Noise has become a model of cultural and theoretical thinking over the last two decades. Following Hegarty's influential 2007 book, Noise/Music, Annihilating Noise discusses in sixteen essays how noise offers a way of thinking about critical resistance, disruptive creativity and a complex yet enticing way of understanding the unexpected, the dissonant, the unfamiliar.

It presents noise as a negativity with no fixed identity that can only be defined in connection and opposition to meaning and order. This book reaches beyond experimental music and considers noise as an idea and practice within a wide range of frameworks including social, ecological, and philosophical perspectives. It introduces the ways in which the disruptive implications of noise impact our ways of thinking, acting, and organizing in the world, and applies it to 21st-century concerns and today's technological ecology.