Deirdre Loughridge

Category: Music and Technology

  • Valves and Values: Another Story of Technological Transition

    New technologies, as they begin to take hold, have always elicited fear and criticism of the changes they will bring. Such was the main message of two stories that passed through my Twitter feed last week. The first, by Tom Standage, was an op-ed piece in the New York Times on coffee houses as the new social networking platform of the 1600s. Standage recounts seventeenth-century worries that coffee houses were places of distractions that undermined productive work and mental concentration. Standage concludes:

    There is always an adjustment period when new technologies appear. During this transitional phase, which can take several years, technologies are often criticized for disrupting existing ways of doing things. But the lesson of the coffeehouse is that modern fears about the dangers of social networking are overdone.

    Rebekah Higgitt offered a follow-up in the Guardian, citing concerns dating back to the eighteenth century that technological innovations are speeding up the pace of life and endangering our well-being. “We were doomed (again),” she sums up: “There is nothing so old as warnings about modernity.”

    These types of stories are valuable for demonstrating that technologies and social practices with which we feel comfortable – so comfortable we wouldn’t even think to question them – once were the subject of heated debate (I’ve told such a story myself for Auto-Tune). But these stories also do something concerning: they imply that our criticisms and concerns about new technologies will soon look just as silly as those of the past – that we can dismiss today’s fears because we’ve heard them all before. Framed this way, these stories use history to teach us to embrace the latest innovations, and to foreclose critical discussion of their effects and trade-offs.

    The history of technological transitions has other lessons to offer, however. Let’s consider a musical case: the adoption of the valved horn.

    The valved horn, familiar as the French horn, is now a standard member of the orchestra. But the valve mechanism employed in horns and other brass instruments was invented only in the 1810s (i.e. twenty years after Mozart’s death, and after Beethoven had composed most of his symphonies). Until then, all horns were made of coiled metal tubing without keys, and the length of this tubing determined the frequencies at which the the instrument would resonate. These frequencies were limited to the pitches of the harmonic series. In the key of C, these would be:

    There were thus gaps between the available pitches, especially in the lower register. To get intermediate pitches required the technique of hand-stopping, which altered the tone of the instrument (though especially virtuosic horn-players were able to reduce the difference to near imperceptible).

    Valves closed the gaps in the harmonic series, making it possible for horns to play the entire chromatic scale throughout their range. This would seem an obvious advantage – more notes, more musical possibilities. But like the coffee house, the valved horn prompted an abundance of worried commentary. The tone of the valved horn was considered inferior, the instrument lacked the singing quality of its predecessor, and horn players were losing the sensitivity and knowledge that came with learning to control the intonation and tone color of the valveless horn.  As one critic wrote in 1837:

    What are we to do with all the stories we hear about valves and keys? They ruin the natural characteristic tone and make it so that soon we will have only yellow and red, with which we can no longer fittingly paint and shade….

    Another in 1835 wrote:

    I want to attempt to discuss the disadvantages of the general introduction of the valved horn in some detail…Sadly one cannot mistake the Zeitgeist in the introduction of this instrument…should we then keep no instrument that is actually created totally for singing?

    And in 1865:

    But in the future how would orchestral music (with string instruments) fare, if the good players of the natural horn became increasingly scarce?…a skilled horn player can be trained only if he uses the natural horn in his practice….Thus the worst decline threatens…

    We might now chuckle at those who worried about the valved horn, and look upon those who fear the consequences of digital technologies for music as equally overdrawn in their concern. But the choice of valveless or valved horn was a matter of trade-offs – each was better for certain purposes, as this concert reviewer recognized in 1842:

    It is undeniable that the natural tones of the natural horn far surpass the natural tones of the valved horn in fullness and tone quality, yet on the other hand, there is a perfect equality of all the whole and half steps on the valved horn that makes it possible to work in all scales with nearly equal success

    The transition to the valved horn was thus not a matter of the inferior giving way to the superior, but of certain values – and certain people – winning out over others. The winners in this transition included those who patented valve technologies. The obvious losers were valveless-horn players, whose skills and knowledge were rendered increasingly irrelevant. Though many nineteenth-century commentators maintained that both valved and valveless horns were valuable and necessary, each for their purpose, by the twentieth century valveless horn-players were wanted neither for performance nor teaching positions.

