What's That Sound?

In Ashley Fure’s compositions, it could be the hum of a giant steel aircraft cable.

IMAGINE THAT you’re a young composer and one day you realize that you don’t much care for notes. Actually, you’re also kind of disappointed in instruments, pitch, melody, and rhythm. These ingredients—as fundamental to music in the West as flour, water, and yeast are to bread—somehow don’t explain the wonder you feel at the sounding world, which is made of more mercurial stuff, all the scratchings, clangs, thumps, growls, and caws that fill our ears and that we lump under the unfair rubric of noise. “Language fails when you get to complex timbres. You look at unstable complex waveforms and we call it a screech. But any two screeches are nothing alike,” says Ashley Fure, a composer who spent years fighting her education and searching for the tools to harness the beauty she heard around her.