 Welcome back everybody. Our next speaker is up. Nick Sieberg. This is so weird. All right. Hi. My name is Nick and the name of this presentation is A Brief History of Re-Performance. And that's what it's about. It's a very brief history in this case, the fun of crunching 100 page paper into 20 minute presentation. So right now I'm a little bit deep in the tall grass, so I've tried to simplify things a lot. So I may have dropped things that are required to make sense of certain parts of this. So if anything doesn't make sense, or if you want more detail, let me know. I aired on the side of this implicit view with the hope that stuff would come out in the Q&A if you really wanted it. So I'm interested in music reproduction. And in the standard way of thinking about it now, we sort of have had two ways of reproducing music. The first is with performance, with music notation and performers. If you want to make a piece of music happen again, you have a performer and a score, and they do what the score says. And now you have the piece of music one more time. And the other way, which I'm pretty sure you're all familiar with, is with speakers like this, that produce sound waves in the air directly. And these speakers and other similar technologies that vibrate little membranes to produce vibrations in the air are modeled on this, which is the tympanic membrane or your eardrum. And so Jonathan Stern calls these kinds of technologies tympanic reproduction. So they're based on the tympanum, the human eardrum. So a lot of the way that we talk about sound and reproduction and sort of related issues is based on this, is based on, sort of makes sense, based on the ear, based on technologies that are based on the ear. So what I'm interested in doing is looking at a different kind of reproduction, a kind that's not the dominant, not the successful, not the current, but an older obsolete residual, all of these great, sort of marginalizing words. And specifically for the purposes of this presentation, I'm going to be looking at this machine, Edwin Scott Vody's 1897 Pianola, which is a machine that plays your piano for you. If you look up here, patent diagrams are great. The white and black line up there, number eight and nine, that's a key on a piano. So you stick this thing up in front of your piano. It's got 88 fingers with little felt tips on them. And it presses down on the keys. You put your feet on this pedal and you pump it. That makes the keys go. And what actually sort of directly makes the keys go is that this piece of paper with holes in it rolls over a bar that also has holes in it. And when the holes in the paper line up with the holes on the bar, then a vacuum pulls through and gets hit in the piano. So now you know exactly how player pianos work. It looks sort of like this, which I don't like to use this in my last presentation. This woman is playing the piano, which is playing her piano for her daughter. And so she's doing stuff with her hands that will become important later. So before I get into the ugly details of this, this is one, this is a ghost hand, ghost hand. I want to sort of get at the question which is sort of inherent in a lot of this historical work. Why do we care? Why do we care about a strange machine that's invented over 100 years ago that we don't use today and all this? What does it have to tell us about where we are now? Why would we care about old things as if I have days when that's okay? I will. So I would say that the argument for why we care is because it is strange. Because it seems strange and is uncommon, we can discover alternative ways of looking at sound reproduction. So for example, when I think of performance, which is this mode of reproduction, what I think performance offers is an opportunity to look at sound reproduction, to think about sound reproduction in unusual terms. And so a lot of the purpose of my thesis is about enabling exploration and enabling a kind of inventiveness in the way that we can see of sound and material sound and recorded sound. So the central theme of this presentation is in performance those first two modes and bringing them together. And the way that happens will become hopefully more clear. So there are two primary areas in which I think the pianola, for this presentation, there are two primary areas in which I think the pianola has something interesting to offer us in this area. Okay, so first, representation. The way that performance is represented on paper, the way performance is fixed in order to be reproduced. And again, reconfiguration, this is the way that performance is actually altered in order to be reproduced. So in order to make a piano performance happen again, you need to do something to the piano performance to change it from its original form. And I'm interested in those two things that are broadly sort of about representation and reconfiguration, but about perception and labor. So back to our friend, the role. This is the sort of fundamental thing and the grad students have read this article by Lisa Gittleman about a 1906 court case which is about these very things. And the question was, are these sheet music or not? And there's a debate, it's all about money in the end, between composers and sheet music publishers and music role producers. And the music role producers say, this is not sheet music because if it was sheet music, they would have to pay royalties to the composers. And so they said, this is a sheet music, it's in a machine. It moves around in a machine. The music role producers said, no, you can see, look, there's the notes, they go like this. You can't read it though, so it's not legible to humans. But so the question in this issue, the court ended up deciding that it was machine parts, actually, which is funny. On analogy with the phonograph, because the phonograph is not sheet music, so there's the sort of new media studies axiom that we think about new media in terms of the old, but actually newer than the phonograph. So there was a sense of making sense of this via the phonograph. But so the question got then resolved the other way by the 1909 Copyright Act which said, actually, no, these are all a new kind of mechanical reproduction, let's have a thing called mechanical licenses and