Intonarumori

Everyone knows they can trust the internet as a source of information, right? I am working a full time job, developing a non-profit, chiseling away at a 365 day music project, and adopting a son. There is no time for actual research, so good-old Google and Wikipedia will have to do. Trust at your own risk.

I am knee-deep in the muck of electronica this week as I piece together an exotic trance composition that may just squeeze its way onto the final recording of the Redline Project. As I massage the textures into coherence, working and reworking over and again, a fascination with this new array of sonic possibilities is taking hold of me. I am also gripped by utter lack of knowledge about this genre.

The goal of this post and others to follow is to snag snippets of mostly-true information from potentially unreliable sources and garner a shred of knowledge. The topic of my exploration: electronic music.

When I studied the western tradition of music history, page one of chapter one transported me to the era of Gregorian Chant, about 800 years ago. Compared to the likes of dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, the history of music (as Europeans and Americans know it) is all relatively new. Reason declares electronic music a mere baby then, since the advent of harnessing watts did not come along until 1752 when Ben Franklin flew his kite into the sky on a less-than-clear day.

A cross-breed of mad scientist and musician began to emerge in Italy during the early part of the 20th century. This experimental group of artists called themselves Futurists. One such loon named Luigi Russolo assembled devices he referred to as Intonarumori, or noise machines. In his own words, these aural contraptions were "acoustical noise-instruments, whose sounds (howls, roars, shuffles, gurgles, etc.) were hand-activated and projected by horns and megaphones."

Stop right there. We have a gathering of fellows in Italy around 100 years ago who focused their life work on producing concerts of noise. My best guess is that their elevators failed to visit the top floor. Hail the Futurists - these are my kind of folks.

The first instruments with sound produced purely from electricity were invented during the 1920s and 1930s. Devices such as the Etherophone (also known as the Theremin) debuted on stage of symphonies in novelty pieces composed for orchestra and electronic instruments. 1929 saw the founding of Laurens Hammond's electronic instrument company, which would later go on to produce the iconic Hammond B3 organ.

Though these rumblings of electronic sound were a far cry from the thumping synth-driven club music made popular in the 1980s, this collection of early forays begged deeper explorations of sonic possibilities that would carpet the continents with new music in under 50 years. Electronica is brand new but has spread like wildfire.

This highly-paraphrased synopsis was produced using the single source of Wikipedia. My middle school teachers, and probably my mother, would be horrified. Tune in this time tomorrow for a loosely factual pontification about the invention of synthesized sound.