In April 1914, an Italian theater audience expecting an evening of orchestral music instead saw a stage crowded with brightly colored wooden boxes fitted with giant metal megaphones. When performers began cranking levers and the hall filled with mechanical howling and scraping, the crowd tore up velvet seats and attacked the musicians. This episode explores the man behind that riot, Luigi Russolo, a futurist painter, composer and inventor who lived from 1885 to 1947 and argued that the Industrial Revolution had changed how humans hear.

We follow Russolo from a quiet seminary graduation in 1901 into the roaring industrial boom of Milan, through his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises, and into the studio where he and assistant Ugo Piatti built the intonarumori, families of rumblers, cracklers, howlers and scrapers controlled by cranks and pitch levers. He devised enharmonic notation with flowing lines instead of notes, staged the 1917 Grand Concerto Futuristico, and painted works like The Solidity of Fog and Dynamism of a Car. The episode also confronts the movement’s entanglement with Italian fascism, the loss of every original instrument in World War II, and the lone 1921 recording by his brother Antonio that remains our only sonic window into the machines.

• Why Russolo believed Beethoven and Mozart could no longer express the mechanized human experience
• The inner mechanics of the intonarumori: rosined wheels, tensioned strings and drum membranes
• How the 1921 recording paired noise machines with a conventional orchestra, and why that compromise proved invaluable
• Marinetti, the Fascist Manifesto, Mussolini-sponsored exhibitions and biographer Luciano Chessa’s findings on Russolo’s 1933 return to Italy
• The lineage from Moholy-Nagy and musique concrete to industrial rock and laptop producers sampling subway sounds