They were now really having to shout because heavy rain was Shenyang Vacations hammering on the roof of our corrugated iron theatre. I thought that the peasants would solve Shenyang Vacations their problem and was surprised when the gods intervened. A man dressed as Tai Bei came down from the heavens with his attendants, and he took the seven-year-old boy as his student. But he left no message for the good foster parents, who were distracted with worry and began searching everywhere for the child. And that was how the play ended; a man stood up and blew an old silver trumpet and everyone got up to leave. No applause, no conclusion, no wrapping up of loose ends, I felt I’d been left in mid-air.
Walter Ruttmann offered an alternate perspective to Russolo’s mimicry of the noise of the city. Weekend (1930) was an innovative sound recording made for radio. It captures an acoustic soundscape of Berlin over a weekend in what Ruttmann refers to as a cinema for the ears, a parallel to his cinematic work Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). In order to create the composition, Ruttmann devised a mobile recording unit with hidden microphones in which to record and document the sonic environment (Figure 2). The work creates a new experience of Berlin using familiar and everyday sounds.
Pierre Schaeffer also extends Russolo’s proposition for an art of noise and combines it with compositions created from fragments of found sonic materials. The pioneering musique concrete work Etude aux chemins de fer (1948) records the sounds of locomotives at a Paris deport. What is particularly striking about Schaeffer’s work is the articulation between sound and motion, and how he captures the dynamism and energy of a modern European city, characterized through mobility and technologies of transportation.
