In this lively book, David Brown locates jazz music within the broad aesthetic, political, and theoretical upheavals of our time, asserting that modern architecture and urbanism in particular can be strongly influenced and defined by the ways that improvisation is facilitated in jazz.

Improvised music consists of diverse properties that fail to register in the object-oriented understanding of composition. As a result, it is often dismissed as noise--an interfering signal. However, Brown asserts, such interference can bear meaning and stimulate change. Noise Orders identifies how...