force everyone to pay this little bit of money. In any case, I don't care about copyright. Sorry. So the question that I think is interesting here is about legibility. And what does it mean personally to be machine legible and to be human legible? And I think that that is a sort of negotiable thing. The holes are obviously machine readable in a certain way. These lines on the paper are human readable and not machine readable. I'll get back to them in a moment. But even while the musical producers are saying things like these are machine parts, they're doing all of this work, this hybridizing work to make these legible to humans. So you find dimensions like this which is printing music across the front of the role and you're sitting at the piano and you can look at it and see the music, right? The music meaning traditional musical notation. There are a variety of ways to do this that chop up musical notation and alter it. This is one. This is that one. This is another one. Then this one brings up an interesting sort of extra step where in addition to showing music on the screen they also show you what to do. This is a piano instruction role. It'll teach you how to play the piano presumably after you've taken the thing off the front of the keys before using one with a built-in player. So it says, you know, here's the whole that's this note, press it with your finger and so on. And an even more exciting one which is this which tells you how not to play the piano but how to operate the piano like itself. And you notice the foot on the pedal is towards the bottom because you won't get very far if you don't realize that you need to press the pedal to continue moving. So returning back to this sort of this thing I don't know about these lines. There are two lines. There's a dotted line and there's a sort of solid wavy line. The dotted line represents dynamic level and would be printed on the roll because if you pedal harder or pedal softer you can make the music louder or quieter and how do you decide whether it should be louder or quieter? Well, you can read this sort of line on it. And what that line tells you, oh hey, I'm supposed to get to reconfiguration. What the line tells you is, you know, what to do. So the now the role is instructing both the machine in how to sort of come together and produce this re-performance of something that's already been stuck on the piece of paper. What the... I won't get to the solid line just yet. So what this does is changes the interface of the piano. From this you used to need to know how to manage this thing to play the piano if you wanted to be a pianist to this. So now you can be a pianist who is someone who plays the piano and this is what the woman was operating and what that wavy line was showing. So these are some hand controls you can control the sustain pedal because your feet are busy, you can change the tempo, you can make the high notes louder or the low notes louder, and this varies tremendously across all of these machines. But what I'm interested in at the moment is this one. This is the tempo lever with an added thing that points up. It's called the metro style because it is the metronome stylus. It changes the tempo and you track that line with it and as you track that line the music speeds up or slows down. And the reason that you need to have this is because at the time most piano roles were metronomically plump, which means you take sheet music and directly turn it into the piano role. So you would say there's four quarter notes in a row, you have four holes, you can be spaced. Nobody plays like that. Those would also come out evenly at an even dynamic level. They would be exactly the same loudness. And so at the time there's a question how can we make this mechanical thing more human? And the interesting answer at this time is with a human in front of it. And so what you do is you tell the human wiggle this little stick and the tempo will sort of go like this, and that will sound more human, vary the dynamic level, and then that will sound more human. So reintroducing variability by actually using a person. What's really interesting about the metro style one though is that they're not only just sort of drawn on there by the guy who says now it gets faster and it gets slower, not according to the score, but they're recorded sometimes or drawn on by experts. So a famous pianist would take this role that was a score and they say, okay, interpret this. They would take a pen and they would write on the roll where they would go faster or slower. So now what the pianist's job is, now that the machine can remember the notes, the pianist's job is to say, okay, I want to say with a dynamic level and what the tempo is. So that's now the locus of human pianistic performance is being able to change these two things. So they would record it by using things like this. If you're not familiar with the insides of pianos, this may just look like the inside of a piano. But the thing up there above the hammer number 10 is a recording device that if you hit the string with a hammer, that will tell you how fast you hit the string, therefore tell you how loud, and then will mark a roll and instead of having the holes be evenly spaced, it will be spaced according to how you play them. So it's a they call it a hand-plated roll. And so this develop, this causes a very interesting phenomenon which is what you are interpreting or playing when you're on the piano as a pianologist has occasionally already been performed. So you are playing a recording in the sort of traditional sense where you're familiar with playing recording because you probably do it all the time. You probably did it this morning before you came here in some capacity of the shower or the car or whatever. And so but now what you're doing what you're performing has already been performed one time. So there's a little bit of interesting language slippage that happens here and happens throughout sort of the rest of the thesis which points to what I mentioned before about how timpanic reproduction really organizes the way we think about sound and reproduction. So we know what words like playback interpretation, liveness and performance mean, right? Those all have meaning. So like liveness for