From http://enoughrecords.scene.org/100_years_of_noise/
#31 Joshua Banks Mailman - Murmurs of the Moist:   INTERVIEW

Where are you located?
USA

What does noise mean to you?
To me, noise is just a pragmatic word to differentiate some kinds of sounds from others.

What is your approach to noise creation?
When improvising with the system, I often explore by trying to attain sounds that are "in between" two or more sounds I've just made, thus striving for increasingly finer grained nuances, while listening and responding to what emerges sonically and visually. This process of improvising with Fluxations and FluxNoisations is discussed in "Improvising Synesthesia" in Leonardo Electronic Almanac v.19/2, 2013. Both systems (FluxNoisations and Fluxations) use an infrared camera and Sofia Paraskeva's wireless gloves as a full-body controller for music (sound) and graphic (visual) generative algorithms I developed and programmed in the RTcmix computer music language and Processing computer graphics environment. The generated sounds are based on physical models of real objects.

Noise equals music?
There's some use in maintaining a distinction between noise and music, so long as it's flexible and fluid. Noise is often defined by negation: sounds that are unintended or that one does not want to hear. Yet, as they say, "one man's signal is another man's noise." That extends beyond differences between individuals to differences within individuals. What may be noise to a person in one context, or one point in time, may be (or become) music to the same person in another context or time. We hope for a fluidity between noise and music such that neither term applies in any absolute way. For some of us, as least some of the time, we nevertheless call what we _want_ to hear "noise." And that's because of two things: (1) We somehow expect that some others will _not_ consider these sounds _music_, and related to this (2) there's an expectation that what is called "music" will be somehow regular, conventional, or harmonious in some traditional sense.

How was your track written / recorded?
I improvised _Murmurs of the Moist_ (2012) using the FluxNoisations interactive system, which I developed after co-developing Fluxations with Sofia Paraskeva. FluxNoisations allows me to spontaneously manipulate several sonic qualities of three streams of percussive noise which are generated algorithmically in real-time. I manipulate these through controlled movements of my hands and body, a sort of dance. The system also generates graphics in real-time, which are also manipulated by the same hand and body movement. The word 'moist' refers to water sounds literally as well as to the synthesis of physiology (wet) and technology (dry), as characterized by Roy Ascott, as "moist."