The Art of Noises Reflection

I think the format of the article alone is very interesting--a letter written by a Futurist Sound and Noise Musician to what seems to be a Futurist composer outlining why he finds the progression of music to be boring, and how he wants to encourage the incorporation of noise with sound. I find his ideas somewhat intriguing, that the earth went from silent (before the invention of instruments) to restricted (before the use of multiple instruments) to rapturous (he described him and his fellow Futurists as having once been very affected by the sounds of Beethoven and Wagner) to dull, and that music can only be enhanced by the incorporation of more machines and modulations. I disagree, however, with his implications that if we do not continue to add more and more to our sound then music will only grow more and more boring and repetitive--it erases almost entirely all the variation that a full orchestra can produce. While he argues that each orchestra can be boiled down to 5 sections, it should also be noted that those 5 sections can also be further split up into a myriad of different instruments that each produce different sounds, and that it's foolhardy to presume that these orchestras have already produced every engaging piece of music that could be produced. However, modern music has gone on to incorporate the use of technology to create a new breed--everything from techno to dubstep to screamo has implemented what could be called "noise" (beeps, synths, screaming, and in the case of one heavy metal band, a parrot squawking to replace a lead singer) to generate even more possibilities in terms of sound, noise and music.

The Art of of Noises response

     The article was very insightful in presenting an idea I hadn't thought about before: noise as as sound and noise integrated with sound to create what Russolo calls "Futurist Music." Normally I categorize noise as sound that is unpleasant whereas sound is soothing or intriguing in some way. Noise grates the nerves whereas sound does not.
     The idea of noise-sound was interesting because the more I think about it, the more I realize we have been moving away from "pure" sound. One example that I thought of (I'm not sure if this is exactly correct since it's not mentioned in the article) is screamo. It's still considered music, but it's made up of a mix of instruments (sounds) and screaming (noise).
     The tonality of noises was also a strange concept because while I know that all sounds in any form have tones, I hadn't focused on the tonality of noises because they're generally unpleasant so I don't think about them. It also depends on perspective. Because while the article listed thunder, wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, and the clatter of a trotting horse as noises, I consider them sounds. So it's all objective.