Signal to Noise

I have been thinking about the phrase "Signal to Noise" recently.  I want to jot down what I think of it, right now, in May of 2013, while I am 34.  A lot of these thoughts have been floating around my head for years.  I am going to slide into talking about it diagonally from another thought.  How I feel about sell out bands, and how that is an outgrowth of my feelings on creativity in art.

I have often talked about how much I respect the bands The Counting Crows, Smashmouth, and Gwen Stefani of No Doubt.  Specifically, I like how they each more or less sold out and blatantly switched to a pop style, because there was no economic future in their original style.  Early in Counting Crows growth, you can see them try to mature and stay true to themselves.  Like Eddie Vedder in Pearl Jam, you see these bands initially wanting to not sell out, and make shit pop music.  But then you can see them very quickly give up on that and decide instead to sell out and sell out hard.  Smashmouth more than any other.  And I respect this tremendously.  Why?  Because it fits this narrative I have:
       
    The majority of art is ineffective.  It is made as an expression of
    creativity, and succeeds at that, but achieves little else beyond.
    Which is to say, it does not land with an audience.  It is dead on
    arrival.  It is stillborn.  No one cares, and it means nothing to the
    majority of people who encounter it.  Worse, it may counteract
    any intent the creator had.  To me, this is fine.  Because if the art
    was made without intent beyond the creators desire to create,
     then that is all it was meant to do.  However, what angers and
    frustrates me is when the artist decides to tag on an intention
    afterward, or worse, they have the intention from the beginning
    and fail to execute on this intention effectively.  I hate seeing
    creators do what they know how to do, and wishing it achieved
    some result, when it clearly fails to do so.  I hate that very much.
       
    The majority of art s ineffective.  If you want to make art be
    effective, affective, or DO anything, then you have to own that
    and really grapple with how the enduser is going to receive it.
    I find most creators, all of us really, to be lazy.  It isn't natural,
    but it is necessary, to really think about how your creation will
    land with others.  But it is only necessary if you want your
    creation to DO something.  If you don't care, then you can go
    make whatever you want.  Like Eddie Vedder writing a song
    about cockroaches.  He wanted to express something, and
    not write a radiohit for some labels.  And he succeeded at that.
    Criticism of art, is only valid, in my opinion, in analyzing what
    was intended, and did it succeed in that ambition?

And that is why I love Smashmouth so much.  They made a shitty ska album late in the third wave of ska, at the peak of ska's popularity and just before interest in it crumbled and vanished.  Had their follow up record been ska, it would have utterly failed.  What happened instead was that they had one slightly non-ska song on the album that became a record hit, and they subsequently decided to ditch their entire position as a ska band, and instead make music that sounded like their one pop song, with the intention of achieving further mainstream success.  And they succeeded wildly with their song Hey now you're an Allstar!  I love that they had an intention and succeeded at it.  Many other ska bands from this time, maybe half heartedly tried to do the same thing, but more or less failed and fell by the way side.

When a creator creates a creation, which they only half-heartedly intend to achieve a result, it seems to me that they fail.  It seems to me to be necessary to know what you want to achieve with a creation,  and really take on being responsible for making it work.  In the world of writing, this is what editors do.  They tell authors "hey this isn't working, it needs to be fixed, or it won't achieve the result you want."  A day or so ago I was reading a book on the biology of evolution, and he was just blathering on wasting pages and paragraphs not saying anything, and then just failing to hit home the most important points that mattered.  Ugh.  It was all noise, no signal.

As I understand it is a legit scientific measurement that came out of the field of electronics.  Signal is the desired information, and noise is the irrelevant information that is cluttering up/interferring with your ability to detect the relevant desired information.  The ratio of signal to noise therefor indicates how much you are getting of what you want, versus how much junk is obscuring it.  At a personal level "Signal to Noise" means can you get what you want out of this or no?

An example.  In an online forum discussing something of interest to you, the divergence into tangentially unrelated topics increases the noise to signal ratio, until it becomes so hard to learn about what you are interested in, that you give up and leave the discussion.

So to me, in art, if what was created fails to convey its intended concept, or induce its intended emotion in the audience (or achieve whatever it was intended to achieve), then the creator has failed because their signal to noise ratio was off.  Smashmouth saw that people wanted pop music, and made pop music almost devoid of anything ska-like, and succeeded.  The band Reel Big Fish tried to make pop music, but also tried to keep their ska roots in doing it, and failed, because people didn't want their ska roots cluttering up their pop music.  If Reel Big Fish's intention was to succeed as mainstream stars, they failed.  If their intention was to stay true to their Ska roots, then they succeeded.  This example illustrates my theory that Intention is the measure by which art can be evaluated or criticized, and the unit of measurement then is Signal-to-noise.

End part 1.
Begin part 2.

Here is an entirely different way I have been thinking about Signal to Noise.  I have not synthesized this way of thinking with the above way of thinking.  I will (I imagine) do that later.  For now, I just want to get it out, so that I can save it in writing for the "later" that I am hoping will happen.

What follows is an interpretation of how the ratio of Signal to Noise relates to the information gathering technique's used in the Intuitive and Sensory styles of the Myer's Brigs personality types

At the core level, my understanding of what Myer's and Brigs were aiming at, was to define how any given person most immediately goes about solving a need for information.  The intuitive style they propose is a way of describing when an individual as a habit, seeks out and notes a wide variety of information, and then seeks to arrive at clues by comparing all that information.  In contrast, the Sensory style depicts when an individual screens out as much information as possible, seeking the specific relevant clues needed.  A wide array versus a laser focus.

My assesment has been that The wide array succeeds better in situations of uncertainty, finding information where there is little to go on.  The sensory style works better when there is an abundance of information, and dodges overload.

As interpretted through the conceptualization of Signal to Noise...
Intuitive style data collection is actually a mechanism to tolerate and make use of data with a low Signal to Noise ratio.
Sensory style data collection is tailored to using data with a high Signal to Noise ratio.
Therefore, which technique is best to use in any given circumstance, could be determined by understanding what the Signal to Noise ratio is, and consequently using the best tool for that circumstance.  If I understand Myer's Brigs test correctly, they are evaluating which you prefer to use, or rely on most frequently.  Which can help you understand why the technique you most commonly employ is failing, in the face of the kinds of circumstances you are using it in.  As well as how others attempts yield different results.

Okay, now I have to go do other things and think other thoughts.  Blog out.