The definition of legitimate musical sound has continually expanded to include noise and everyday material

A through-line of 20th- and 21st-century experimental music is that what counts as a valid musical sound source keeps widening. Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises argued for replacing the orchestra’s limited timbres with the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms — an early claim that industrial and everyday noise is legitimate material. Successive practices (musique concrete, tape manipulation, circuit bending, glitch, Japanoise, no-input mixing) each annexed further ‘non-musical’ sound into composition. The durable idea is not the timeline itself but the principle that the boundary of musical sound is historically contingent and expandable.

Examples

Russolo’s Intonarumori (1913) treating machine noise as timbre; Oval’s Systemisch (1990s) making music from deliberately damaged CDs; no-input mixing turning mixer self-noise into an instrument.

Assessment

State the principle that the category of musical sound is historically expandable, and give two examples of practices that widened it.