From Futurist Noise to Ecological Listening: Russolo, Balla, and Neuhaus

In 1913, Carlo Carrà declared that painting, that "art of silence," must abandon its static, hieratic space and push into the accelerated time-frames of modern society. Sounds, noises, and smells, he argued, were dynamic where silence was still.

Visual languages, according to Carrà, now had to supply a "plastic equivalent" for the range of sensory stimuli the modern city offered: its theatres, music-halls, cinemas, docks, garages, and industries. Luigi Russolo's 1912–1913 painting Dinamismo di un'automobile captures a car rushing at full speed — for the Futurists a revelatory moment capable of overturning an entire tradition of aesthetic values overnight, from the Winged Victory of Samothrace to the harmonies of Beethoven’s Pastoral and Eroica symphonies. The sequence of acute angles dominating the picture plane illustrates both Carrà's "angles of the will" and the physical propagation of sound. The painting essentially reproduces the frequency variation of the Doppler effect — that perceptual alteration of a sound source in motion that city-dwellers know well when an ambulance or police siren passes by. As Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue explain in their Répertoire des effets sonores, the Doppler effect "alters" the relation between observer and emitting object, producing a "relative anamorphosis of the original signal." The effect, they continue, is not merely a sign of a necessary cause but "the trace of an event" — something that "refers to all the conditions surrounding the existence of the object and the way it appears in that situation."

Giacomo Balla's Velocità astratta + rumore (1913–1914), the central panel of a triptych charting a car approaching, passing, and driving off, similarly evokes that phenomenology of trace-events. Balla's transcription appears as a constellation of forms representing the peak of acoustic energy and its dispersal in multiple centres and directions. Futurist sensation-poetics extracts sound from mere causality and places it within a web of circumstantial causes — a significant precedent for later phenomenological approaches to the sonic dimension.

Half a century later, Max Neuhaus produced Listen, effectively a manifesto for active listening, presented in various formats from 1966 onward: a lecture, newspaper article, postcard, sticker, poster, and actual sound walks through New York neighbourhoods. This pivotal work hesitates between the domain of music and that of art, continuing Luigi Russolo's conquest of the "infinite variety of noise-sounds" while inheriting his fascination with industrial infrastructure. One walk-stage might focus on the sound of an electric power station; another leads participants beneath the Brooklyn Bridge to feel traffic-noise amplified by the bridge's vibrating structure.

Continuity between Russolo's "modern ear" and Neuhaus's choreographed listening does not, however, mean seamless progression. Neuhaus walked through a New York undergoing severe de-industrialisation in the 1960s–1970s crisis. That changed urban fabric became a resource for the downtown Manhattan art scene, where abandoned premises turned into lofts and exhibition spaces. Gordon Matta-Clark emphasised that "the availability of empty and neglected structures was a prime textural reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through modernisation." Neuhaus, alongside Matta-Clark and Richard Serra, confronted the "leftover public space" expanding across the city — a double-edged condition somewhere between degradation and experimental freedom.

"The omnipresence of emptiness, of abandoned housing and imminent demolition gave me the freedom to experiment with the multiple alternatives to one's life in a box as well as popular attitudes about the need for enclosure." — Max Neuhaus

Listening to the modern city became less an act of de-contextualisation or acoustic representation and more a direct participation in the heterogeneity of a changing, conflictual territory. The possibility of bypassing the concert hall's barriers led Neuhaus to abandon his career as a percussionist and re-situate music "outside, in the open air," thus moving simultaneously into in situ sculpture. His criticism of the sonic avant-garde — Russolo, Varèse, Cage — is well known: he felt they aimed "more at impressing the audience through the scandal of 'ordinary' sounds placed in a 'sacred' place than through the sounds themselves," without enabling audiences to "re-use that experience from a new perspective on the sounds of their day-to-day lives."

Abandonment of musical conventions manifested through novel social situations: the Water Whistle series (from 1974) was heard through the skin, underwater in several US swimming pools. Drive-in Music (1967) was re-modulated via car radio as audience-members drove through a succession of transmission zones. Fan Music (1967) linked sound sources on the city's rooftops to variations in sun, humidity, and temperature, creating "sonorities which intermixed to form a continuous aural topography across the urban terrain." This topographical approach re-founded musical experience: each sound functioned within convert-and-filter ecosystems that accounted for the timescales and different ways of listening of people passing through. The process became still more radical with Walk Through (1973–1977) in a Brooklyn subway passage, and Times Square (1977–1992, re-installed in 2002), where the "crossroads of the world" hosted sounds described as "almost plausible with the context."

Those sites exposed acoustic environments more directly than ever to the city's social fabric — whether a neglected back-passage or an impossibly dense square. Furthermore, the installations stretched time-frames across months or adopted a permanent state. Neuhaus also rejected signs, stripping the work of authorship. "I never do a piece where I'm not sure that 50 percent of the people who come across it will walk right through it without hearing it," he explained. His aesthetic therefore grounded its relationship to reality not in mimesis (imitation) but in mimetism — the power to "be hidden in the environment" without hiding, the ultimate fulfillment of an ecological project of cohabitation between art and everyday life.

It becomes possible now to interpret the "capacity to listen to our environment" posited by Listen as fundamentally different from Russolo's Futurist position. Russolo's idea of adapting the ear to modern life remained locked within aesthetic objectivation: he rejected traditional harmony and enhanced "noise-sounds," but merely shifted the object of the beautiful rather than challenging the hierarchy. Neuhaus tried instead to dismantle hierarchy entirely. With Listen, the acoustic heterogeneity of neighbourhoods — including the sounds of Puerto Rican communities — was defended against any implicit discrimination against "undesirable" noise.

In a 1974 New York Times op-ed he publicly warned against the discriminatory attitudes of noise-pollution activists. As Branden W. Joseph emphasised, "the aesthetic refusal to distinguish between proper and improper sounds relates to a political refusal to discriminate between 'proper' and 'improper' inhabitants of the urban public sphere." Those principles played out concretely in Neuhaus's urban design work, including the Sirens project (1978), in which confrontation with "one of the largest sonic events in daily life" led him to spend several years developing a new, patented sound system for emergency vehicles.

A set of 1991 drawings illustrating the Sirens project permits comparison with Futurist vehicle-sound representation. Though the chromatic range — red, green, blue — matches Balla's, the "angles of will" and disorderly jolts have given way to sharply defined volumes and diffusion-direction arrows. Where Russolo's painting had represented irregular distances between Doppler wave-fronts, Neuhaus's drawings show distinct, regular sonic events spaced by deliberate silences — the sketch of a design meant to accomplish something with sound rather than merely represent it. "I was able to give cars a sonic form," he declared. That shift — from representing phenomena to producing them — responded to a desire to act on the environment, socially (through design) and aesthetically (in in situ installations). It folded listening into the issue of social construction, and along with it the notion of soundscape.

Neuhaus's poetics of space was thus a politics of space: to control and "give shape" to sound without predetermining anyone's listening left every participant free to forge their own experience. There is no intrinsically bad sound, he insisted in his Sirens lectures. Art, practiced through a form of "attention to the sounds that we add to the environment," became a species of sound ecology — and, even more essentially, "listening to listening."