We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically.

To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.

Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.

Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations.

Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.

Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist's inspiration will extract from combined noises.

Luigi Russolo - 'The Art of Noises'

I long
for instruments
obedient
to my thought
and whim, with
their
contribution
of a whole
new world
of unsuspected
sounds,
which
will lend themselves
to the exigencies
of my inner rhythm.
-Edgard Varese, 1917

John Cage was not only a major figure of the musical avant-garde but also an avid mycologist, collector and consumer of mushrooms. His knowledge of the fungal world was legendary. In 1959 he even won 5 million lire on an Italian TV quiz show with mushrooms as his specialty subject.

Indeterminacy was a lecture performance work in which Cage recited a series of one minute stories and anecdotes in no particular order. Many of these stories related to his love of mushrooms and his experiences of collecting and studying them.

http://www.mundusloci.org/fungus/culture/cage2.htm

**

"Schoenberg had impressed upon me the need in music for structure (the division of a whole into parts). He said this should be accomplished by means of harmony, tonality. I had no feeling for harmony. I was interested in noises. I had to find what would be the proper structure for noises, and when I found it—an empty time structure—I found a proper structure for collaboration between two arts such as dance and music. And that, of course, covers all sorts of things, singing, for instance, anything, in fact, that
happens in time. "

"Four or five years ago, Cunningham would have said that the indeterminacy you can exercise in music is physically dangerous in dancing, because if two people moved with great strength, as they must to do certain things, and collide, you have something equivalent to a catastrophe which could make it impossible for either one of them to dance again. This is a problem with architecture—if the building is badly built, it will fall down. But then he has found ways to permit more freedom on the part of the dancers than formerly."

"I’ve noticed when I’ve seen dance that was not supported by the music, the dance immediately looks physically strong and rhythmic in its own right.
Each movement looks like a rhythm in a way that it never does if it’s going with the music. Now I simply can’t enjoy that, two things happening in unison. It just drives me berserk."


"The two things that music now is able to free itself from, as I see it, are pitches and rhythms, because those are the two aspects that were easily measured. It is difficult to measure tone quality or overtone structure, and also difficult to measure dynamics, but easy to measure tone and pitch; so as we give up those measurements, we’re able to move into a field of activity.

Now in dance, if you give up things that correspond to rhythm and pitch —namely, movement on two legs—what do you have? It’s almost as though you couldn’t give it up. You could, as you suggested, have a film, or the movement as we do have now of abstract shapes on film, or transmitted on television; but that isn’t the dance. And no matter how electronic our culture becomes, we will still have the question of two feet on the earth, and that very fact is going to produce dancers. There is nothing about scales and periodic rhythm in the art of music that makes them so eternally necessary.

Rather, I would agree with Busoni, who says that music gains its true nature when it is free of all such physical necessities; and where we notate regular rhythms, as Busoni says, they come to life only with rubato, they come to life only with irregularity.

But in the very nature of the dance are such questions as balance, muscle
control, left-right, left-right, etc."
John Cage