Book review Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond by Hillel Schwartz Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Zone Books, 2011, 928 pp., £21.02 ISBN-13: 978-1935408123 / Albert Pellicer On 29 th February 2012, the London Sound Seminar series hosted a talk by Dr. Hillel Schwartz, a paper entitled, The Noise of Almost Nothing alongside the UK launch of Schwartz’s book, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. An indispensable text for those researching noise through a Western oriented cultural history, and which forms the subject of this review. ‘Noise is an oscillation of creation and loss’, says Hillel Schwartz in Making Noise. 1 An oscillation that is present throughout history but that is increasingly appreciated through critical terrain thanks to the technological developments that enable the study of the barely audible. When John Cage suggested that silence is just sound or noise that we are not paying attention to, he emphatically unburied hidden (not-heard) ‘unwanted sounds’ from the avant- garde agenda. Schwartz’s book pursues such realisations as they occur. In Making Noise, under the direction of his ear-opening knowledge, noise ceases to be framed through a restrictive geometry of appreciation; instead the study of noise becomes porous, and readers are encouraged to pay attention to all the noises that are more commonly heard, but not-listened-to, which have so far VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1 SPRING 2013 Albert Pellicer is a poet and a free- lance journalist. Born in Barcelona and based in London, he has a BA in Creative Writing from Antioch University (US) and received an MA in Poetic Practice at the Royal Holloway, University of London. At present he is researching towards a PhD on ‘Oscillations Between Text And Sound: a poetics of timbre’ at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck. Email: albert.pellicer@btopenworld.com