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In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility.

— Luigi Russolo

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More quotes by Luigi Russolo

We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.

This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.

This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor. In the pounding atmosphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Luigi Russolo (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.