Noise for Airports

Old Media: Interactivity and Mechanical Music

For my department, I wrote up this short piece about why I study “old media.” I’ve cross-posted it here, for your enjoyment. It’s (hopefully) a nice basic-level intro to the kind of work I’m doing.

By Nick Seaver

“So what do player pianos have to do with media studies?”

I get that question a lot when I tell people about my CMS thesis topic. A lot of media studies work focuses on new stuff: “the” media, social networks, TV on the internet, and so on. The question is not so much about whether player pianos are media (I assure you, they are), but rather about their usefulness to media studies: Why study some rickety old obsolete technology? What can we learn about media from a technology that we don’t even use anymore?

It turns out, we can learn quite a bit. Thanks to a CMS grant, I recently got the chance to spend a week at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. I was there to check out the Howe Collection of Musical Instrument Literature—a treasure trove of documents relating to mechanical music at the turn of the 20th century. The collection includes all sorts of material, from music catalogs and advertisements to company letterhead and sales manuals. The first thing you realize leafing through all this material? This technology was not always obsolete!*

It’s sort of obvious to say, but too easily forgotten: the player piano may seem obsolete now, but for the people who invented and used the various devices we lump together as “player pianos” today, the technology was very much alive and in use. So for someone like me, who is interested in the history and use of these machines, the first thing to do is to forget what you think you know about rinky-tink old machines and let the documents speak for themselves. Famous pianists of the day are all over the advertisements, making grand claims like: “Anyone who hears the Pianola will surely think it is a great virtuoso that plays” or “The Pianola is the only instrument that allows the player to interpret with feeling and emotion.”

“Interpret?” Another benefit of taking a closer look at these old technologies is that memory is not always kind. The common take on player pianos is that they are completely automatic and noisy things that sort of approximate human playing. Actually, most of the various kinds of player pianos were interactive… (Click ahead toward the end of the video below to see the Pianola in action.)

Although they took care of “remembering” the notes, player pianos were fitted with all sorts of devices that allowed users to alter playback: levers to vary the speed, pedals that allowed control over dynamic level, buttons that could change the relative volume of melody and accompaniment. These interactive features encouraged listeners to remain involved with playback, and these operators were called “pianolists,” after the Aeolian Pianola, the earliest popular player piano.

“Live” music as we think of it today didn’t exist before audio recording—it was impossible for a sound to not be live. The player piano makes things a bit more complicated: is it still live if the notes are all punched on a roll in advance but “interpreted” by a live pianolist? Advertisements showing the ghostly hands of famous pianists on the keys suggested perfect fidelity: the parts of your piano would move exactly how they did when Rachmaninoff or Paderewski played. Would this recording, played on an actual piano, count as “live?”

These issues are not just weird historical relics: anxieties about technology and performance continue on today. Think of the debates about Auto-Tune, lip-syncing, Guitar Hero, turntablism, pre-recorded backing tracks, laptop DJs, and countless other musical technologies. If we start from the assumption that the phonograph represents “fundamental” sound reproduction and that the “natural” way to use the record is to passively listen (although this was not always the case), then these technologies seem like strange new complications of recording and performance. If, on the other hand, we let alternative technologies like the player piano back into our history, then these messy performance/recording technologies seem less strange and less new.

So, what do player pianos have to do with media studies?

By looking back at a technology no longer in widespread use, we can find the new in the old—the promise that player pianos held for those who invented and used them when they were new. This perspective helps us look at our present situation and find the old in the new—the ways in which complicated arrangements of performing humans and machines are not just a product of 21st century technology. Hopefully this historical perspective will help us to realize that unusual performance technologies are not inherently “unnatural,” allowing us to tun passive “listeners” into active “players” and giving us the freedom to experiment.

*And, if you talk to the dedicated and generous communities of collectors and enthusiasts, they’ll tell you how the automatic piano technology of the late ’20s still hasn’t been surpassed!

An apology to sticklers: in the interest of keeping things simple, I’ve not distinguished between the reproducing piano and the standard player piano (not to mention the dozens of different makes and models, all unique). The interactive features described above were relatively common; reproducing pianos included extra features that allowed the formerly user-controlled parameters to be automated, thereby making possible the reproduction of famous pianists’ performances that had been recorded on special recording pianos. So, if you wanted to sit back and listen, you could. However, even reproducing pianos would let you turn off the reproducing functionality and take control of interpretation yourself.

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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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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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!

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.)