    In terms of values, the transition to the valved horn was a matter of the chromatic scale winning out over resonance. Here, especially, we can learn from early criticisms of the new technology. For while critics may voice particular fears that in retrospect appear unjustified or narrow-minded, their worries can also reveal the particular interests upon which a new technology is based – and which, once the technology has been adopted, come to seem natural, inevitable, invisible. When a fourth-grader is handed a French horn, she is handed the privileging of pitch over other musical dimensions – a preference for thinking about music as a matter of relations between pitches rather than relations between sounds and physical bodies. While valves expanded the capabilities of the horn in certain senses, it also reduced the uniqueness of its musical voice and perspective. As one mid nineteenth-century critic of the valved horn’s tone observed, getting at the dynamics of accommodation and erasure at play in the transition to the valved horn: “it appears that one wants to make all instruments play like keyboards.”

    After falling into almost complete disuse for the first half of the twentieth century, valveless horns were revived by the historically informed performance movement which found for it a new value: fidelity to the composer’s original conception of his musical works. One may now thus compare, say, a performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony using today’s valved horns with one using horns of the early nineteenth century. This revival of the valveless horn made possible another development: composers are now finding the unique musical potentials of the instrument suited to their expressive purposes. Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto, completed in 2002, exploits the fact that valveless horns sound the overtone series native to their particular length. As Ligeti explains:

    by providing each horn or group of horns with different fundamentals I was able to construct novel sound spectra from the resulting overtones. These harmonies, which had never been used before, sound “weird” in relation to harmonic spectra.

    Musical values have shifted, making it clear that valved horns reflect one set of priorities – and that those who worried about the loss of valveless horns – their techniques and musical properties – were quite justified in doing so.

    So yes, there is always an adjustment period when new technologies appear, and during the transitional phase technologies are often criticized for disrupting existing ways of doing things. But the lesson of the valved horn is that new technologies embed certain values and, once adopted, conceal alternatives – hence the retrospective bafflement at all that worry.

     

  • Voices of the Dead: From Edison to Tupac via Sonovox

    …whoever has spoken or whoever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has turned to dust. The possibility is simply startling…Speech has become, as it were, immortal.

    “A Wonderful Invention – Speech Capable of Indefinite Repetition from Automatic Records,” Scientific American (Nov 17, 1877)

    At the end of the nineteenth century, the invention of sound recording suggested a new era in which the voice would not die with the body but would rather be stored up, preserved, so that future generations could hear the dead speak. As one phonograph enthusiast remarked in 1896, ”death has lost some of its sting since we are able to forever retain the voices of the dead.”

    But what if one wanted to hear a voice of the dead say something it had never uttered in life? That was the challenge faced by the creators of the Tupac Shakur “hologram” for the 2012 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Though the resurrection of Tupac (who died in 1996) proved a media sensation, reporting focused almost exclusively on the visual illusion and its mechanics – including a special fascination with the fact that the “hologram” wasn’t really a hologram but rather constituted a 21st-century version of a 19th-century optical illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost.

    Tupac’s vocal performance, no less than his dance moves, required technology wizardry with a curious genealogy. The sound engineer responsible, Claudio Cueni, discussed the process of creating Tupac’s vocal performance on Pensado’s Place (a show for folks in the audio biz). While the visual team plumbed footage and medical records to recreate Tupac’s appearance in meticulous detail, Cueni combed recordings: no vocal double was be used – everything had to be Tupac’s own voice. The word “Coachella” – crucial to establishing the virtual Tupac’s presence at the festival and apparent interaction with the audience – proved particularly difficult, as Tupac never said the word in life (the Coachella music festival started in 1999, three years after Tupac’s death). But by joining the word “coach” to a mixture of sound-alikes for “ella,” and by time-stretching, auto-tuning, and altering vowel sounds with the audio plug-in Talkbox, Cueni was able to assemble the phrase “What the f*** is up Coachella?” from Tupac’s recorded voice.

