The Art of Noise
Luigi Russolo
Originally published in 1967 as a Great Bear Pamphlet by Something Else Press.
The Art of Noise
(translated from L’arte dei Rumori)
My dear Balilla Pratella
great futurist musician,
On March 9, 1913, during our bloody victory over four thousand passé-ists
in the Costanzi Theater of Rome, we were fist-and-cane-fighting in defense of your
Futurist Music, performed by a powerful orchestra, when suddenly my intuitive mind
conceived a new art that only your genius can create: the Art of Noises, logical consequence
of your marvelous innovations. In antiquity, life was nothing but silence.
Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery.
Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility. For several centuries, life went on
silently, or mutedly. The loudest noises were neither intense, nor prolonged nor varied.
In fact, nature is normally silent, except for storms, hurricanes, avalanches, cascades
and some exceptional telluric movements. This is why man was thoroughly
amazed by the first sounds he obtained out of a hole in reeds or a stretched string.
Primitive people attributed to sound a divine origin. It became surrounded
with religious respect, and reserved for the priests, who thereby enriched their rites
with a new mystery. Thus was developed the conception of sound as something apart,
different from and independent of life. The result of this was music, a fantastic world
superimposed upon reality, an inviolable and sacred world. This hieratic atmosphere
was bound to slow down the progress of music, so the other arts forged ahead and
bypassed it. The Greeks, with their musical theory mathematically determined by
Pythagoras, according to which only some consonant intervals were admitted, have
limited the domain of music until now and made almost impossible the harmony they
were unaware of. In the Middle Ages music did progress through the development
and modifications of the Greek tetracord system. But people kept considering sound
only in its unfolding through time, a narrow conception so persistent that we still find
it in the very complex polyphonies of the Flemish composers. The chord did not yet
exist; the development of the different parts was not subordinated to the chord that
these parts could produce together; the conception of these parts was not vertical, but
merely horizontal. The need for and the search for the simultaneous union of different
sounds (that is to say of its complex, the chord), came gradually: the assonant common
chord was followed by chords enriched with some random dissonances, to end
up with the persistent and complicated dissonances of contemporary music.
First of all, musical art looked for the soft and limpid purity of sound. Then
it amalgamated different sounds, intent upon caressing the ear with suave harmonies.
Nowadays musical art aims at the shrilliest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of
sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is
paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human
labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside,
machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound,
with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion.
To excite our sensibility, music has developed into a search for a more complex
polyphony and a greater variety of instrumental tones and coloring. It has tried
to obtain the most complex succession of dissonant chords, thus preparing the ground
for Musical Noise.
This evolution toward noise-sound is only possible today. The ear of an eighteenth
century man never could have withstood the discordant intensity of some of the
chords produced by our orchestras (whose performers are three times as numerous);
on the other hand our ears rejoice in it, for they are attuned to modern life, rich in all
sorts of noises. But our ears far from being satisfied, keep asking for bigger acoustic
sensations. However, musical sound is too restricted in the variety and the quality of
its tones. The most complicated orchestra can be reduced to four or five categories of
instruments with different sound tones: rubbed string instruments, pinched string
instruments, metallic wind instruments, wooden wind instruments, and percussion
instruments. Music marks time in this small circle and vainly tries to create a new variety
of tones. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure
sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.
Each sound carries with it a nucleus of foreknown and foregone sensations
predisposing the auditor to boredom, in spite of all the efforts of innovating composers.
All of us have liked and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For years,
Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts. Now we are fed up with
them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations
of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud
crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral
symphonies.
It is hardly possible to consider the enormous mobilization of energy that a
modern orchestra represents without concluding that the acoustic results are pitiful. Is
there any, thing more ridiculous in the world than twenty men slaving to increase the
plaintive meeowing of violins? This plain talk will make all music maniacs jump in
their seats, which will stir up a bit the somnolent atmosphere of concert halls. Shall
we visit one of them together? Let’s go inside one of these hospitals for anemic
sounds. See, the first bar is dripping with boredom stemming from familiarity, and
gives you a foretaste of the boredom that will drip from the next bar. In this fashion
we sip from bar to bar two or three sorts of boredom and keep waiting for the extraor-
dinary sensation that will never materialize. Meanwhile we witness the brewing of a
heartrending mixture composed of the monotony of the sensations and the stupid
and religious swooning of the audience, drunk on experiencing for the thousandth
time, with almost Bhuddist patience, with elegant and fashionable ecstasy. POUAH!