example music can't be live until it can be recorded. So you don't have live music until there's a recorded music that sort of produces live music. So there's a distinction between maybe improvised music and music that's been written down. I get to that in the thesis a little bit but there's no what does it mean to be live? So live music is fundamentally based on recorded music. And when recorded music is recorded in a particular way liveness is constructed in a particular way. So the kind of liveness that is complementary to a sort of a traditional sound recording a timpanic the kind that we do now with the speakers that's one kind of liveness. But say what does live mean in this situation, right? This guy is going to play the piano live but he might be playing someone else's interpretation he's being told what to do by the machine he doesn't have to do what the machine says so there's this sort of interpretive flexibility. And what you have is this strange overlap like I sort of hinted at in the beginning between recording and performance where recordings are made into these sort of objects that can be performed again. And the opposition that we have between performance and recording that I sort of casually threw out in the beginning as a way that we often think about sound being alive versus recorded as sort of a fundamental paradigm and how people think about music when they listen to it this doesn't make sense. So what you have at the time is confusion about this because they do have live and recorded music when the piano comes out. They have the photograph, the photograph has been around and so the advertisers have this question and they say well, how are we going to sell this machine? Are we going to sell it as hey you don't remember the notes, if a baby crawled onto the pedals and started pushing then the baby could play or are we going to sell it, I wish I had a picture of this ad but I couldn't find it or are we going to say trust me as it says this you're not an operator, you're a player with this device. So they're trying to say now you're not consuming things, you are actually producing something, you're actually performing something. And so in recent literature on the player piano, on mechanical music specifically a book by again in Brian Dolan and an article by David Suisman there's a talk about de-skilling as what this is so you don't have to remember the notes. So now you have less skill or it requires less skill to do and as someone who is a compared media studies you may be able to imagine where I go on this issue about consumption versus production and I'm interested in sort of reclaiming what people are doing when they're sitting at the piano and so people who are sitting at the piano are doing something and just because the machine becomes more complicated doesn't mean that you have to become less complicated in some way you can still interact but I'm interested in sort of reclaiming the performativity of recordings which is sort of obvious thing in this case because it's a recording and you perform it but it's not so obvious in the case of say playing your boombox on the subway or in terms of you know putting the needle on a record but a lot of these things have interesting parallels. So basically by blending together traditional notions of recording and performance we can by blending together recording performance we can replace or reconsider our models of skill our models of what performance is of what recording is and sort of move into the brave new world of overlappy performative, performativity and recording. Now this, I don't know how many of you got to see the Gutenberg parentheses talk yesterday but I'm going to go out of a window this is going to be good. So there is a structural similarity between what I'm saying and some of the points of the Gutenberg parentheses people which is to say that the idea that recording and performance are these inviolate separate things is historically local and technologically local and it's only true of recording. It's not even true of phonographic recording at the beginning of it. It's true of recording you know from the early 1900s through you might say like the advent of turntablism in the 70s this don't touch the record recording and performance are a different kind of idea but before that, what we use for reproduction means notation and performance reinterpreting other people's creative work as part of performance is the way that you do things and now it's part of the way we do things again this is part of the patent document for rock band which is really hard to see but this is what patents look like now and how they used to look yeah so sort of in conclusion and trying to lead on to questions I think that what's interesting about re-performance is this alternate viewpoint it gives us on the way things are going now on technologies that overlap performance and recording in rock band you are playing but you're also playing things that have been recorded and people get upset about this people say this isn't music, this isn't performance, this isn't all sorts of things considering where those terms come from the sort of historicality of performance actually is something that's been defined by and against recording so I think that by sort of blending together these things by looking at re-performance it is coming back actually in some sort of high fi communities I didn't get to talk about the company that takes old acoustic recordings and turns them into player piano recordings, modern fancy player piano so they're better recordings but they're also in the thesis but basically this is sort of in the theme of a lot of our a lot of our presentations so far about opening up room for exploration, opening up room for inventiveness and blurring the lines between categories that were previously thought to be completely incommensurable or distinct from each other and now early I would just like to answer questions instead I downloaded off the internet I can give it to you later it wasn't a real question that is a real question, yes, Elliot alright, so I actually might have already asked you about this some other day but I'm going to go for it I don't know if you're familiar with one of the early harmonics projects before they