- the forms/categories of noise and sound.

These two forms and categories overlap. Noise is taken to include both organised and incidental sounds, as part of a general range of sounds within society. Noise here is understood as sound produced from within society, having its source in places of work, the sounds of collective activity. Music is that thing, produced through sovereign and church power, and now through institutional and corporate powers. From the 17th century this music was organised around political economic orders of representation: from the second half of the C19th the new political economic order of production, that of repetition, came to be the structure for the production of sound. The output of a radio station, of an hydraulic press, can be classified as noise; a concert, the playing of a record, a lecture can be classified as music. However, the two categories are not fixed relative to the other; noise at one point might be taken up as music, and vice versa. The category 'noise' and 'music' are closely linked to orders of society, of its reproductive forces and generally to powers of assigning value. There is a further definition of noise - in the actual quantity of music circulating, in public and domestic places, through 24 hours, this constitutes through repetition; noise rather than music. It appears, it no longer recurs, but 'plays' continuously as a drone. It becomes the accompaniment to motion, it lubricates the flows of work, shopping, talking, journeying, thinking... it is all around and inside. This is noise channelled through various means and particular forms - entertainment, news, culture - in effect silencing other forms of listening. This definition parallels those arguments about the extent of information circulating as nonsense - noise as a metaphor of this.

Musak: dealing in the music of silencing. Created in 1922, to provide music over the telephone, it branched out into selling atmospheric music; the pieces of music used on the tapes they sell are the object of treatment called 'range of intensity limitation' which consists of dulling the tones and volumes. They are then programmed by a computer into sequences thirteen and half minutes, which are in turn integrated into completed series of eight hours.

- the social-spatial context of hearing. - the economic context of hearing.

The investment of the music industry now shifts from the distribution of the representative scheme of representatives- performers and sites of representation - to the development of production of demand. This develops from 19th century repertoires and concert tours, to current multi-billion pound turnover of concerts, the production of the changing line-up of artists/stars, of anniversaries, of interpretations, of changing devices and technologies of reproduction, of radio play lists, and predominantly, the production and maintenance of the charts. All these are techniques of setting value, set in the face, or the ear, of this problem: with such a profusion, with such a mass reproduction, how and where does value lie, and by what means is meaning to be generated? If there is, so to speak, no longer use-value - there is too much recording for that - and if representation is so distant as not to signify matters of particular and collective experience, (experience defined here as a day-to-day communal condition, of relations to labour/work, of occupation of a place, and not the abstract-authentic of the gig, the performance) then the devices of promotion, of demand become the points of investment. Note that the music industry does not produce music, it produces demand.

Music as war/dominance. The American 'boys' valiantly confronted the Panamanian dictator, Noriega, with a mobile 'sound system' as weapon. Listen - the government are well tuned into the condition of the inner city, reckoning that the production and circulation of music constitutes a form of pacification of troubled, marginalised social groups by the channelling of a violence into a consumption 'of sounds'. The U.S. government, with plenty of means of violence to hand, invert this and try it on Noriega. From ghetto to dictator blasters; blasted off the streets.

- hearing and listening are not naturalised activities; incidental and purchased hearing.

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