Let’s get out quickly, for I can’t repress much longer the intense desire to create a true
musical reality finally by distributing big loud slaps right and left, stepping and pushing
over violins and pianos, bassoons and moaning organs! Let’s go out!
Some will object that noise is necessarily unpleasant to the ear. The objection
is futile, and I don’t intend to refute it, to enumerate all the delicate noises that give
pleasant sensations. To convince you of the surprising variety of noises, I will mention
thunder, wind, cascades, rivers, streams, leaves, a horse trotting away, the starts and
jumps of a carriage on the pavement, the white solemn breathing of a city at night,
all the noises made by feline and domestic animals and all those man’s mouth can
make without talking or singing.
Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive
than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing
among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings
of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons,
the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the
snapping of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestration
of department stores’ sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars
of railroad stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and
subways. And we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare. The poet
Marinetti, in a letter from the Bulgarian trenches of Ariadnople described to me as
follows, in his new futurist style, the orchestra of a great battle:
1 2 3 4 5 seconds the siege canons gut the silence by a chord-
Tamtoumb! Immediately echoes, echoes, echoes, all echoes-quick!
take-it-crumble it-spread it-infinite distance to hell. In the center,
center of these flattened TAMTOUMBS-width 50 square kilometers-
leap 2 3 6 8 splinters-fisticuffs-headrammings-rapid fire
batteries Violence, ferocity, regularity, pendulum game, fatalitythis
grave bass apparent slowness-scan the strange madmen
very young-very mad mad mad-very agitated altos of the battle
Fury anguish breathless ears My ears open nasals! beware!
such joy is yours o my people to sense see ear scent drink
everything everything everything taratatatatata the machineguns
shouting twisting under a thousand bites slaps traaktraak
cudgellings whippings pic pac POUMTOUMB juggling
clowns’ jump in full sky height 200 meters it’s the gunshooting
Downwards guffaws of swamps laughter buffalos chariots
stings prancing of horses ammunition-wagons flue flac zang
chaak chaak rearings pirouettes patatraak bespatterings manesneighings
i i i i i i i medley tinklings three bulgarian batallions
on the move crook- craak (double bar slowly) Choumi Maritza
o Karvavena officers’ shouts copper plates knocking against
each other pam ici (vite) pac over there BOUM-pam-pam-pam
here there there farther all around very high look-out goddamnit
on the head chaak marvelous! flames flames flames
flames flames flames
flames crawl from
forts over there Choukri Pacha telephone orders to 27 forts
in turkish German hello Ibrahim! Rudolf hello! hello! actors
roles blowing-echoes odor-hay-mud-manure I can’t feel my
frozen feet stale odor rotting gongs flutes clarinets pipes everywhere
up down birds twitter beatitude shade greenness cipcip
ip-zzip herds pastures dong-dong-dong-ding-bééé Orchestra
Madmen keep hitting orchestra professors they bent beaten
playing playing playing Great fracas far from erasing drink
tiny noises revomit them precise them out of their echoing
mouth wide open diameter 1 kilometer Debris of echos in this
theater of laying rivers sitting villages standing mounts recognized
in the audience Maritza Tungia Rodopes 1st and 2d
rows loggias groundfloor boxes 2,000 shrapnels gesticulation
explosion zang-toumb white handkerchiefs full of gold toumbtoumb
clouds-gallery 2,000 grenades thundering applause Quick
quick such enthusiasm pulling hair very black hairs ZANGTOUMB-
TOUMB war noises orchestra blown beneath a note
of silence hanging in full sky captive golden balloon controlling
the fire.
We want to score and regulate harmonically and rhythmically
these most varied noises. Not that we want to destroy the movements and irregular
vibrations (of tempo and intensity) of these noises! We wish simply to fix the
degree or pitch of the predominant vibration, as noise differs from other sound in its
irregular and confuse vibrations (in terms of tempo and intensity).
Each noise possesses a pitch, at times even a chord dominating
over the whole of these irregular vibrations. The existence of this predominant
pitch offers us the technical means of scoring these noises, that is to say to give
to a noise a certain variety of pitches without losing the timbre that characterizes and
distinguishes it. Certain noises obtained through a rotating movement can give us a
complete ascending or descending scale through the speeding up or slowing down of
the movement.
Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life. Noise is familiar to us.
