“The Art of Noises” is a very interesting manifesto. It’s really ironic that I’m reading this because I am currently taking a music theory class as well as an electronic music class. So every week, I am constantly challenged with the idea of what I consider actually music. One class is teaching me what traditional, rote music is and is not and another completely blows this idea out of the water. My electronic music class is teaching me to constantly think outside the realms of rhythm, melodies, harmonies, and tone. It’s amazing to think that this was written in 1913, because the history of what is now electronic music stems from this very idea. The idea that music is in everything that we encounter in our world. Composers like John Cage (4’33”) and Edgar Varese(“Liberation of Sound”) were both proponents of this very idea. I am currently learning how to listen and make music that comes from natural sounds in our world as well as synthetic sounds like white, pink, and brown noise.

I found Yoko Ono’s “Cough Piece” (1971) especially interesting because it reminds me of John Cage’s “4’33″” which is basically a symphony where the player doesn’t actually play anything, the sound of the audience is in fact the music. I have personal experience with this “Musique Conréte” because of this class, I created a piece called “Snaps is the Name of the Game” which is a song made entirely of snaps.