An Enactive Approach to the Preservation of Musical Instruments Reconstructing Russolo's Intonarumori

In the early twentieth century, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo made a set of instruments called Intonarumori. In each, sound was generated inside a box with a horn, by means such as a wheel scraping on a string, controlled by a crank and one or more levers. The original instruments were all destroyed during the Second World War. This paper describes reconstructions using digital controllers attached to a lever and crank and sound generated by a physical modelling paradigm to mimic the original construction of wheel, string, box and horn. This allows for a kind of 'preservation' of the original instruments whereby their original enactive properties are recreated.