The word ‘noise’ has taken on various meanings throughout the course of twentieth-century music. Technology has had direct influence on the presence of noise, as phenomenon and as concept, both through its newfound ubiquity in modernity and through its use directly in music production – in electroacoustics. The creative use of technologies has lead to new representation systems for music, and noise – considered as that outside of a given representation – was brought into meaning. This paper examines several moments in which a change in representation brought noise into musical consideration – leading to a ‘noise music’ for its time before simply becoming understood as music.