actually got into video games, they were giving a presentation and they were talking about it that their original product was they were trying to sell a variation of karaoke machines where you can actually sort of like the piano where you can actually control tempo and other factors of the music and the market, you know the business people just said, what are you doing you can't change recorded music so I'm wondering if there's a if you think there's a cultural factor that could prevent you know you're talking about bringing some of that back and not that's this is dependent on finding market in that sense you're now a cultural resistance to changing I think there absolutely is a cultural resistance to changing it, as an example so this company that I was talking about that takes the old acoustic recordings and turns them into the player piano things they don't call their player pianos player pianos, they're pianos that play themselves but they call them robotic pianos because as the president of this company told me it's a market disaster if you say player piano and it sort of goes to because player pianos mean crappy and old and all that stuff but it's sort of a similar problem where there's this ingrained idea of what recordings are supposed to be and this is where it gets a little bit good friends and stuff like that these are sometimes to be in violent that recordings are recordings so we don't do anything with them but I mean the funny thing with the karaoke example is that there was already karaoke so karaoke is already about changing yourself into the role of the singer and I have some stuff in another section about the roles that are defined in this and how people occupy different roles differently and shape the roles and move in so singing is one thing but being the band leader is this weird is this weird other thing but meanwhile no one at the moment is terribly upset about DJs and turntables where you are all about changing the tempos so yeah there's certainly cultural resistance given my historical time frame I am hitting it less than I would have expected yeah Jules yeah so I mean I'm interested obviously in what you're doing I'm curious it seems like the gesture to move towards something like the obsolete here or the residual is largely to produce a pragmatic or material histories of things we don't remember right so I'm wondering if there's also a conceptual move or if there's also a theoretical move yeah just to say like I see the richness of what emerges in terms of how the obsolete seems to be really alternative but are you interested in certain different models of history as a function of this or is this largely something about getting us to rethink contemporary media part of this yeah so I actually, thank you for that because there is a broad theoretical part of this that I decided when I was going to cut because I didn't trust myself to be able to talk about it in the 20 minutes but sort of generally yeah so there's a theoretical angle on just how we perceive reproduction but as far as history goes like the working history there are definitely relationships between this and theoretical working on innovation and how new technologies come about that are interesting to be in this context and also about the relationship between people and automation and so theoretically that's something that comes up all the time obviously comes up in Marxism clearly and Marxist alienation is something that I'm sort of dealing with personally and in the context of the presentation but yeah so it's more the theoretical stuff that's coming up is generally media history specific just because I had to cut myself a chunk somewhere but it's mostly about how people relate to automation and specifically the automation of things in the cultural sphere so like Marxism is great about you know what happens when the job in the factory is now done by a robot but there's a different kind of attitude here about what happens when playing the piano is done by a machine because on the one hand it seems less dire because whatever it's only art but on the other hand it also seems more dire because art is the human and like what does it mean to have machines do the thing that are the human and so yes there's this kind of anxiety and so automation are the kind of facts that are losing sort of change yeah and I think specifically in the sort of anthropological angle that I would have loved to go deeper into here how people respond specifically to automation so not so much making claims about the nature of automation what automation does to culture or how people and automation are but more about how do people negotiate this because the piano it exists it's a real thing nowadays people think about it like a metaphor it's something to throw a chair at during a bar fight or a master or whatever but it's a real thing in people's houses at the time and so part of part of me is just excited by recovering historical specificity and you get to say hey look this was a real thing that had wheels and like you had to push it up to your piano and so I think there's like a lot of value just in doing that just in sort of reclaiming the thinness of this thing so one of the things you talked about very interesting is that the change from the interface of the piano keyboard to the interface of that piano a lot of holes that people faced but the other change that's going on there is also that the piano keyboard itself becomes not only an interface to people's hands but now to a machine which it wasn't before and I think this relates to some of the comments you're just making about fear of mechanization of playing a piano but there's something different about creating a device that the interface is to an existing piano any device that just plays itself I'm wondering what the implications of that are that the piano keyboard which is exclusively for the use of human piano players gets converted by the piano into a piece of a mechanical interface or like between one machine and another so there are two interesting points I'm hopefully going to remember both of them while I talk about the first one so the first one is just a sort of little where are you about how the whole thing about glomming the about glomming this on to the front