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Can Musical Machines Be Expressive? 449 g e n e r a l a r t i c l e Can Musical Machines Be Expressive? Views from the Enlightenment and Today S te v E n K em p er a n d R ebecca C y p ess How can music produced by automated technologies be expressive? tive may be understood as “transitive,” since it takes mean- Transitive theories of expression dominated eighteenth-century ideas ing or emotion to be transmitted from the performer to the of automated music, and many contemporary designers of robotic listener. Roger Scruton’s article in the Grove Dictionary sum- instruments adhere to these ideas, increasing sonic nuance to make ABSTRACT their instruments seem more like expressive human performers. A listener- marizes this position: “Despite all the skepticism that has centered understanding of expression—an “intransitive” perspective— been heaped on Romantic aesthetics, the popular view re- allows us to see automatic instruments as capable of expression despite mains essentially that of Rousseau and Diderot: music evokes the fact that no human performer is present. The expressive potential of emotion because it expresses emotion. Music is the middle these instruments is best understood as a product of their mechanical term in an act of emotional communication, and it is by nature—their idiomatic movements and sounds, which remain distinct virtue of that role that music acquires its value” [1]. from those of human-operated instruments. This article explores two case That Scruton cites Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis studies in the history of “expressive” automated instruments: Diderot and Engramelle’s cylinder-driven instruments from eighteenth-century France Diderot is telling, for writers of the French Enlightenment and contemporary robotic musical instruments. coupled technological advances in automated instrument design with clearly articulated theories of transitive expres- sion. Builders of automated instruments in late-eighteenth- Since the development of automated musical instruments in century France designed their instruments with a view to the early modern era, designers and theorists have empha- accuracy and subtlety in timing, for timing was a vital means sized the capacity of their instruments to be “expressive”—a of expression in the French tradition. This approach is de- notion that might seem counterintuitive, since no human scribed in the Mémoires mathématiques by Diderot (1748) performer is involved in creating the music. This concern and the Tonotechnie of Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engra- for expression is evident in the attempts by designers of au- melle (1775) [2,3]. Automated organs controlled by pinned tomated instruments from the early modern era as well as barrels could replace the fallible human performer by al- the present day to increase control over the subtle aspects of lowing direct communication between the composer and music-making associated with human expression—phras- the listener. The materialist philosophy, which informed ing, articulation, timbre and dynamics—all of which require machine technology in eighteenth-century France, held that complex design or programming. both human beings and human-built machines are essen- The understanding of “expression” as control over sonic tially mechanical in nature. The idea that automated musical nuance resonates with mainstream contemporary under- instruments could be transmitters of emotion was very much standings of expressive performance. In this view, a per- at home in this environment. former expresses the meaning of a piece of music, often But even in the eighteenth century, some writers objected thought of as a function of emotion, to the listener through to automated instruments, suggesting that they could never subtle variations of these musical parameters. This perspec- be as expressive as human performers. While these critiques focused on sonic nuance, such as lack of dynamic control, the underlying issue was that these machines lacked emo- Steven Kemper (educator), Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, 81 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, U.S.A. tion. Similar objections are applied to contemporary robotic Email: [email protected]. instruments [4]. Designers of robotic instruments have in- Rebecca Cypess (educator), Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, 81 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, U.S.A. creased their instruments’ capabilities for sonic nuance in Email: [email protected]. pursuit of expressivity. However, as long as we understand See www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/52/5 for supplemental files associated expression as an act of transmission, nothing will make up with this issue. for the missing “human factor” in performance. 448 LEONARDO, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 448–454, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01477 ©2017 ISAST Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/leon_a_01477 by guest on 30 September 2021 Other, less dominant understandings, however, yield for a cylinder-driven mechanical organ, which would allow a theory of “intransitive” expression, in which meaning any piece to be heard in the manner intended by its com- is constructed by the listener and does not depend on the poser: Composers would inscribe their own understanding presence of “emotional communication” initiated by a hu- of the music—especially its mouvement—within the cylinder, man performer. Max Paddison describes a shift in thinking bypassing the fallible performer entirely. Diderot explained in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Critics and that the application of automated technology to music could scholars moved from a transitive understanding of expres- augment its emotional impact, not detract from it. Far from sion to the idea that musical expression is a product of a rendering music impersonal, the synthesis of the human mimetic experience [5]. This notion of mimesis resonates composer with the mechanical organ would enable a more with contemporary theories of embodiment, which see mu- faithful, and thus more expressive, performance. Ultimately, sical gestures reperformed in the mind of the listener [6]. he claimed, the cylinder-driven organ represented a synthesis A theory of expression as a listener-generated phenomenon of the human performer and the chronomêtre, which, signifi- circumvents arguments against mechanical performances. cantly, he described as “two distinct machines” [12]. Intransitivity does not force us to understand machines as The characterization of both the performer and the time- capable of transmitting human emotions; rather, listeners an- keeping device as “machines” might seem strange today, thropomorphize mechanical performers, imbuing inanimate but it was consistent with the materialist philosophy of the objects with human characteristics. eighteenth century, which viewed the workings of the hu- While a thorough survey of expression is impossible in this man being, both body and soul, as functions of mechanics. context, in this article we explore two case studies in the his- This approach, based in the rationalist idea of the Enlight- tory of “expressive” automated instruments, comparing the enment that all aspects of human life could be understood aesthetics of cylinder-driven instruments from the French through experimentation and reason, emphasized the close Enlightenment with the ideals of contemporary musical ro- relationship between animate beings and self-animating botics. Although the French writers articulated a transitive machinery [13]. While such ideas had been in circulation perspective, their materialism opens the way to a theory of in both popular and learned culture earlier in the century, intransitive expression that may be fruitfully applied to con- the classic statement on materialism, the treatise L’homme temporary robotics: Automated instruments are capable of machine, by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, appeared in print producing and applying their own language of mechatronic in the same year as Diderot’s es- expression. say on automated organs [14]. La Mettrie argued that human be- Expression in ThE AuTomated instruments ings were themselves machines, in of dideroT And EngramellE which all bodily and intellectual Timing was a crucial parameter of expression in eighteenth- processes were connected, and century French performance. Interpretation could be sub- that natural philosophers could jective, but determination of a work’s mouvement (tempo, achieve new knowledge of life rubato and character) required attention to the details of the through experimentation with notation and its correct realization according to the inten- automata. Likewise, Diderot sug- tions of the composer [7,8]. François Couperin explained the gested that automated keyboard difficulties that performers had in deciphering the mouve- instruments constituted a fusion ment of French music: “In my view there are defects in our of mechanical timepieces on the style of writing music which correspond to the manner of one hand and the expressive hu- writing our language. That is, we write differently from the man composer on the other; both, way we perform” [9]. Criticisms of live performers addressed he claimed, were “machines.” Like the inability of performers to understand, interpret and ren- humanoid automata, which simu- der the music using the subtleties of timing that gave it its lated life through programmed distinctive means of expression. motion, automated musical in- French inventors developed mechanical timepieces to reg- struments encoded live music to ulate the basic tempos
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