The Art of Noises (L’arte dei rumori) is the manifesto in which the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo argued that the industrial city had changed the human ear, and that music should embrace the full range of noise instead of the narrow palette of orchestral tone. Written in 1913 as an open letter to the Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, after a concert of his music, it was expanded and published as a book in 1916.
Russolo sorted noises into families, from roars, explosions and bangs to shouts and shrieks, and proposed instruments to produce them, which he then built as the intonarumori. The text is widely treated as the first theory of noise music. Its consequence for drone is indirect but real: by treating continuous mechanical sound as raw material worth organising, it opened a path to musique concrète, industrial music and, eventually, to compositions built from a single hum or grinding tone held over time.