Machines to Interpret for Them

I’m reading Inventing Entertainment, an enthusiast’s history of the player piano, and while it is generally light reading (most interesting for anecdotes), I’m occasionally finding really provocative stuff in it. One such passage, an excerpt from Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice:

“By chance,” explains the main character, Peter Hogarth, an eminent mathematician, “a program tape for a digital computer might also fit into a player piano, and although the program has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with music—it might refer to some fifth-order equation—nevertheless, when it is put in the machine, it produces notes. And it might also happen that not all the notes thus produced will be in total chaos, but that here and there one will hear a musical phrase.”

The book is about scientists trying to decipher messages from outer space—to convert them from one form of encoding to another that we can understand. This passage is a great literal example of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication.

In Hall’s model, messages are always encoded by the sender and decoded by the recipient. This encoding and decoding can be sociocultural (like in-group language, or based on common cultural references), and that is Hall’s main focus, but the model also works for technological encoding and decoding. What Hogarth describes in the passage above is the co-dependence of data and decoder for meaning making. The punch card on its own does not mean anything; only in conjunction with the computer does it mean mathematically. In conjunction with the player piano, these holes could signify music.

This idea is actually carried out in Yasunao Tone’s Musica Iconologos. The album is based on two Chinese poems. Digital images of the poem’s ideograms (or perhaps of photos representing the ideograms, I’m still unclear on that) are the equivalent of Hogarth’s computer tape. These binary files, instead of being read to create images, are read as audio data in a different computer program. Through what Hall might call an “oppositional reading,” data encoded for one purpose is decoded for another, creating a screechy, noisy, Fluxus-y composition.

(That’s an embedded Flash player with an excerpt, for you RSSers and Tumblr dashboarders.)

In spite of Tone’s avowed interest in indeterminacy (he was loath to make recordings, since they are so repeatable—this data composition was a way to remove intentionality), the liner notes for Musica Iconologos reveal the human hand that intervened in this otherwise pure replacement of decoding processes:

The sound files produced were very short in duration, averaging out around 20 milliseconds in length. […] My task as the digital editor and sound designer was to uncover and shape the larger sounds that lay within each short 20 ms burst.  I accomplished this by expanding the sound to a length that best fit the meaning of the word or picture the sound represented.  Then, if necessary, I digitally mixed or merged several projections together to achieve a desired grouping of data, following the structure (word groupings) of the poem and the implicit meaning of the particular word or picture in question.  Also, where appropriate, digital pitch shifting was applied to certain sounds in order to reflect the phonetic implications of the spoken Chinese word.  It should be noted that there was never any exclusion or repeated inclusion of sounds based on their final result.  To his credit, Tone always remained true to the poem’s structure regardless of his personal impressions of the music, and in a sense the sounds were a type of “chance operation” in form, as their final organization was established long before the project began production.

That quotation is from the sound designer for the album, Craig Kendall. Because the sounds produced by a clean swap of decoding software were too short, he had to lengthen them. Beyond that, and quite surprising to me, is the discussion of how pitch and structure was altered for artistic effect. It is rather telling, I think, how apologetic he becomes at the end of this passage, trying to recover the idea that something with so much human judgment can remain a “chance operation.” (Of course, even things that seem more obviously to be chance operations are never really devoid of human influence.)

I’m always looking for more examples of this kind of data music, so if you know of anything cool, drop me a line!

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer (1955): The Synthesis of Music (“Blue Skies,” by Irving Berlin)

This clip is from a series of 45s released by RCA to accompany the announcement of its then-new Electronic Music Synthesizer. In it, the narrator guides you through the creation of a synth version of “Blue Skies,” by Irving Berlin. It’s fun to hear someone talk about synthesizers from a time when the technology was so new. (So new, in fact, that the tunes on it were still sequenced using a player piano-like roll.)

What I find craziest about this is how fragile the song sounds at the end, like the oscillators are always about to fall out of tune, and the rhythm is about to come undone. With so much talk about the objectivity and precision of machines, it’s nice to hear machines sounding so close to the edge of failure.

You can listen to mp3s of the whole box set here.

(via Chris Ariza)