The Art of Sound response

The ideas and concepts put forth by the futurists including Luigi Russolo was very interesting. I was fascinated by the idea of questioning what makes music music and our recognition of everyday sounds as being considered “normal”. They put forth a number of great points I will need to sleep on and reread to see if I understand correctly. I also enjoyed the idea of the futurist “band”. The idea of these wild, unprepared people performing in such a bizarre way is really a funny picture to imagine. I really am sorry we do not have sound videos of these figures performing because that would be really great to hear/see (side note I will need to search to see if anyone recreated such performances (surely someone on the internet has thought to do this…I realize it was 1913 —a little over 100 years ago—but someone could have lived long enough for sound movies to be invented…heck they did have wax cylinder recorders which could have recorded something so I’ll have to do some research).

I have to admit something because I think it’s really cool and relevant: I’m a college student with lots of assignments so anyway I can multitask I will immediately take. I noticed the text of the article was copyable so I copied the 1913 manifesto onto a document. From there I enabled my text to speech function on my computer so that said document (which is about sound) was verbalized by a computerized voice. In other words: I kind of sort of made futurist sound art out of a futurist manifesto on the art of sound. It was actually pretty funny (especially since it read every single word on the document including the “ubuclassics ubu.com / the art of noise luigi russolo” and number that was on each page). So while I am not sure if I will be able to hear a real futurist sound band performance I did get a performance of sound art through this reading.