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 ...