Art of Noises  by Luigi Russolo

22 min | reading + lecture by loopool  | NOV 2013

(Excerpt from "Come on, feel the noise" by Paul Hegarty - published on 11 Nov 2008  The Guardian)

In his 1913 book The Art of Noises, Luigi Russolo imagines a future dominated by noise. In this soundscape, noises are a colossal part of what drives culture. He wanted to incorporate the beauty of industrial noise into the properly aesthetic realm of music.

For this he devised noise-making machines that he called "intonarumori", which, through cranks, mechanical effects and the passage of air, would alter our idea of what sounds could be made into music. His growlers, cracklers and bursters (and many more) would form an orchestra that would first reflect the new world of the machine, then contribute to human development.

In the future seen from 1913, the noise-making machines are everywhere: orchestras and the old machines that hid noise from us, such as musical instruments, are redundant, part of pre-history. In a society ruled by noise, everything would begin again.

Industry is not only ever-present, it is noisier than ever, and the city becomes a perpetual symphony (for all his radical notions, ideas like "the symphony" still pre-occupied Russolo and his fellow futurists). Art and manufacturing offer a resonant dissonance (not, of course, harmony), and the noises from nature and human culture comprise a soundworld based on pistons, levers and hammers. This is a world that conjures the worst kind of noise, that of loud and unwanted sound, but for Russolo, this was just a matter of retraining and reworking our ears.

John Cage attempted something similar with his silent pieces, most famously in David Tudor's non-playing of a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, known as 4'33", in 1952. In place of a concert the world intrudes, the world of all sound, something Cage tried to harness for music, so that the world could become musical.

Russolo and Cage, like Satie and Varëse, had included noises in their musical works, but these noises had been "musicalised", restructured so that the noise is dissipated.

We might want to think of noise music as a history of the use of noise (and reactions to this), going from Russolo (or Wagner, Schoenberg, etc) through the cut and pasting of the 1950s and 1960s, Iggy and the Velvets, industrial music, power electronics, and, finally, the outpouring of noise from Japan, especially in the 1990s.