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Image: Luigi Russolo and his assistant, Ugo Piatti, in their Milan studio with their intonarumori (noise machines). January 1, 1913. Reproduced in L'Arte dei rumori (Milan: Edizione Futuriste di “Poesia,” 1916)

In 1913 the Italian Futurist artist Luigi Russolo wrote a manifesto “The Art of Noise” that celebrated “musical noise” as the true embodiment of the experience of industrialized modernity. To perform this music Russolo created intonarumori, or noise machines, visible in this photograph. Russolo’s only surviving score of his noise music entitled Awakening of a City was published in the Futurist journal Lacerba in 1914. In Inventing Abstraction, viewers can hear a recording of this score through a speaker placed above the spread of the magazine.

Image: Excerpt from Russolo’s score for Risveglio di una città (Awakening of a city), to be played on intonarumori (noise machines). Lacerba, March 1, 1914, pp. 72–73