page_title: Noise in music
section_title: Machine music
hierarchical_section_title: Noise in music / Noise as a feature of music / Traditional music / Europe / Machine music
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Edgard Varèse English: Edgard Varèse
context_page_description: In music, noise is variously described as unpitched, indeterminate, uncontrolled, loud, unmusical, or unwanted sound. Noise is an important component of the sound of the human voice and all musical instruments, particularly in unpitched percussion instruments and electric guitars. Electronic instruments create various colours of noise. Traditional uses of noise are unrestricted, using all the frequencies associated with pitch and timbre, such as the white noise component of a drum roll on a snare drum, or the transients present in the prefix of the sounds of some organ pipes.
  The influence of modernism in the early 20th century lead composers such as Edgard Varèse to explore the use of noise-based sonorities in an orchestral setting. In the same period the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo created a "noise orchestra" using instruments he called intonarumori. Later in the 20th century the term noise music came to refer to works consisting primarily of noise-based sound.
  In more general usage, noise is any unwanted sound or signal.
context_section_description: In the 1920s a fashion emerged for composing what was called "machine music"—the depiction in music of the sounds of factories, locomotives, steamships, dynamos, and other aspects of recent technology that both reflected modern, urban life and appealed to the then-prevalent spirit of objectivity, detachment, and directness. Representative works in this style, which features motoric and insistent rhythms, a high level of dissonance, and often large percussion batteries, are George Antheil's Ballet mécanique (1923–25), Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231 (1923), Sergei Prokofiev's ballet Le pas d'acier (The Steel Leap, 1925–26), Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry (an orchestral episode from his ballet Steel, 1926–27), and Carlos Chávez's ballet Caballos de vapor, also titled HP (Horsepower, 1926–32). This trend reached its apex in the music of Edgard Varèse, who composed Ionisation in 1931, a "study in pure sonority and rhythm" for an ensemble of thirty-five unpitched percussion instruments.
caption: Edgard Varèse, who explored noise in an orchestral setting.