This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For the ancient Greeks, sirens were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks

in the sea. Their music was so beautiful it was said that sailors were powerless against it.

They would turn their ships towards these sea nymphs and crash into the reefs around them.

In Homer's Odyssey, there's a story where Odysseus and his men are traveling near an area

that sirens are known to inhabit. In Odysseus knows that if he hears the siren song,

his ship is going to sink, but he still wants to hear what they sound like, so he comes up with a

plan. Odysseus has his men tie him to the mast so that he can't take control of the ship.

Then Odysseus has his men fill their own ears with beeswax so they can't hear anything.

The plan works. Odysseus gets to hear the sirens call, his men don't, and they sail on to safety,

with Odysseus pleading with his crew to crash the boat the whole way.

And for over 2,000 years or so, that's what a siren was, a creature that made a beautiful sound.

That all changed in 1819, when a French engineer named Charles Cagnard de la Tour

decided to call the artificial noise maker he was working on. The siren.

And this new mechanical siren became one of the signature sounds of the modern world.

Sirens warn people about eminent bombing raids during WWI, sirens announce incoming fire engines

and ambulances and police. Thanks in part to the siren, the world of the early 20th century had

become a lot louder than any time in human history. And we can probably assume that these sirens

that people heard in cities all over the world sounded nothing like the siren songs of Greek myth.

At least to most people, one man, a composer named Arseny Avramov, heard music in the

cacophony of the modern world, and he tried to create a composition, a symphony, from the clatter

of the newly formed Soviet Union. In this little bit of a departure from the typical 99%

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