of female musicians--from Linda McCartney to Taylor Swift--are often leaked with the intention of exposing them as frauds. Male artists, by comparison, are rarely exposed in the same way; and if they are, they rarely generate the same reaction (Gibsone, 2014). Perhaps less obviously, the video and the reactions to it also serve as a reminder of the ways in which 'feminised' speech, sounds and music-making are often equated with noise, whether the term is understood as extraneous, unwanted, unpleasant, dis-ruptive or meaningless sound (Carson, 1992;James, 2015;Thompson, 2013). Love's performance appears to fail as music, and so the video is a testament to Love's apparent 'failure' as an artist. The (intended) reception of the video invokes the notion of noise as 'sound out of p...