Decades before the advent of “musique concrète,” Luigi Russolo--a key Futurist painter and musician at the beginning of the twentieth century--introduced the intonarumori--a family of instruments that used the whole noise spectrum as the basic medium for music making. These large boxes were operated with levers and wheels that exercised strings and produced sounds via loudspeakers; Russolo not only built many of these instruments, but also designed a music notation system and a sound taxonomy to serve as an instrumentation compendium.

Since these instruments have since been destroyed, the purpose of this paper is to describe research efforts for resurrecting Russolo’s intonarumori, as a way to preserve what is seen as important musical heritage. The authors propose a software-based platform for intonarumori sound restitution. Their new designs either use actual materials or build on physical synthesis modeling techniques. Since the recordings of Russolo’s intonarumori are few and unreliable, it is difficult to assess whether the new instruments perform exactly as the originals, although it is a plausible guess that the differences, if any, are slim.

This easy-to-read paper will interest both musicologists and computer scientists who are interested in computer music applications. Also, interested readers can listen to Russolo’s musical experiments on YouTube.