OSLO 5—8 JUNE 2013 MachineDreams ‘Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy- source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts.’ Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia In our software-operated society celebrations of the vanishing white noise we use surfaces on flat, shiny objects between FM stations where voices are to access information and heard fading in and out of range; an entertainment. And through these examination of the vocoder, a human- objects we communicate. voice scrambling machine born within the But when machines began to US military which went on to define the make their way into everyday life sound of electro; explorations of time following the Industrial Revolution, machines; mechanical pianos; machines the prospect of automation was met transforming images into sound and vice with fear as well as euphoria; with the versa; customised sonic tools as well as concern that some important human obsolete technology which seemed to dimension might be lost. The American offer the possibility of communication writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in with another world altogether. 1854, in the opening chapter of Walden: The ‘progress’ which machines “We are in great haste to construct are said to bring has always had its a magnetic telegraph from Maine to supporters and its critics. Through Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may our diverse programme, we hope to be, have nothing to communicate”. examine the machine through multiple Thoreau’s fear that electronic perspectives: both as a utopian communication would only reinforce construction built to improve lives, everyday inarticulacy and triviality was and as a dehumanizing force undermining well founded. Through television and something essential about society. social media, to a certain degree, this Plus, we will look at ways in which people is exactly what has happened. and machines are learning to live Machine Dreams is a festival together, creatively and inventively. exploring the machine in all its glory. And at Only Connect, all of this, of Not only as a paean to obsolete course, is approached via the medium of mechanisms and the soundscape that music and sound, which, perhaps more disappears with them, but as a than any other art form, has been celebration of the machine as a model for profoundly affected by the enormous thinking. Only Connect brings you transformations of the machine age. Anne Hilde Neset Artistic Director, nyMusikk Smile When You Say Nasty Words The history of the vocoder is the long, strange journey of a military machine that became a distinctive voice in modern music. By Dave Tompkins At times a flamethrower would do. then chopped and shredded. Never Perhaps a screwdriver. Or maybe a repeated, always unsaid. If you played Westinghouse oven, though that was the SIGGRUV, you’d just hear active used to stabilize the super-crystals. surf, tidal white noise. The 805th US Signal Corp preferred a specialized machine when it came to The system was called Project X, permanently disfiguring its top secret or SIGSALY, named after nonsense, vinyl. The device was entered into a the compression of a tongue-twizzler Signal Corp log in North Africa as concerning a child hustling conches on ‘The Record Destruction Machine’, the boardwalk. The vocoder was its somewhere between ‘request to marry central component. Occupying an entire local French girl’ and ‘bubonic plague floor, these robot walls ran hot and has broken out’. high maintenance, seven-foot cabinets of synthetic voice, thrumming. The Record Destruction Machine would The machine was the space. find itself in a wine cellar in Algiers, chewing up rare records produced by the The vocoder disbanded conversation Muzak Corporation and Bell Labs and into sub-frequencies and reconstructed distributed by the US Army Signal Corp it into a machine’s impression of human in extremely limited, covert vocoder speech – stiff as a puppet’s chin and markets throughout the world, beginning often denounced by its users. Intelligence with the Pentagon and ending in Tokyo as deformation. A misunderstanding and Berlin. Thermalized noise was the from a machine that was once called a micro-est of subgenres. spectral decomposer. Or the Indestructible Speech Machine, if you This may have seemed a little off- want to get all Eisenhower about it. message at a time when Erwin Rommel The vocoder helped filter, add and was out in the desert somewhere, subtract the SIGGRUV noise at both commanding a wall of noise and talking ends of the line, allowing brass jaws to over a primitive laser beam with his determine the world’s fate in voices they throat jacked into a tank radio. But this barely recognized, dehumanized into wasn’t elevator music in the machine’s digital pulses 20 milliseconds in length. teeth. These 16-inch singles held the Admiral Leahy said he heard robots. code key, the most sensitive