Feeling Musical Machines

Joseph Auner

This book grows out of a series of articles, seminars, and lectures I have developed in recent years exploring the central role of music technologies in how composers, musicians, and listeners create and experience music since the early years of the twentieth century. I argue not only that interactions with specific devices from the phonograph to smart phone musical applications have profoundly shaped musical developments in popular and classical music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but that increasingly our experience of the world, our bodies and voices, and our conceptions of race and gender are mediated by and through technology.

The wordplay in my title, Feeling Musical Machines, is intended to put forth a set of interrelated propositions concerning the far-reaching impact and ramifications of the introduction of new electronic instruments and sound technologies, which together with new media of reproduction and transmission set the stage for the explosion in recent decades of inexpensive music hardware and software. My emphasis on “feeling” points in part to the physical and haptic dimensions of playing both traditional instruments and new musical interfaces as well as to the strong emotional connections people develop with technologies, with the reported love affairs with the Siri voice interface on the

Iphone as only the most recent example. I am interested in remarkable depth of involvement that composers and musicians have with their instruments, developed through years of practice that allow one to realize fully one’s potential as a musician, which in turn is also often experienced as realizing central elements of one’s sense of

1 self. We are used to hearing about the almost mystical attachment musicians have to the touch and sound of historical instruments, whether it be a Stradivarius violin, a fortepiano from the time of Mozart, or a Fender Stratocaster guitar that had been played by Jimi

Hendrix. But I have been exploring the more surprising development that even recently invented electronic instruments now attract their own passionate connoisseurs, restoration experts, and real and virtual museums. As I have discussed in several articles, many composers and musicians have made the expressive implications of music technologies central to the meaning of their music, ranging from the nostalgic effect of old and obsolete machines to the evocations of overwhelming power associated with the technological sublime. And just as with any relationship, people seem to fall in love with such devices as much for their quirks and peculiarities as for their capabilities. With the notion of “musical machines” I also evoke the blurring of the borders between the human and machine as we increasingly rely on technological systems to communicate and experience the world, marked especially by the ubiquity of artificial voices in our environment. New developments in cognitive neuroscience have revealed complex interelations between the mechanisms in our brains that process and produce music, language, movement, and consciousness. From some posthuman perspectives we might be regarded ourselves as essentially “feeling musical machines.” And with the burgeoning artificial intelligence research, which has led to software ranging from

Pandora’s music genome project, computer programs that compose in the style of Mahler and Scott Joplin, and ever more sophisticated robots, it seems clear that humans will no longer have a monopoly when it comes to feeling musical.

The project will intersect with the rich interdisciplinary scholarship on music and

2 technology, sound studies, sound art, and the history of the senses, but it address a major lacunae in many of these studies by exploring the central role of specific technologies in relationship to composers and their works. Too often writings in these areas fail to engage with how individual technologies actually work, how their capabilities and limitations shape individual pieces, and the degree to which such devices become part of the musical experience of composers, musicians, and listeners. Indeed the invisibility and silence of technology in this literature, including many writings explicitly dealing with music and technology, reflects the degree to which we quickly become habituated to even the most dramatic technological transformations in how we live our lives and experience our world and each other.

Building on my background as a recording engineer and extensive experience with analog and digital synthesizers, my book will consider development of specific music technologies from the turn of the twentieth century through the present. As the rough chapter outline below indicates, the book will have a chronological organization, starting around the turn of the twentieth century and moving up to the present. But all the chapters will engage with contemporary developments and present day ramifications. My approach also opens up new perspectives on several familiar topics in musical scholarship, including the transformation of tonality in music theory and composition early in the century, historical performance practice, and sketch studies and the creative process. At this point, I anticipate that the focus of the discussion will be primarily on musical trends in Europe and

North America, but I will also draw on the considerable body of scholarship in many fields that is showing that the story of music technology up to this point is by no means exclusive

3 to the west, just as the most dramatic impact in the future is likely to be in other parts of the world. The book grows out of a popular course on music technology that I have offered for non-majors, majors, and grad students, and will be written to written to be accessible and engaging for those audiences as well as interested scholars and general readers in other fields. The two attached articles are intended to give a sense of my approach. The recent syllabus I have attached is also useful in giving a sense of the range of scholarship I will be drawing on for the book.

The focus on my sabbatical work this fall will be to develop an overarching theoretical framework for the book as a whole through further readings in history and philosophy of science and technology, history of the senses, sound studies, digital culture, and other interdisciplinary approaches. In addition to auditing a computer science course on musical interfaces, I will be engaging with archivists, composers, and engineers at the

Sacher Stiftung, MIT Media Lab and. Based on this material, which will be the focus of introduction, I will then start revising the other chapters using several articles I have already published as starting points. While the issues I have articulated here are obviously very broad, I am envisioning a book of fairly modest dimensions (approximately 80,000 words, approximately 5-10 black and white illustrations per chapter) with the seven chapters serving as focused case studies of important moments of the story of music and technology over the last century and a quarter.

4 Feeling Musical Machines Overview

1. Introduction: How we Became Phonometrographers.

Establishing a historical and theoretical foundation.

2. Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality (1890-1930s)

Implications of the new musical technologies that emerged at the end of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth century for how composers began to rethink tonal materials and the nature of tonality. Mahler, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Antheil,

Cowell, and Ruth Crawford Seeger linked with recording, phonography, player pianos, and the burgeoning sciences of sound. Adapting material from “Weighing, Measuring,

Embalming Tonality.” In Tonality 1910-1950. Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, forthcoming 2012

3. Machine Age (Developments between the World Wars)

Technology and the primitive, Zeitoper, issues of race and gender

Adapting some material for “Soulless Machines and Steppenwolves: Renegotiating

Masculinity in Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf.” In Siren Songs, eds. Mary Ann Smart.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 222-236

4. Working with Sound (Post-WWII)

Rethinking the Creative Processes in Electronic Music, Recording Studio, Computer

Music.

5 Big Science, Cold War contexts, the idea of “parameters,” Popular Music Production, sound, Sketch studies of electro-acoustic music

5. Wanted Dead and Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro Acoustic Music

Making Old Machines Speak (1970s to the present)

Techno-nostalgia, vintage synthesizers, analog, vinyl, computer simulations, challenges of performing electro-acoustic works of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Nono.

Drawing on “Making Old Machines Speak” in Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 2/1 (2001)

“Wanted Dead and Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro-Acoustic Music from Abbey Road to IRCAM.” Communicating About Music, eds. Roberta Marvin and

Craig Monson. University of Rochester Press, forthcoming.

6. Losing your Voice (1990s to the present)

Artificial Voices, Vocoder, Autotune: Kraftwerk Radiohead, Emerson Lake and Palmer,

Posthuman Sampled voices in instrumental hip hop and related genres; Ubiquitous

Computing, Music Software, unintentional singers

Adapting material from “‘Sing it for me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular

Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128 (2003): 98-122. “Losing your

Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable”

Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing. Ed. Ulrik Ekman.

Cambridge: MIT Press (forthcoming 2009).

7. Feeling Musical Machines (turn of the twenty-first century to the present).

6 Touching/Feeling—Issues of Interface and Subjectivity.

New musical interfaces, hyper instruments, games and toys, networked composition and performance.