Posts tagged me

A Brief(er) History: Gould’s Hologram

This post is part of my attempt to port my master’s thesis into blog form. Over the next [arbitrary and probably long amount of time], I’ll be posting longer-form pieces that track the various themes of the thesis, from the dominance of the speaker/microphone paradigm to the use of scientific rhetoric by 1920s player piano laboratories. I’m hoping they’ll be intelligible on their own, but as they go up, you can see them all together in chronological order here. You could also skip ahead and download the real deal PDF. This first installment is more or less directly copied from my introduction—a description of an unusual Glenn Gould concert.

Zenph Studios: Making Pianistic History

“I was totally wowed,” a woman in the audience told CBC News. “The only thing missing was a hologram of Gould actually playing.” ^[1]

In 2006, on what would have been Glenn Gould’s 74th birthday, in the studio named after him at the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, Zenph Studios produced a concert featuring his performance of the work that launched his career when he recorded it for Columbia Masterworks 50 years previous: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Variations, published in 1741, had been considered esoteric harpsichord music until Gould’s interpretation on the piano revived them for a modern audience—an aria and 30 short contrapuntal variations on its bass theme. Zenph’s concert was unusual in many respects, but two facts suggested that it should not have happened at all: Gould famously abandoned live performance at the age of 31, and he died at 51.

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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.

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Pianistic Translations

In doing research on the player piano, a certain temptation has come up many times. Given the popularity of the phonograph as an object of academic inquiry (and the persistence of its basic working principles), it is basically mandatory that I compare the pianistic reproduction I’m looking at to phonographic reproduction.

So first, there is a question: What kinds of things am I comparing? I just called my topic “pianistic” reproduction, which is basically a working term meaning “with discrete notes and attacks, like a piano.” “Phonographic” reproduction, on the other hand, would mean “like a phonograph.” Basing my terms specifically on the technologies is not ideal: like a piano in what way? like a phonograph in what way? Jonathan Sterne did the hard work for the phonograph and ended up with “tympanic reproduction”—sound reproduction that is modeled on the eardrum (like all microphones and speakers). That seems to collect together iPods, phonographs, 8-track tapes, etc. in a meaningful way—based on a foundational shared principle. At the moment, my only parallel move would be to alter “pianistic” so that instead of referring to “piano” the technology, it refers to “pianism” the mode of engagement with keyboard instruments. This is a little obtuse, still working out terms, but I hope you get the idea.

Click through for a bunch of examples, after the jump.

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Machines to Piss Them Off

This weekend, I was at the New England Conservatory to see a performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique. The piece, originally written in 1924, called for a siren, several electric bells, two airplane propellers, a set of xylophones, a pair of live pianists, some bass drums, and sixteen player pianos. Syncing the pianos proved impossible at the time, so eventually the piece was performed with a single player piano. In the 1990s, Paul Lehrman and Schirmer revisited the piece with MIDI, used the magic of computers to sync up the pianos, and the rest is history (or a series of concerts).

There is a certain pleasure in being able to finally play a piece as the artist “intended”—Antheil never heard the piece as originally scored. But, of course, “intent” is a tricky thing. What do you do if an artist intends something that is not possible? The modern, MIDI-enabled Yamaha Disklaviers are not the same instruments as the player pianos of the 1920s. They can be synced together, and they are certainly pianos, but they do not function in at all the same way as the pneumatic contraptions Antheil would have known. One effect of this, I realized part way through the performance, was that Antheil had no way of knowing what 16 player pianos playing in sync would sound like.

It turns out, sort of muddy. The performance I saw had just 8 Disklaviers (the player piano part is written for four voices, with four pianos each, but we just had two pianos per voice), but even so, when all those sustain pedals are down and the pianos are hammering away, it sounds like mush. The rapid-fire melodies and clangorous chords just form a sort of “mrrrrrrr”-sounding backdrop to the much more lively playing of expert xylophonists and noisy sirens and bells. Antheil wouldn’t have known this—by intending something not possible, he had no way of evaluating its sound.

Not that I minded the muddiness. What it made plain to me, though, was how Antheil’s concern was not so much sonic as spectacular. The idea of sixteen player pianos bashing away at once is more important than the sound of them. As a contrast, take Conlon Nancarrow’s pieces: they play tons of notes, with the sustain down (and in a few cases call for two player pianos at once). However, Nancarrow modified his pianos, putting metal strips on the hammers of one, lacquered leather and tacks on the hammers of the other. These modifications resulted from actual experience with the sounds of his pieces, and a concern for them as sounds. The hardened hammers made for more clearly defined attacks that stand out above the muddy resonance of sustained notes.

As Paul Lehrman told it in a talk before the concert, Antheil wanted to cause a riot. He was considered an enfant terrible of the music world, known for putting a gun on top of his piano before a performance, so people wouldn’t leave. (And his eventual autobiography would be titled Bad Boy of Music.) The piece was to be premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had caused riots a decade earlier. Listening to the piece, the riot-causing intent is quite legible—the siren sounds totally outrageous, the electric bells unreasonably loud. He succeeded, solidifying his reputation as a guy who liked to piss people off. Unfortunately, the US premiere in New York was advertised as a guaranteed riot, and the folks who showed up, apparently un-enraged by Antheil’s musical tantrum, didn’t riot. This solidified Antheil’s reputation as a guy who liked to piss people off, but not always how he intended.