Noise has the power to bring us back to life. On the other hand, sound, foreign to life,
always a musical, outside thing, an occasional element, has come to strike our ears no
more than an overly familiar face does our eye. Noise, gushing confusely and irregularly
out of life, is never totally revealed to us and it keeps in store innumerable surprises
for our benefit. We feel certain that in selecting and coordinating all noises we
will enrich men with a voluptuousness they did not suspect.
Although the characteristic of noise is to brutally bring us back to life, the
art of noises must not be limited to a mere imitative reproduction. The
art of noises will extract its main emotive power from the special acoustic pleasure that
the inspired artist will obtain in combining noises. Here are the six categories of noises
for the futurist orchestra that we intend soon to realize mechanically:
1 2
roars whistles
claps snores
noises of falling water snorts
driving noises
bellows
3 4
whispers shrill sounds
mutterings cracks
rustlings buzzings
grumbles jingles
grunts shuffles
gurgles
5 6
percussive noises using animal and human voices:
metal, wood, skin, shouts, moans, screams,
stone, baked earth, etc. laughter, rattlings, sobs
We have included in these 6 categories the most characteristic fundamental noises: the
others are hardly more than combinations of them. The rhythmic movements of a
noise are infinite. There exists not only a predominant pitch, but as well a predominant
rhythm around which more secondary rhythms are equally perceptible.
Conclusions:
1 - We must enlarge and enrich more and more the domain of musical sounds.
Our sensibility requires it. In fact it can be noticed that all contemporary composers of
genius tend to stress the most complex dissonances. Moving away from pure sound, they
nearly reach noise-sound. This need and this tendency can be totally realized only through
the joining and substituting of noises to and for musical sounds.
2 - We must replace the limited variety of timbres of orchestral instruments by the
infinite variety of timbres of noises obtained through special mechanisms.
3 - The musician’s sensibility, once he is rid of facile, traditional rhythms, will find
in the domain of noises the means of development and renewal, an easy task, since each
noise offers us the union of the most diverse rhythms as well as its dominant one.
4 - Each noise possesses among its irregular vibrations a predominant basic pitch.
This will make it easy to obtain, while building instruments meant to produce this sound,
a very wide variety of pitches, half-pitches and quarter-pitches. This variety of pitches will
not deprive each noise of its characteristic timbre but, rather, increase its range.
5 - The technical difficulties presented by the construction of these instruments
are not grave. As soon as we will have found the mechanical principle which produces a
certain noise, we will be able to graduate its pitch according to the laws of acoustics. For
instance, if the instrument employs a rotating movement, we will speed it up or slow it
down. When not dealing with a rotating instrument we will increase or decrease the size
or the tension of the sound-making parts.
6 - This new orchestra will produce the most complex and newest sonic emotions,
not through a succession of imitative noises reproducing life, but rather through a fantastic
association of these varied sounds. For this reason, every instrument must make possible
the changing of pitches through a built-in, larger or smaller resonator or other exten-
sion.
7 - The variety of noises is infinite. We certainly possess nowadays over a
thousand different machines, among whose thousand different noises we can distinguish.
With the endless multiplication of machinery, one day we will be able to
distinguish among ten, twenty or thirty thousand different noises. We
will not have to imitate these noises but rather to combine them according
to our artistic fantasy.
8 - We invite all the truly gifted and bold young musicians to analyze all noises
so as to understand their different composing rhythms, their main and their secondary
pitches. Comparing these noise sounds to other sounds they will realize how
the latter are more varied than the former. Thus the comprehension, the taste, and
the passion for noises will be developed. Our expanded sensibility will gain futurist
ears as it already has futurist eyes. In a few years, the engines of our industrial cities
will be skillfully tuned so that every factory is turned into an intoxicating orchestra of
noises.
My dear Pratella, I submit to your futurist genius these new ideas, and I invite
you to discuss them with me. I am not a musician, so that I have no acoustic preferences,
nor works to defend. I am a futurist painter who projects on a profoundly loved
art his will to renew everything. This is why, bolder than the bolder professional musician,
totally unpreoccupied with my apparent incompetence, knowing that audacity
gives all prerogatives and all possibilities, I have conceived the renovation of music
through the Art of Noise.
Luigi Russolo
Painter
Milano, March 11, 1913.
Direction of the futurist movement: Corso Venezia, 61, Milano.
Luigi Russolo in 1913 with his mechanical orchestra.
