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Musical Intelligences and Human Instruments in Science Fiction and Film

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Musical Intelligences and Human Instruments in Science Fiction and Film SINGING MACHINES: MUSICAL INTELLIGENCES AND HUMAN INSTRUMENTS IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FILM by Nicholas Christian Laudadio October 8, 2004 A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The State University of New York at Buffalo in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Copyright by Nicholas Christian Laudadio 2004 ii Sincerely felt and appropriately formatted thanks to: My committee members: Joseph Conte (director), James Bono, James Bunn (with tremendous help along the way from Charles Bernstein and Chip Delaney) My outside reader: Bernadette Wegenstein My parents And most certainly to Meghan Sweeney, without whom all goes poof, &c. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Setting the Mood Organ: An Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE The Song of Last Words: Kubrick’s 2001 and the Acoustic Moment of Disconnection 13 CHAPTER TWO Just Like So But Isn’t: Listening AIs, Recursive Disconnection, and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 56 CHAPTER THREE Instrumentes of Musyk: An Organological Approach to Lloyd Biggle Jr.’s “The Tunesmith” 93 CHAPTER FOUR What Dreams Sound Like: Forbidden Planet and a Material History of the Electronic Musical Instrument 135 WORKS CITED 179 iv ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Frank Poole Jogging in the Ship from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey 22 Figure 2: Frank and Dave Discuss HAL’s Fate from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey 41 Figure 3: HAL Disconnected from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey 47 Figure 4: “The Organist and His Wife” by Israel Van Meckenem 94 Figure 5: The Telharmonium from “120 Years of Electronic Musical Instruments” 145 Figure 6: Clara Rockmore 151 Figure 7: Raymond Scott and his Family from Gert-Jan Blom’s Manhattan Research, Inc. 157 Figure 8: Raymond Scott’s “Wall of Sound” from Gert-Jan Blom’s Manhattan Research, Inc. 159 v ABSTRACT Singing Machines: Musical Intelligences and Human Instruments in Science Fiction and Film examines the ways that musically-inclined machines and instruments function in science fiction. The texts under investigation here—Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s “The Tunesmith,” and Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (particularly its accompanying electronic musical score by Bebe and Louis Barron)—all present a mechanical entity that makes possible (through musicality) a profound connection with its “users.” This connection tends to manifest itself as an empathic reaction, linking the mechanical and the organic and bridging larger evolutionary rifts in imagined futures. Chapters one and two address the idea of the “acoustic moment of disconnection” wherein a fictional artificial intelligence uses song and the act/art of singing as a way to detach itself from its human companions, enacting a digital version of death. I argue that this moment of song or sound is crucial to understanding the way in which science fiction both confronts and confounds the relationships artificial beings have with their creators and their adopted environments. Following this evaluation of musical intelligences, I proceed to actual and imagined musical instruments that, like the artificial intelligences in the previous chapters, merge and mediate the organic and the electric in the texts that they accompany. In all of these texts, the singing machine suggests that the gulf between human and inhuman can be traversed by an instrument both cultural and scientific, organic and mechanical. By tracing the role that this musical-mechanical instrument plays in fictive texts one can better understand the means by which sound and song help articulate the process of becoming human. vi .
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