of the piano there's an example that I found from 1915 which is a bench that you put in front of the piano and you plug it into the wall and it's got two little pegs that come out of the front of it and it peddles the piano for you so there's obviously this bizarre interest in having machines that operate other machines and earlier sort of tech that I was taking in the thesis was to look at the pianola as a kind of reading of the interface of the piano with the physical reading of the interface because you look at the piano and you say okay what are the salient parts of this interface and then if you look at the sort of business end of the piano you can see you know in inverse what they thought was the important connection here and so part of what I blurted over in this in trying to focus on a single device I didn't have to explain a million devices while I was going through this thank you to my CMS colleagues for getting me on that so people like to make a distinction between piano players and player pianos so this is a piano player because you stick it on the front of the piano a player piano it's a piano that has this mechanism all built into the inside and those turn into what are called reproducing pianos which specifically they automate this so they have encodings on the side that replace you entirely by you know moving the tempo automatically with the roll and doing the dynamics on their own and so that has a really different reception actually the reproducing piano versus the piano because the reproducing piano again is this listening thing now you can have Paderezki in your house and he'll play you a song and you can go sit over there and you can just listen to him and I think by the time of the reproducing piano you see a little bit of this I would call it a timpanic attitude kind of pre-bind to how people relate to these machines because like you said it's no longer about interfacing two machines together like a machine that you could have played yourself like you can with a reproducing piano yourself but it's not a piano that can play itself so well that it doesn't need you anymore and so that's maybe where some of this anxiety comes out where in every time someone wants to say well there's something special about live performance or before there's live performances there's something special about extemporaneous performance so let's capture that in a machine and then they do it and they go oh no I killed the bird or whatever because they've captured it and now it's not special anymore so they need to find the next thing that's special so yeah I think that's maybe what happened with the reproducing piano is that it wasn't special anymore because you didn't have this there's this like erasure of the human and there's a bit of work to try to reclaim the performativity of the reproducing piano in terms of like in terms of sort of experimental composition which I know people here know is a fancy of mine which I had as a sound example now because it was funny that it had no sounds in here but it would have been timpanic anyway so it would have been not as legitimate but yes those examples where people take the reproducing piano and say what can we do with this that humans can't do and then sort of move from there and then it's sort of liberatory as opposed to this like crushing alienating kind of thing so it's a weird question of attitudes I think I think it, I mean I keep thinking of the Turing test and you know the whole question of can you when thinking something is real that it's actually automated and I'm wondering if we get into any discussions of automation and creativity and you know how we think about these two things because they seem to be in some sense diametrically opposed and yet in other ways if you think in Turing it's going to work wouldn't be possible so yes the Turing thing brings up sort of two things for me the first is in terms of creative like automatic creativity it would have been really fun to get into some of the like automatic composition things it would have been more kind of like Whitney's thesis actually from last year because there are like sort of similar historical relationships between algorithmic composition like Mozart composes things that use dice to you know move stuff around and give up agency to sort of outside sources sometimes machines sometimes nature that was that was the whole piece but now in terms of the Turing test though there are actually concerts that they would give at the time which would have the reproducing piano here and you would have the pianist over here and they would go and sit at the piano and then they would pretend to play and then they would get up while the thing was still playing these are like advertisements right in the form of concerts and like all concerts and they would come and stay over here and then keep playing and you go oh my gosh that's amazing because there's something visual about seeing about seeing the guy there there's this thing the ghosts of the player and you go oh man now he's there and he's here and they're amazing accounts because they have him with the photograph also actually with the photograph there's this question of like really like do you believe that that a 1910 phonograph sounds exactly like an operatic tenor on stage like there's no way that that could possibly be true whereas with the piano there's this other weird effect where piano sounds like pianos so the way it sounds different like sort of this is another thing that I get to talk about in the presentation the thesis not the presentation is fidelity so what is fidelity faithfulness in timpanic reproduction is about in the air being exactly the same in two different places whereas this kind of fidelity is weirder it's like something about interpretation so now you need to be true to someone's hands as opposed to true to their ears and so what does that mean to be you know faithful to some famous pianist's interpretation and it's an open question I mean they don't really figure it out then there's a great thing where when they automate the dynamics they have to do it in steps right they have all these bellows that you can either collapse all the bellows or certain numbers combinations of the bellows it's actually a ternary