Machines to Play Machines for Them

The reason posts have been a little light lately (not in number, but in content) is that the thesis season has begun in earnest. A little over a week ago my classmates and I gave our preliminary thesis presentations, making a “public commitment,” to use the words of my thesis advisor. This post is an adaptation/abridgement of that presentation into blog format, as another form of “public commitment” and as a place to direct people when they ask me “So what is your thesis about, anyway?”

The Musical Gorilla: Musicality and Automaticity in Mechanical Musical Instruments

In H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, a woman sees a pianola in a man’s living room. She asks him, “Does this thing play?” He replies,

Like a musical gorilla, with fingers all of one length and a sort of soul.

The research I’m doing revolves around statements like this—evaluations of machines that make music. I’m interested in how the various parties involved with these instruments (makers, marketers, users, listeners, and so on) think of them. Are they machines? musicians? Should their music be evaluated like human-produced music? If not, then how should one evaluate machine-produced music?

Only when you can forget your fingers can your brain be perfectly free. It surely stands to reason, then, that the ready made technique of the player piano sets the musician’s brain free to attend to the purely artistic side of the performance.

-Ernest Newman

The gramophone concerns itself with “sound” in a general sense, reproducing it as it is heard, rather than as it is made (this is why your speakers don’t look like little mouths, violins, pianos, etc., but rather like abstracted ears). The various iterations of player pianos, on the other hand, are concerned with how a particular kind of sound is produced (this is why player pianos generally look like—yes—pianos).

There are a lot of good books written about the early history of sound recording, from all sorts of musicological, historical, and theoretical perspectives. When I wrote my undergrad thesis, I had to grapple with many of them. The player piano, on the other hand, is less thoroughly theorized (probably for good reason—How long has it been since you’ve seen a player piano in person? What about an iPod?).

For me, though, the absence of big, authoritative works is a blessing. The various ideas about sound reproduction from the numerous authors who’ve theorized it can come into play without crushing me under the weight of a thousand master’s theses about the history of recorded sound. Because, on a fundamental level, the work of machines like the pianola (or Pianola) is different. These are not machines that try to replicate and model natural phenomena: these are machines that play other machines.

“Where, in truth, is the non-mechanical musical instrument? […] The anti-piano-player pianist is, in fact, a million removes from mere nature; he would be helpless without the huge box of mechanical tricks in front of him.”

-Ernest Newman

A fundamental idea in the kind of technology studies-informed work I do is that machines are not cold, objective things that go about their existence independent of humans. In their use, manufacture, and physical composition, they reflect the influences of countless actors. This is as true of the piano as it is of the automatic piano-player. The piano represents a certain kind of musical interaction—the pressing of keys to call out notes in specific intervals, the ability to change dynamic level, the sustain pedal. The player piano is a physical reading of the piano’s interface, which in its design reflects decisions about what is “musical,” “essential,” “artistic,” or “automatic.”

So what?

“Everybody is an electronic musician. Some of us push only one button in a performance, and some of us push many buttons.”

-Vladimir Ussachevsky

In the modern musical environment, automated music is basically omnipresent. In addition to mp3 players and car radios, we have music games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band that reinsert physical machinery into the path of sound reproduction. Every song now on the Billboard charts (and elsewhere, for that matter) arises from the manipulation and interaction of machines to produce sounds, and with effects like Auto-Tune, this machinery comes to the foreground in new ways. The player piano plays a formative role in our modern relationship to musical machines (I think); by looking at this example at a historical remove, hopefully I can shed some light on our current music listening and making situation.

While exciting, this is all quite broad now (and the stuff in this blog post is maybe half of what I presented last week), so it will surely contract and expand in various ways and areas many times before I’m through.

Projects drift; that’s why they’re called research projects.

-Bruno Latour

Stay tuned for more exciting player-piano based updates with the thrilling “thesis” tag. (They’ll hopefully come in more manageably-sized chunks after this one.)