    It is with Talkbox that the genealogy of Tupac’s resurrected voice gets interesting. Since 2008, the plug-in has come with the digital audio workstation Pro Tools. In its Audio Plug-Ins Guide, Pro Tools explains that the purpose of Talkbox is “to add voice-like resonances to audio signals.” The website Pro Tools Production adds that this plug-in (like many plug-ins) digitally models a previous analog device:

    The hardware equivalent is a stomp-box with a speaker connected to a plastic tube which ends up in the musician’s mouth. The user changes the shape of his/her mouth to filter the sound which is then picked up by a vocal mic.

    The hardware predecessor to Talkbox was brought to prominence in the 1970s by Peter Frampton, who used it on such hits as “Show Me the Way” (from the album titled – get this – Frampton Comes Alive!).

    Before there was the Talk Box, however, there was the Sonovox. The idea behind these two technologies was similar: both used the shape of the mouth to modify the frequency content of a reproduced sound. With the Sonovox, instead of putting one’s mouth on a tube that transmitted the sound to be modified, one pressed two loudspeakers against one’s throat. In both cases, the user silently mouths words while the transmitted sound does the job of the larynx, or voice box. (“The Talk Box is an extra larynx,” Frampton has said, “you shut of yours and get piped in larynx. It could be a guitar, it could be a synthesizer – anything that could be amplified and come out of the speaker and be bypassed and put through the tube.”) Lucille Ball demonstrated the newly invented Sonovox in a newsreel of 1939, in which the sound she modifies comes from a recording of a train (in 1941, the Sonovox was used to impart speech to a whistle and steam for the voice of the train in Disney’s Dumbo):

    Like the illusion of Pepper’s Ghost, the Sonovox found an early application in conjuring the dead. In the 1940 film You’ll Find Out starring Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre, the Sonovox plays an important role in the performance of seances. The first seance scene features three visitors from the beyond, the first speaking through a trumpet, the second drawing a low, growling voice from unseen drums, and the third a wispy voice in the wind:

    In this second seance scene, the trick behind these voices is discovered:

    These inhuman voices of the dead are a far cry from the faithful recreation of Tupac’s stage voice sought and achieved by Cueni (and it’s worth noting here the convenient fact that Tupac’s stage voice was always already mediated by microphones and loudspeakers, allowing Cueni to mask imperfections by adding reverb and delay without these effects seeming unnatural). Analogously, a main appeal of Pepper’s Ghost was that the seemingly three-dimensional figure could pass through objects and people; holographic Tupac, by contrast, remained distant from his on-stage company – never revealing the insubstantiality of his form, and encouraging us to perceive him as a living presence.

    John Durham Peters has observed that “two ruling ambitions in modern technology appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead” (Speaking into the Air, 161). While the conjuring of the dead seemed to fade in importance in the twentieth century, the ability now not just to replay but also to reanimate the archive of a life lived – to generate new performances from it – has renewed the ambition. With today’s technology, death is no obstacle to the comeback.

    If conjuring the dead remains a ruling ambition, however, it is also significant how much that ambition has changed in the last century+. Early phonograph users imagined that the vibrations of a voice, preserved in tinfoil or wax, carried a person’s presence. Something of this remains in the insistence that the holographic Tupac use Tupac’s own voice. Yet, in using Talkbox, Cueni treated Tupac’s recorded voice as an audio signal that needed to be artificially imbued with “voice-like resonance.” Like a train whistle or guitar, Tupac’s voice (cut up and reassembled syllable by syllable) became the raw material to which sonic markers of sentience and life were added. The remarkable result of such technological gymnastics was the convincing illusion of Tupac’s resurrection. Whereas yesterday’s technologies shadowed forth a second, ghostly realm, today’s thoroughly blur the boundaries between presence and absence, animate and inanimate, life and death.

    In You’ll Find Out, the sonovox pivots from this “yesterday” to “today.” In the final scene, Mr. Kayser – the one who discovered the trick behind the seance – presents a more wholesome, musical application for the Sonovox. Just before the start of this clip Mr. Kayser declares, “it gave me a whole new idea for a band number. We’re going to let our instruments speak for themselves!”:

  • Music, Technology, Theory Timeline (c.1650-1850)

    I’ve been experimenting with using Prezi to map out developments in music and (primarily visual) technology. Though it’s a bit clunky to use in this way, I like the ability to include images and move between distant and close views, and I’m finding it useful for organizing information chronologically and conceptually.