code that's on the side of the role that tells you which bellows to turn on or not and at one model can do 16 levels of nuance or whatever and they're trying to get this pianist to come and record for them they say you have to record for a duor we're the best we have 16 levels of nuance and he says sorry I play with 17 levels of nuance and so there's this interesting gap right between how machines do things and how people do things that they're constantly trying to overcome and if I was able to give a million presentations and talk about this new company this Zen company that does the robotic pianos where instead of having 16 levels of nuance they now have 300 levels of nuance and you think maybe that is enough like what happens now if that's actually enough levels of nuance and so yeah so the issues are it's a persistent I can't imagine it will ever stop although you really feel like how can you get any better than the ones they have now but I'm sure that that is true then as well thank you for your presentation just some free association one is the uncanny valley in robotics they try to to speak about this ghost you know hands like you would produce not just magic you would produce a human thing so basically it's it's very anthropomorphic we try to simulate a human with a machine as a system I think it's very interesting because it brings this idea of presence maybe in humriness uncanniness this idea of presence that removes speakers and the company so I think there is something very interesting here and also I cannot not think of Maimodenki you know this Japanese performer they use like 20 guitars but they operate with this thing the knocker you know doing this on guitar so there are more there is still research there is one of those robotic pianos in the bill I forgot how appropriate it is to do this in the media lab because there is all sorts of stuff that comes into this from the media lab as well performance with the opera of the future this kind of stuff but as far as eariness goes there is a question of eariness with speakers also and again with the television radio all of this question I like are there ghosts in these like weird this can reproduce what people can do therefore it's this like uncanny version of a person therefore there are ghosts so this is the most common thing you can imagine like in the ads it's just like the piano and not only is the piano player a ghost but it's in this person's home and there are dancing have you been to the haunted mansion in Disneyland there are dancing ghosts in the air in this person's house while the person is playing in the advertisement and this is good right like I bring all these ghosts because you know that's how real is so yeah so I forgot to say that there's that's the other thing that's interesting I think about this and about the way they think about sound reproduction so there's a sort of teleological model of sound reproduction where like on a large level tympanic reproduction is the best because it's pure it's just exactly the sounds in the air so it's completely neutral but then there's this question you know the CD is better than the record you know blah blah blah is better than the wire recorder but there's always like different things that are better than other things and people forget that there's more than one way to do stuff right like just because one of these is successful doesn't mean that everything else sucks so there are more than one way to make an automatic piano and some of the ways that people did that usually prior to this is with is with androids right so you have re-en-toinette has a piano playing android that's in a museum somewhere in Europe now that plays the piano and you think okay that's interesting because automatic pianos aren't just one thing the same with sound reproduction is actually not just one thing like you could make one of the quotes that I put up in my last presentation at the beginning of the year was someone arguing for the player piano by saying the piano is an automatic hammer dulcimer anyway right like there are strings in the dulcimer you hit them with hammers the piano it says you hit 88 strings with 88 hammers in exactly the same way every time so lucky you and now this is an automatic automatic dulcimer and so on but the automatic automatic dulcimer could be a lot of things there are actually automatic dulcimers right like that would be to have a little person go and they you know they're an android and they hit them with these hammers so I'm this is about not about like replacing to panic reproduction or claiming some like other alternate like trunk of history but basically making a thicker sort of more multi-furious kind of media history specifically in this in this time period when stuff is really thick and there's this idea that this is because it's obsolete now it's always been obsolete and so the people who use the player piano that must have been dumb or something because they didn't realize that that is ridiculous you know so there's this interesting that's where the historical work I guess yes oh yeah like actually sort of composition there is a device home perforator that you could get 19 teens maybe even a little bit earlier that was going to be actually a focus of the pieces before I could I had to keep cutting this but there's this it's a home perforator and it has music stand on it so it's sort of intended for you to make your own roles for music and other people have already composed and this elaborate they have like different models right there's the little portable one it's still like iPhone or whatever for you to like bring your friends house and there's the like bigger home one that goes in a cabinet and then you put the music on it's got a fancy little ornate stand and you there's a punch it's actually ratcheted across so it only will punch you know right on where the holes are supposed to be and then only it's ratcheted this way too so only on like you know the notes so that you don't have to worry about sloppy timing and then there's a big one that's for like classrooms and I have these amazing pictures of music teachers with all of these little kids punching roles and I'm not sure what that was supposed to do but it's an interesting thought right like