The example of sound art I chose that interested me was Spot by Ivo Malec under the selection eLECTRONIC Panorama: Paris, Tokyo, Utrecht, Warazawa (1970). In the reading, Russolo talks about using noise to take music to the next level, since we have become used to the harmonies, instruments, and pattern we’ve been hearing all our lives. “To excite our sensibility, music has developed into a search for a more com- plex polyphony and a greater variety of instrumental tones and coloring.”
According to Russolo, the great thing about musical noise that you are using a combination of unfamiliar, sometimes jolting sounds, to produce “acoustic pleasure”. The reason why we can derive so much pleasure from it is because it “enlarges and enriches” our “domain of musical sounds” by giving us sounds that dont match the traditional ones we are so used to hearing in music.
The reason I chose Spot was because to me, this piece fit very well with the six categories that Russolo predicted would be used in the futurist orchestra. The beginning alone stars off with what sounds like dripping water(category 1), and the track contains plenty of rustling, shrill sounds, and jingles (categories 3 and 4), along with an abundance of percussive noises which mostly sound like wood being clacked and banged (category 5). To go a little off topic, as someone who is into producing music digitally as a hobby, I can attest that many of these sounds Russol predicted we would aspire to produce in different pitches through the creation of new actual instruments, have been realized through digital means. And it is very true that the reason we now have all these sounds recorded, catalogued, and readily available for playback and recording, is that we are looking for those untraditional sounds and pitches. We are using these sounds to, like Russolu said, enrich our domain of musical sounds.