    Go to timeline on Prezi

  • A Dynamic Medium for Creative Thought: Beethoven’s Erard Piano

    For most of his early career, Beethoven played on German and Viennese pianos.  With the light action, clear attack, and rapid decay of these instruments, he composed themes such as this, from the concluding movement of Op. 49, No. 1:

    Op. 49, No. 1 – Rondo: Allegro; Zvi Meniker playing a reproduction of an Anton Walter piano, c. 1790

    Beethoven, Op. 49, No. 1, third movement (first edition)

    In 1803, Beethoven received a new, French piano from the maker Sébastian Érard.  This piano responded differently to his touch, used a foot pedal rather than knee lever to lift the dampers, and produced different sonorities.  It was – as Tilman Skowroneck has discussed – a new tool with which to conceive musical ideas.  With the less clear attack and longer decay of its tones, Beethoven explored new possibilities and abandoned old ones.  One result was themes such as this, from the last movement of Op. 53 (the Waldstein Sonata):

    Sonata No. 21, Op. 53 – Rondo: Allegretto moderato – Prestissimo, Bart van Oort playing a c. 1815 Salvatore Lagrassa piano

    Beethoven, Op. 53, third movement (first edition)

    The long slurs, the slow pace of harmonic change, the rippling accompaniment in the right hand while the left hand alternates between resounding bass notes and treble-register theme, the bell-like quality of this theme  – all are products of Beethoven’s interaction with his new Érard piano, the medium of his creative thought.

    In “Personal Dynamic Media” (1977), Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg heralded a new “dynamic medium for creative thought” in the form of the Dynabook, a predecessor to the notebook computer.

    Kay and Goldberg described the Dynabook as an active medium (or really, “metamedium” that can be all other media), which they saw as basically unprecedented.  “For most of recorded history,” they wrote, “the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even ‘motion’ pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer’s wishes.”

    Yet the piano, and indeed all musical instruments, are responsive media.  Some are more responsive than others – in 1796, Beethoven was dissatisfied with a Streicher-made piano because it “deprived him of the freedom to create my own tone.”   But all musical instruments respond to the “queries and experiments” (to use Kay and Goldberg’s language) of their users.

    Why did Kay and Goldberg exclude musical instruments from the prehistory of the Dynabook?  Not out of neglect.  As Kay and Goldberg state, “one of the metaphors we used when designing such a system was that of a musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly and consistently to its owner’s wishes.”  Here, the reason for the exclusion becomes clear: Kay and Goldberg conceived musical instruments as interfaces, not as media.

    Recently, Kay has suggested that musical instruments and computers belong to the same category. In a 2003 interview, he remarked, “the computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.” This sounds like a statement from a culture in which musical instruments are primarily vehicles for already composed music.  It is as if music exists prior to instruments, simply waiting to be accessed.  That musical instruments and computers are now the same for Kay may reflect the failure of one the dreams behind the Dynabook: the dream that everyone would become computer “literate.”  Discussing the thinking behind the programming language he developed for the Dynabook, Kay explained, “the ability to ‘read’ a medium means you can access materials and tools generated by others. The ability to ‘write’ in a medium means you can generate materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate.”  The early environments developed using Kay’s language emphasized the “writing” side of literacy: they were for such activities as painting, animation, and composing.  On the Dynabook, kids wouldn’t learn how to play a musical instrument – they would create their own musical instruments, and write music with them.  With the Dynabook, Kay and Goldberg hoped, “acts of composition and self-evaluation could be learned without having to wait for technical skill in playing.”

    Music on the Dynabook prototype.  On the right, “a musical instrument is created.”


    But lets look at how Kay and Goldberg conceptualized media in 1977: “external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows.”  That, to me, sounds like a good description of media.  And it sounds like an excellent description of Beethoven’s Érard piano.  Which should teach us that no technology can be a short-cut to our ideas; but any can be a medium for creative thought.