dimension Eavesdroppers merely heard a buzz. As a of a top secret phone scrambler used by device whose name had been struck from Churchill and other windbags of war. its own user’s manual during the war, the vocoder often spoke under conditions of Called SIGGRUV, these ‘one-time’ anonymity. D-Day, Dresden, Hiroshima. records had to be playing while the The deliquesced pewter world. vocoder was in use, which in 1942 was often. So a two-turntable system – also The vocoder was invented by a man who engineered by Bell Labs – was deployed. kept bees and surfed. In 1928, Homer (There was a self-destruct mechanism in W Dudley just wanted to send our voices case the terminal was breached, a underwater, compressing telephonic turntable meltdown activated by the last bandwidth in the Trans Atlantic Cable. man out). Each record was played once, He was trying to save space while somehow imagining a vocoder basement space’). From its inception, the phone in every home. Though Homer Dudley’s gave the illusion of proximity, putting a vision was speech compression – voice – and more than a few crazy ideas and clarifying human communication – – in people’s heads. Its functionary, his machine would make machines out the vocoder, would further distance the of donkey brays, storm winds, church voice from the human body, creating more bells, oceanic roars, tap-dancing, birds space. In 1939, the LA Times called this and leaf piles. All tested at Bell Labs. artificial voice ‘the voice true’. During Each having a ball on reality’s dime. the Vietnam War, when covert ops were codenamed Urban Funk and the jungle This wasn’t some automaton romance was bombed with portable radios, of technology. The vocoder’s conception NASA fed special test sentences to the came to Dudley when imagining his mouth vocoder: Smile when you say nasty words. to be a radio station, while suffering from colitis in a hospital bed. (He literally By the late 1970s, the axis of shat himself). He would later write of eavesdroppers was still Italy, Germany the speech mechanism: oral resonances, and Japan: Moroder, Kraftwerk, and the mouth, laryngeal vibrations, the Yellow Magic Orchestra. In 1983, the teeth. We were machines transmitting vocoder was the voice real – the main speech on carrier waves. machine of hiphop and R&B – transforming the alienation of the Though the vocoder may not have African-American experience, the rehabilitated shellshocked mutes – distant longing for better times, as Dudley originally believed – it did approximating machine to body, to dance manage to enter the dreams of the out of constriction and compression. insane. In the late 1970s, a hospital in Trying to make space, if not a galactic Bavaria commissioned the British void. Said ‘Fly Guy and the Unemployed’, synthesizer company EMS to provide a 12-inch nobody heard: ‘DC is into vocoder recordings for patients as they space/DC doesn’t care about the human slept, in particular ‘heavy cases of race’. ‘Come with me to the land of mental illness’. Talking water drops and stuff’, encouraged a man from Ohio winds were prescribed for subconscious named Sneak E. Another unheard autosuggestion and pat assurance. unknown. A device that was intended to The machine was treatment. improve telecommunication for all was then restricted and redacted for military In its ever-evolving shrinking state, echelons, coveted by Stalin and office- the vocoder would feed the fantasies maxed by the Stasi, only to be refreaked and nightmares of other machines while for hiphop, functioning against the subsuming whatever noise was in its machine’s intentions, trying to find a path, giving voices to planes, trains, voice in a black hit of space. We ate automobahns, submarines, computers, those records alive. synthesizers, Daft Punk, cell phones, and ultimately, ourselves. Or at least a decent wireless rendering of ourselves. (To misappropriate knee surgeon jargon, the vocoder ‘replicated intra-articular Transformer Nils Henrik Asheim and Alf Terje Outdoor concert Hana have composed a piece for a Wednesday 5 June 18:00 ‘machine’ consisting of 50 guitarists, Free all aged between 13–19. Within the huge ensemble, ‘components’, or players, create individual functions, from hovering drones to pulsing rhythms, building to unexpected outcomes. Guitar Machine is a free concert performed in a temporary architectural structure called Transformer, which can itself be seen as a machine for Guitar altering and redefining public space. Machine Kunstnernes Hus Conlon Nancarrow Wednesday 5 June 20:00 Toccata Kr 200/100 (members/concessions) Piece For Tape Study no. 3 Rex Lawson (player piano) Daniel Paulsen (percussion) Karin Hellqvist (violin) George Antheil and Fernand Léger Ballet Mécanique Rex Lawson (player piano) US born Conlon Nancarrow (1912–77) composed most of his work for the player piano, or pianola, whose actions are Piano programmed using perforated paper or metallic rolls.