Noise music is a type of music that employs noise as a musical resource. It is generally created with nontraditional musical instruments such as static, feedback, electronics, circuit bent instruments, or any other noise source.
The genre explores cacophony, repetitive sounds, atonal randomness, indeterminacy and dissonance.
The earliest noise music was created by futurist composer Luigi Russolo in the early 1910s. His piece "Veglio di una citt脿", released as a single in 1913, was the first ever noise song, shocking Italian audiences.
In the mid 1970s, free improvisational music was becoming more and more extreme, and groups like Dedalus created music bordering on noise.
In the late 1970s, industrial musicians like Boyd Rice (A.K.A. NON), SPK, and Maurizio Bianchi experimented with noise. NON's 1978 single "Pagan Muzak" is a landmark of industrial noise music. It was a 7" record made of many locked grooves, playable at any speed, which would loop infinitely until the owner decided to stop a groove and move on to the next.
The modern harsh noise genre is largely a creation of Japanoise musicians such as Hanatarash and Hijokaidan in the mid-1980s.
Other noise subgenres include harsh wall noise (based on unchanging "walls" of noise) and power electronics (based on modified electronics and screamed & shouted vocals). .