A Brief History of Re-performance

The long wait is over, and my master’s thesis for the MIT Comparative Media Studies department is now online. It’s a relief to have it done (in this incarnation at least—I’ll be crushing it down to article length this summer), and kind of nice to remember that I started blogging the summer before I started at MIT, trying to get my brain back into shape for grad school.

The thesis ended up in a different place than I could have imagined at the start (of course), and as a result I have a few qualms about it. First is the language: I very much value academic writing that is not in “academese.” As a result of time pressures, the appeal of well-worn habits, and really, time pressures, this thesis is mostly in a pidgin academese. I know that is a barrier for a lot of people, and my plan is to essentially post the whole thesis on this blog in installments, rephrasing things in a way that makes more sense for the everyday world we live in.

Second is the methodology: I started with the idea that I could somehow capture all about the player piano, from its pre-history to Hedy Lamarr’s missile guidance patent, to the punched-paper rolls of the RCA Mark I synthesizer. Of course I had to narrow, and what I ended up with treats essentially four categories of player-piano-related objects. I’ve learned a lot about the work of doing media history—methodological obligations, common traps, fallacies, and so on—but given the scope of the project, I wish I could start all over and be a rigorously theoretical historian, more thoroughly practicing what I preach. For a thesis that values context above all, I wish I could have included more of it!

In any case, I am happy with how it all turned out—an exploration of an unusual form of music reproduction in three parts: material representations, labor reconfigurations, and scientific productions. I’ve copied the abstract below the jump, or you can read the PDF yourself here.

Stay tuned for the hyperlinked, colloquial, bloggy version, coming soon to a sound/music/technology blog near you.

Abstract

Discussions of music reproduction technology have generally focused on what Jonathan Sterne calls “tympanic” reproduction: the recording and playback of sounds through microphones and speakers. While tympanic reproduction has been very successful, its success has limited the ways in which music reproduction is popularly imagined and discussed.

This thesis explores the history of “re-performance,” an alternative mode of reproduction epitomized by the early twentieth-century player piano. Re-performance centers around the recreation of a sound’s source rather than sound waves themselves.The thesis begins with a discussion of nineteenth-century piano recorders and the historical role of material representation in the production of music. It continues with the advent of player pianos in the early twentieth century that allowed users to “interpret” prerecorded material, blurring the line between performance and reproduction and inspiring popular reflection on the role of the mechanical in music. It concludes with the founding of the American Piano Company laboratory in 1924 and the establishment of a mechanically founded rhetoric of fidelity. Bookending this history is an account of a performance and recording session organized by Zenph Studios, a company that processes historical tympanic recordings to produce high-resolution data files for modern player pianos. Zenph’s project appears futuristic from the perspective of tympanic reproduction, but is more readily understood in terms of the past, through the history of re-performance, suggesting a need for renewing critical attention on re-performative technologies. 

Contemporary developments in music reproduction such as music video games and sampling may make new sense considered in the context of re-performance. This alternative history aims to provide a ground on which such analyses could be built.