One theory about the development of our brains is that reliance on hearing played a large part in it, at a time when we were tree-dwellers vulnerable and fearful at night – since sound, needing to be measured over time, requires more processing power than visual information. Neither of these ambitious and complementary books goes back quite so far, though they start from the same recent discovery about the distant past: that prehistoric wall paintings coincide with the spots of maximum resonance within caves. Artistic expression in its earliest visual form was a response to richness experienced through the ears.
Each book is the published accompaniment to a series in another medium, Noise being a commission from Radio 4, while The Story of Music has just finished its run on BBC2. Howard Goodall has form not just as a presenter (with the excellent Big Bangs) but as a composer. If anyone could bring off a survey of music that, while it obviously can't hope to include everything, doesn't exclude any musical style or event in advance, then it has to be him. Even the most rushed whistlestop tour of the subject would have to make time for a halt outside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913 for the première of The Rite of Spring, but Goodall manages to find space to discuss another Stravinsky score, Les Noces from 1923, whose soundworld he regards as even more influential.
The idea is to assume no prior knowledge of the subject, but in practice there's some awkwardness. The reader who needs to be told that Benjamin Britten was a "mid-20th-century English composer" is likely to be baffled by the information that Scriabin's Prometheus has affinities with Stravinsky's Firebird. At his best, Goodall has a facility for lively shorthand, as when he describes the three most commonly used chords (tonic, dominant and subdominant) as "music's primary colours", or compares Haydn's "delightfully proportioned amusements" for Prince Esterházy with Capability Brown's garden layouts and Robert Adam's architecture.
When this facility falters the result is a soundbite without teeth. Very little information is conveyed by describing The Threepenny Opera as "a kind of Trainspotting for the late 1920s" – and it hardly illuminates Salome to be told that with this score "in one fell swoop, Strauss had transformed himself from the genteel Kapellmeister of the Austrian Belle Epoque into the Che Guevara of the musical rebels".
The desire to isolate turning points and symbolic moments is understandable, but it needs to be managed tactfully. It's fair enough, though routine, to single out the success of Rhapsody in Blue on record as culturally significant (a million copies sold in 1927), but ridiculous to counterpoint it with Mussolini ordering Boccherini's remains to be repatriated from Madrid to Lucca in the same year, in order to produce this rhetorical flourish: "It may be a cliche but the melting pot of the United States proved, in its domination of 20th-century music, that leaving behind nationalistic distinctions in search of a collective voice was by far the more fruitful choice." The 20th-century material is probably the weakest, just where it needs to hold its own against the competition from Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise.
Goodall's anti-elitism is mainly refreshing, but sometimes he overdoes it. He pillories the surrealistic ballet Parade, for instance – music by Satie, scenario by Cocteau, sets and costumes by Picasso – on the basis of the offensiveness ("How cut off from reality had the arts world become?"), of offering something so frivolous to a Parisian public in May 1917, with the second battle of the Aisne raging only 100 miles away. It's one thing to dislike Parade, and even to say that "music's flirtation with surrealism was short-lived" (though what is Einstein on the Beach but surrealism in music?). But you can't really claim to take the first world war more seriously than those who lived through it. Satie was in his 50s, and Picasso as a Spaniard was exempt from military service, though his close colleague Braque was badly injured in 1915. Cocteau, though not a combatant, was assigned to the ambulance service, and spent the whole winter of 1915-16 at the front.
Is it elitist to find film music, hailed by Goodall as the vindication of classical music's vitality as a language, by and large disastrous in its empty emoting? When music is reduced to telling audiences what to feel then both film and score are impoverished. The effect is clear enough in the TV programmes on which this book is based. We're so used to music supporting images that the opposite process, of images illuminating music, struggles to get off the ground. Even the last episode of the series, for which archive sources are rich, gave the impression of being a radio programme cluttered with optical interference. Big Bangs, especially the programme devoted to "Bass", showed that a thematic approach suited the medium – and Goodall – much better than a dogged historical survey.
David Hendy's Noise is chronologically arranged, but with a less defined subject, he can interweave themes more freely. In one section he brings together the naturalist John Muir, finding fault with the behaviour of visitors to Yosemite National Park, and the design of the concert hall at Bayreuth, to show that there were simultaneous moves in America and Europe to police people's experience of the sublime, whether in nature or culture.
Hendy quotes a definition of noise by GWC Kaye as "sound out of place" (though it's hardly more than a paraphrase of the description, variously attributed, of dirt as "matter in the wrong place"). The point is that for a sound to be classified as noise there must be someone doing the classifying. A history of noise can only be a social history, and a history of power.
Noise can sometimes destabilise the power structure. To introduce his discussion of audience dynamics at Roman Games, where there was always the possibility that an orchestrated tribute could turn nasty, Hendy finds an exquisite modern parallel: George Osborne being booed at the Olympic stadium while he waited to hand out medals.
One recurring theme is privacy, and the search for quiet. The rich have been moving away from noise since Roman times; Hendy details the process in 18th-century Edinburgh. Of all the devices described in the book (such as the talking drums and the stethoscope), none is simpler than the bell-pull to summon staff, solving as it did the apparently intractable problem with servants. If they were near enough to be useful they were also near enough to see and hear things they shouldn't.
Occasionally the book gives the impression of being a very classy scissors-and-paste job, with material gathered from any number of other writers. Just because something has appeared in a respectable book doesn't make it true. So Hendy passes on from R Murray Schafer's The Soundscape (1994) the information that William Faulkner was haunted for years after the first world war by the sounds ("little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling") emitted by shattered bodies lying around him on the battlefield. Faulkner wasn't exactly a soldier for truth on any subject, but he did nothing but lie about his supposed war experiences, claiming for instance to have suffered a head injury that made necessary the fitting of a silver plate. You can't even call this sort of tale-spinning embroidery, since embroidery requires a backing cloth, and the war had ended before Faulkner finished his training.
In his discussion of radio, Hendy describes an experiment carried out at Harvard in the 1930s, in which the subjects were divided into two groups – one reading a text, the other hearing it read: "Those who had read the piece were more critical and questioning about the material; those who had heard it over the loudspeakers were more inclined to believe everything that had been broadcast." Since the book was first devised for broadcast, this suggests a delightful recursive process: listeners to Noise nodding their assent while Hendy's voice on the radio tells them, persuasively, how persuasive radio voices are.
The 30 sections of the book are all of the same length, which suggests they correspond quite closely to the scripts. The print version would have benefited from the material being developed more ambitiously: the short span of the sections prevents arguments from being made with the sharpness and sweep of which Hendy is obviously capable. Radio is an extraordinary and intimate medium, but its writers and performers must always keep in mind that very few listeners give their attention undivided, in the way that readers must. On the wall of every talk-radio studio hangs an invisible sign that says "Remember they're probably chopping vegetables".
• Adam Mars-Jones's novel Cedilla is published by Faber. To order Noise and The Story of Music for £12.79 and £16 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop
