The matte-black circuit board that holds Tristan Perich’s Noise Patterns has a few things in common with your average smartphone. It’s small and sleek enough to fit into your pocket, and it comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack that gives you direct access to the music within. That’s just about where the similarities end. It won’t let you access Spotify or Apple Music’s immense libraries, and it won’t let you pull up YouTube videos. (You can forget about checking your email, too.) Noise Patterns contains six tracks, and you can’t rewind, skip, or pause them. The music also has more in common with the noises your microwave makes than the songs you can hear on the radio.
Noise Patterns is Perich’s latest experiment with 1-bit music,…