My advisor, who was at the concert, asked me whether Antheil had some over-arching theory of mechanization in music. Player pianos, sirens, electric bells, and airplane propellors would seem to indicate that he had at least some predilection for the mechanical. (Not to mention the xylophone parts, which, according to Paul Lehrman, though played by very dextrous humans, were originally intended for xylophone-playing machines.) It seems that, for Antheil, using machines was just a means to provoke (although this is almost surely an over-generalization). The pianos bash away, and at one point, the human performers are silent while the pianos play solo, with excruciatingly long silences. The conductor stands somewhat helpless, while the audience waits for the inscrutable machines to get on with it.

Turning over all kinds of musical agency to these machines, Antheil seems to consider this dynamic of machine control as something to exploit to provocative ends. (Ironically enough, as he was eventually unable to control his player pianos enough to get them in sync, and at the New York premiere, an inexperienced siren player missed his cue, sending wailing noise through the rapidly emptying house.)

Ballet Mécanique was originally conceived as the score to a film of the same name by Fernand Léger. The two ended up going in separate directions and producing independent works (the film is about 15 minutes, the score about 30), but various attempts have been made to match up some of the music with the film. Embedded below (dashboard people, you’ll have to go to the actual site), you can watch the film in two parts and hear the piece, as recorded with a single player piano.

Mechanical Fidelity

This post is the first of many to come that will be little snippets of thesis-related thought. I’m focusing on a series of objects, people, and practices from the long and weird history of player pianos, and these blurbs are what come out. They’re in no particular order, and they might not make sense individually (although I hope they do). Comments on any aspect are welcomed!

Mechanical Fidelity

[photo ©Mark Manring]

Zenph Studios has a peculiar business model. From their website:

Zenph® Studios takes audio recordings and turns them back into live performances, precisely replicating what was originally recorded. Our software-based process extracts every musical nuance of a recorded performance, and stores the data in a high-resolution digital file. These re-performance files contain the details of how every note in the composition was played, including pedal actions, volume, and articulations – all with millisecond timings.

These digital files are played back on modern player pianos and recorded for sale. Zenph focuses on recreating the original operation of the piano—improvements to recording technology ensure that the new recording will be an improvement over the old. However, the idea of “re-performance” and the relationship between player pianos and acoustic recording have a long history.

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Data Frenzy at Sanders Theatre

Last night, I had the pleasure of being at the North American premiere of Japanese noise/data artist Ryoji Ikeda’s datamatics [ver. 2.0]. The “performance” was really more of a film: the audience watched a large, high-resolution projection of data, while listening to Ikeda’s signature electronically-produced sounds. (To complicate things a bit, the web page for datamatics says that “Ikeda employs real–time programme computations and data scanning” to produce at least some of the visuals,” so it’s not entirely like a film, I guess.) Ikeda was nowhere to be seen, unless you were one of the few people who realized that he was actually the quiet Japanese man by the projectors.

Ikeda’s work thrills at the edges of the sensorium, massing individual sounds until they blur into a mass, playing frequencies at the upper limit of human hearing, and running data across the screen at an ever-quickening, rapidly illegible pace. Warnings were posted at the door about strobe effects and loud volumes (woe to the accidental epileptic who encounters Ikeda’s work unaware), although neither were to be found in unusual amounts for an audience familiar with rock concerts. (My one complaint, and a small one, is that there was not enough volume; Ikeda’s work in bass registers is phenomenal, and the speaker system just wasn’t enough to rattle the audience. I heard that this was perhaps a concession to the fragility of the stained glass windows in the theater—understandable, but a pity.)

The work went through several “movements,” for lack of a better word, revolving (sometimes literally) around the stars, the genome, and then the show itself. This shifting in scale, from the microscopic to the macroscopic and referential to self-reflective, was a central concern, as was the palpably physical effect of such a data deluge. Having gone to the show with a synthetic biologist, I can report that at least one scientist enjoyed the implicit commentary about the incredible mass of modern scientific data, and the effect that these data have on perception. Ikeda may race through the genome in a matter of minutes, but even with years it stretches the limits of comprehension.

Of particular interest was the venue’s role in the history of modern data, and the invention of the science of acoustics. As Emily Thompson describes in her book, The Soundscape of Modernity, Sanders Theatre was considered “acoustically superb” and the president of Harvard wanted to identify what made it that way. Physicist Wallace Sabine was tasked with quantifying its acoustic properties, and he undertook extensive experimentation to measure reverberation.

Sabine amassed a great deal of data, and obsessed with the precision and accuracy of his measurements, “once threw out over three thousand measurements, representing several months’ work, after determining that the clothing worn by the observer (himself) had a small but measurable effect upon the outcome of his experiments” (Thompson 36). Seemingly overwhelmed by his data, Sabine had a difficult time determining how the properties of a room affected reverberation, until one day, he figured it out:

I was floundering in a confusion of observations and results which last night resolved themselves in the clearest manner. You may be interested to know that the curve, in which the duration of the residual sound is plotted against the absorbing material, is a rectangular hyperbola with displaced origin. […] This opens up a wide field. (Thompson 39)

Sabine’s organ pipe sounded data out of Sanders Theatre at the turn of the 20th century, bringing the former art of acoustics closer to science—the “confusion of observations” to the “clearest manner” of equations. Ikeda’s datamatics, at the start of the 21st century, condenses enormous masses of data back into confusion, toying with the clarity and discreteness of data and bringing it closer to art.

(You can watch a lecture by Emily Thompson on her book here.)