I mentioned that with those sort of hybrid things like this this is about making music legible people and there's some sense in which this is what music is and this is not what music is and that's a whole a whole extra question but in the in the classroom there's this weird thought that maybe there was some motion towards saying actually maybe music can be this and like you know legibility is relative so like you could learn how to figure this out and people do things with a print which would be loose on this to say like here's a phrase so you could sort of you know there's this like very hand-motioning kind of bottom-up expression where it's like phrases and there's a technology called audiographic roles where they print music appreciation stuff on it so on one hand it'll have the words on the other hand it'll have this person who we don't know who it is some kind of expert telling you stuff about the music it's like and get ready the bells are coming and it's the part that sounds like the bells and it says one two three it's the there's this Rachmaninoff C minor trailer that goes dum dum dum and it says one two three and he made this very like crazy haired music professor talking to you I don't know where that came from but that there's something there about education oh sorry yeah they're just trying to make these machine readable things more readable to humans and it's just a sign of like legibility is complicated right it's not just about knowing how to read or being able to read something I feel like I recall reading something you were talking to about the fact that the the bells were potentially legible you know I mean there's 88 holes there's 88 well I mean conceivable you could learn to read anything it's a good you can see that this is like this doesn't really matter if it's exactly right there's nothing even there there's sort of a mess there are certain ones where the notes are supposed to be right on the holes and then they actually want to change it because the rolls don't really go down like this and there are a lot of inventions people have different patterns for the same thing basically it's like let's turn this sideways because now you can actually read again reading only happens sideways not up and down so if it moves across this way then you can see the music and it'll be pretty bad um yeah I think people could read it there's this idea that it's possible right yeah I think so there's this question like you could you could train to do it and the musical people wanted to say no you can't do it in the court but then they wanted to be like in all the all of the brochures and it's like you have to really learn how to interpret it because you can be a bad pianist and if you don't know how to tell what a phrase is about to end you may slam the pedal down really hard and hit somebody that's supposed to be quiet super loud and wouldn't that be really embarrassing so so yeah so that's that's definitely an interesting question and so the sort of parallel to that is with the phonograph and there's a question of like can you read a phonograph that grooves and this is well done of other sounds to these people but like maybe if I look at it close enough I can learn it it comes out of this like sound writing thing we should give it one right so this also where like the cone vibrates the thing and it draws you like this is what an A looks like and they go I can't tell they try to draw one out and they're like that looks the same um and then there are artists again who are like maybe we can make our own music directly on the phonograph right like pure we can make it straight like just into pure sound because you can edge your own little groove it's sort of true on the computer now I get synthesis I may be I need to yeah so this may not be the scope of what you were looking at but you sort of talked about the difference between live and actually like the idea of read performance right after the review there um and you even said you know that you couldn't tell it in the thinking of kind of tympanic we would actually write kind of like we're looking at how we hear things um do you look at um you know like audience or perhaps context in which we listen to things right because I can play an instrument to myself you might not call that live music I can also turn on the automated machine and leave the room is that a performance anymore right it's kind of a like it knows they're listening to it it's a performance anymore right so I think um that's an interesting question because a lot of this is is for me about the sort of source of these and I hadn't actually thought about going to that other side about like the audience side of it where tympanic reproduction is not defined by how you listen to it so much as by how it's made and of course it's made thinking that you're going to do it in certain ways this a similar a similar kind of thing they both have their context that they've come from I haven't thought much about the audience what I will say is that there is a lot of thought while this is this is based on the biology of the ear like Helmholtz in the 19th century you know this how does the ear work I think like this makes some things the the pianolas are based on technology that has to be built around a music science that doesn't exist yet you can't believe the pianists they don't know what they're saying even though they're beautiful players and you want to do that I think what they do but there's these labs that pop up and there's the section I didn't get to talk about is objectivity which I really like which is how do you measure performance and you decide what the salient parts are how do you decide in what ways they're salient and it's a lot of science that little device that I showed that's this thing is part of that it's like how do we measure what the piano does because is it the speed of the hammer that makes it louder or is it the speed the key goes down are those the same or maybe it's different across the whole piano so there's this characterizing of the piano as a scientific object that I think is really interesting because we made them like they're not it's like you found it in the woods and you'll notice this thing but it's just strangely familiar you get a deeper layer