Both quotations I've chosen to respond to this week are not statements with which I profoundly agree or disagree, but which I think need qualification.

As Paul Hegarty closes in on a definition of noise in the opening paragraphs of Noise/Music, he states "First...noise needs a listener - probably some sort of animal or a non-organic machine with hearing capacities...The sound then has to be perceived as dangerous to the functioning of the hearing machine. Without these two moments, we might have a sound, but we would not have noise." While I agree with Hegarty's overall point that "noise is cultural," and understand that in the context of a book subtitled "a history" it is necessary to establish immediately that cultural perception of what constitutes noise changes over time, this quotation emblematizes his tendency to define noise only as sounds perceived to be a cultural threat.  He doesn't even mention that there is a more technical definition of the word noise, i.e. sound whose component frequencies are aperiodic.  I think that the technical definition of noise should have some place in the story of music that involves noise, at the very least to delineate the actual sonorous qualities of a large number of the previously taboo sounds that have gained entry into music over the course of the last 100 years or so.  While I understand that Hegarty wants to keep his definition of noise open enough to include even Fluxus's action-based art and text scores as part of the noise-music impulse, I think he's forcing that a little bit - they may be part of the same larger artistic impulse or cultural need as noise art you can hear, but to me he takes the acoustic teeth out of noise in order to give it bigger, sharper cultural teeth.  In a crude sweep over the course of the development of western music from plainchant to now, one sees that sounds with increasingly complex acoustic properties have gradually been accepted into the not-noise category, from the perfect fifth to the diminished seventh chord to Ives' polytonality to all manner of synthesized broadband sounds; the addition of an acoustic angle to Hegarty's overall "noise is cultural" argument would strengthen it and ground his theory in the physical realities of sound.

Luigi Russolo's second concluding bullet point largely sums up the gist of his call to action: "Futurist musicians should substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms." If I had only heard orchestra music written before 1913, I would probably say the same thing.  But orchestral music has completely changed since then, with much wider ranges of timbre opening up in the use of extended techniques, microtonality, unusual instrumentations, expanded percussion possibilities, etc.  It seems like Russolo was (rightly, I think) concerned about the inability of late Romantic orchestral writing to adequately address the artistic needs of an increasingly technological society, but that he was just not a visionary in the realm of orchestration/instrumentation.  He's right that various electronic means can be (and currently are) a large part of the way of the future, but his assertion that the orchestra has exhausted its timbral possibilities looks ridiculous in an era where we've already had decades to digest the work of Lachenmann, Grisey, and Sciarrino (to give only three out of many possible examples).  The question of whether the orchestra is artistically relevant today is still valid, but I think that's more due to the conditions of the orchestra as a cultural institution than to its sonic or stylistic limitations.  Since Russolo, composers have learned how consciously interact with the mechanical/acoustic conditions of sound production on traditional western instruments to achieve some of the same goals he had for new electronic instruments.