Electronic Musical Instrument 1870

The instruments and music created by the Futurist painter/musician Luigi Russollo although not electronic played a revolutionary role in the incorporation of noise and environmental sound into modern music and were a primary source of inspiration for many composers including Edgard Varèse, John Cage and Pierre Schaefer amongst others.

Russolo's attempts to put the Futurists theories on music and art into practice brought about some of the most extraordinary musical experiments in pre-war Europe: the noise intoners or "intonorumori"

"Ancient life was all silence. In the 19 century, with the invention of the machine, noise was born Today, noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men"
Luigi Russolo 1913

in "The Art of Noises" 1913, Russolo describes the passage through history from silence to sound and on to noise-sound and musical noise. he argued that the limited range of the current musical instruments could no longer satisfy modern man's acoustic thirst.

"let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animility, the palpitation of waves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of the tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags.
We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffle of crowds, the variety of din from the stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways"

The 'Intonorumori' or noise machines were a family of acoustic sound generators designed by Russolo to create the palette of sound described in the 'Art Of Noises'. The individual machines were comically basic in appearance: solid boxes of varying sizes and heights each fitted with a huge metal speaker. Russolo and his assistant Piatti worked away perfecting them ready for their first full scale concert in 1914.

"It was necessary for practical reasons that the noise Intoners were to be as simple as possible....and this we succeeded in doing. It is enough to say that a single stretched diaphragm placed in the right position gives, when tension is varied a scale of more than ten notes, complete with all the passages of semitones, quarter-tones and even the tiniest fractions of tones.
The preparation of the material for these diaphragms is carried out with special chemical baths and varies according to the timbre required. By varying the way in which the diaphragm is moved further types of timbres of noise can be obtained while retaining the possibility of varying the tone"

Luigi Russolo c1914

Marinetti, the Italian Futurist poet and helmsman described the experience of demonstrating the noise intoners to the incredulous public as like " showing the first steam engine to a herd of cows"

In 1914 Russolo and Marinetti gave 12 performances of the "Intonorumori" at the London Coliseum, the performances were, apparently, warmly applauded and Marinetti claimed that 30,000 people had witnessed the music of the future.

The heroic days of the noise machines ended after the first world war. Russolo sustained serious head injuries during the war and after a long convalescence left Italy and moved to Paris where he carried out subsequent elaboration's on the Noise Machines. His concerts during the 1920's in the city still caused fierce controversy but also impressed several outstanding composers such as Milhaud, Ravel, Honegger and the future prophet of the avant garde Edgard varèse.

Later versions of the Noise machines developed by Russolo in Paris included "Rumorarmonio" or "Noise Harmonium" or the "Russolo-Phone" which combined several noise machines with a rudimentary keyboard. This was presented to the Parisian public in 1929 by Varèse who planned to put the instruments in to mass production. Unfortunately the plans came to nothing and Russolo somewhat discouraged turned more and more to his painting and philosophy.

The Enharmonic Piano was Russolo's last experimental instrument built during his time in Paris. The instrument consisted of a series of piano strings that were tuned to sympathetically vibrate when played.