I walked into a small, crowded “gallery space” in a back alley in Detroit after weaving through a maze of abandoned warehouses and driving through all of the places my parents warned me never to go.

Across the room, a man scraped a Styrofoam cup across the head of a snare drum as a cellist intermittently slapped the back of a cello with no particular rhythm. In the far corner, a third man blared a rusty, keyless horn. The audience sat, stood, lied down and discovered a type of twitchy dance move I had never seen any human execute in my life. I was at a noise show.

I went to the show with the idea that it was going to be pretty typical. I’d have a few drinks, dance with some friends and then leave. Yet I found myself seeing instruments in a completely new way. I began thinking about music in a manner I never had before. But I still grapple with the concept of what exactly noise music is.

School of Art & Design senior Ronen Goldstein and Performing Arts and Technology senior Brendan Coates are working on a documentary exploring noise music. In a Facebook group they started for the documentary, people have posted responses giving their opinion about what they think defines the genre.

Responses range from: “Noise Music: Fucking around with guitar pedals,” to more heart-felt responses like, “I’m a firm believer in finding new sounds — music is that which our ears know from experience to be pleasing, noise is that which our ears have not yet assimilated into our vocabulary.”

“(Noise music) is about becoming familiar with the unknown, essentially,” explained Goldstein, who is a noise musician himself.

The unknown is often found by breaking down the familiar. Noise music takes apart what has previously been deemed as music and exposes its fundamental elements, simultaneously shifting the boundaries of musical composition itself.

“You become more conscious of things when they’re broken,” Goldstein said. “You become aware of say, the hammer, when it falls apart. You become very aware of the structure and each piece that assembled it. This becomes the type of texture that you get when you listen to noise.”

If I had to compare it to something, I would say noise music runs parallel to the idea of abstract expressionism. In abstract painting, the work often becomes about the medium itself. Paintings are stripped down to the basic components of what makes them a painting: the paint itself.

Emerging from the abstract expressionist movement are canvases in contemporary art galleries that are painted a single color — just blue or red or orange. They are the types of paintings people scoff at, saying, “I could have done that myself.”

But that’s not the point. The point is about breaking down the very construct of what constitutes a painting. It takes apart what the viewer initially thought should make up a “good” painting in the classical sense and reveals to them the very foundation of the art form — all while communicating the often powerful connection people have with color and form.

Goldstein elaborated that there is a portion of the documentary where the film literally falls apart into static and graininess, making viewers more aware they are watching a documentary. This is much like how noise makes listeners more aware that they are participating in a form of auditory expression.

If I wanted to create “noise” in this article, it mghit look lkie tihs asdfY jij*76ee*////00 --86&^aenbufkFFF KJ>>>> Hq!`~ s+kwi..enb JK I&^*

Basically, like Wingdings.

Noise music is about breaking music and sound down into their smallest components and using components not considered to be a part of the normal catalog.

But Coates explained that, apart from the theoretical back-and-forth about what defines noise music, the genre also has a very practical application.