Experiences of Surprise Conversations with Pierre Bastien, Maxime Rioux and Remko Scha

Sound, Art and Technoculture Assignment For City University, London

Richard Harding

The sophistication of todays digital music technology, and its almost universal application in the production of contemporary music, makes the work of the few sound sound-artists who have chosen to experiment with mechanical instruments seem puzzlingly anachronistic, based as it is, on technology long considered superfluous and obsolete. Indeed, the golden age of the mechanical instrument, in terms of popularity, was at the turn of the 20th century. The zenith of popularity of mechanical instruments was from about 1890 to the early 1930s. During this period they could be found in all kinds of public places and also in the home. Coin-operated instruments of all kinds could

be found in cafs and restaurants. In 1920, 70% of the 364,000 pianos manufactured in the USA were player pianos. 1 During this period, prior to the development of phonograph, mechanical instruments offered the public, for the first time, the chance to hear pre-recorded musical performances and an end to total reliance on trained musicians to provide musical entertainment. Mechanical organs, orchestrions and pianos also found a home in the theatre and the cinema where, cheaper to run than a real orchestra, they could be used to provide interval entertainment or accompaniment to a silent film.2 By the 1940s the popularity of new technologies, the radio and the phonograph, had effectively destroyed the market for mechanical instruments. The industry collapsed during the great economic depression of the early 1930s and never recovered. This rapid decline in popularity suggests that self-playing instruments, even despite their widespread use, had always been significantly limited in terms of the range of musical performance that they could effectively reproduce, and that, as a result of these limitations, mechanical instruments were happily cast aside at the earliest possible opportunity. A live recording of, for example, a classical concert, potentially offered a mass audience cheap access to a better quality of performance than could be produced by the piano-roll system, or indeed by local musicians. Electronic recording had another advantage in that it could record and reproduce any instrument put in front of the microphone, from the full polyphony of a classical orchestra to the faithful reproduction of the human voice. Mechanical automation technology had only successfully been developed for the piano, the organ, percussion and some other minor additional sound effects that could be found on the player-piano based orchestrions. These significant limitations of the mechanical technology of the time pretty much guaranteed the consignment of this generation of mass market, self-playing instrument to the history books. As the production of self-playing mechanical instruments ground to halt, the creative use of automatic instruments in experimental classical works appeared to have ended with it. The experimental American composer George Antheil composed the Ballet Mcanique3 for 16 player

pianos and percussion in 1924, but advances in electronic music technology made in the decades that followed, such as the creative use of tape and the development of synthesisers, appeared to have made any creative application that mechanical instruments might have had for the composer seem rather redundant. Subsequent advances in electronic music technology have, of course, also been concerned with developing systems of instrument automation, but these developments have been made purely in terms of electronic control, without further resort to mechanical automation systems. Yet, even as electronic recording technology, and later, digital music technology, appeared to have rendered mechanical music technology entirely obsolete, the creative exploitation of these seemingly outmoded mechanical systems was continued by a number of sound-artists and composers. Gyrgy Ligetis Pome Symphonique for 100 metronomes, composed in 1962, highlighted the unique qualities of the clockwork metronome, in particular the unique way in which each machine, after a time, loses wind-up power and slows to a halt. The sound-art of Stephane Von Heune and Jean Tinguely, produced in the same period, also made use of mechanically generated music as part of larger, automated sculptures. But what is it about mechanical systems of automation that attracted, and continues to attract sound-artists, in the face of the time and labour required to design and implement these systems, and especially as established digital systems of instrument control, such as MIDI, are widely available? What differences between the two systems of automation, mechanical and digital, might be of particular importance to these artists? And, does this obstinate use of mechanical automation point to the existence of serous, perhaps unacknowledged, limitations inherent in contemporary digital music systems? This essay investigates what the possible motivations behind the decision to work with mechanical automation might be, by talking to three contemporary sound-artists who have worked with musical automata and automated instruments. Their responses suggest that the unique limitations

of mechanical automation can in fact be of great benefit to the creative process. The use of mechanical automation systems allows the advantages of instrumental automation to be carried over from the digital/electronic domain into the real acoustic world, and therefore allows the composer to utilise the particular acoustic and timbral qualities of pre-existent instruments. In addition, the automation of instruments in live acoustic space allows the artist to highlight the presence of autonomous acoustic phenomena, or any other non-deterministic qualities of the activation system, which again would not be present in a virtual system. Ultimately it is this interplay between the musical system and autonomous physical phenomena which is of interest to these artists. The creative use of mechanical automation therefore facilitates the generation of unexpected, original musical forms, forms which are not expressions of the human creative imagination, and which therefore ultimately have implications regarding the relationship between the musical creator and his work.

Pierre Bastien & Mecanium

Pierre Bastien was born in Paris, in 1958, and currently lives in Rotterdam. In 1986 he formed his own automaton band, Mecanium, made up of hand-made Meccano built automatons, powered by electric motors. These mechanical players were designed to be able to play a variety of preexistent, traditional instruments. The Mecanium was followed by the Mecanologie, in 1997, in which ready-made objects were incorporated into the performance mechanisms. He has also designed and built a number of other installations which explore the possibilities of automated musical performance, which have been exhibited in a number of European cities. Bastiens automaton performers are generally hand made from humble, easy to assemble materials such as the toy engineering kit Meccano. His choice of materials and his do-it-yourself approach to

the construction of his automatons means that the automatons are never mechanically perfect, and as result play their given parts with odd and unexpected syncopations. They work, they do their job, but they are not perfect, never, I dont know why, but its a bit like when Im doing some jobs at home, like putting up some curtains or whatever; its done but its never perfect. So in the music it is a bit the same. I took advantage of that in the music. The limitations of the automation technology are emphasised as much as possible, as this is what separates them from human performers; Generally with more handy people doing the same kind of work the machines play a bit too strict. With mine they play around the tempo, sometimes, and that makes a kind of style. This difference in playing style is what attracts musicians to play alongside the automata; I realise now that more and more musicians like to play with the machines and follow the kind of groove they have which is a bit different from the rest. The activation mechanisms of Bastiens mechanical players are relatively direct, and do not tend to introduce variations of performance, rather it is the production process itself which introduces a level of non-determinacy into the system. His machines almost appear to be created by accident or mistake rather than by design, and the eccentricity of their playing style must be encouraged by the choice of materials and the way in which they are constructed. Bastien combines his mechanical performers in different configurations to create small bands or installations when required. He recently put together a band to record a piece entitled, Play-Scissors Play, which was made up of contributions from an automated scissors-player, a modified record player which sampled at random a vocal part recorded on a 7-inch disc, and the live accompaniment of two human musicians playing prepared trumpet and a Mangbetu harp, an instrument originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The transformation of an object such as a pair of scissors into a self-playing music machine highlights one of the attractive possibilities of mechanical automation, that real objects can be automated and then engaged with musically, rather than automation being restricted to virtual instrumentation or synthesisers.

The autonomous nature of each mechanical player, and the individuality of their performances, invites a tendency for them to be regarded as personalities, as Bastien suggests; This recent session with the scissors player was like meeting an old friend I had not talked to for ten years! Little by little I got to remember its qualities and its uneasy sides4. There is a sense of being in dialogue with another musician, yet one that possesses a very singular style. The initial motivation for the creation the Mecanium was so that Bastien would have an accompaniment for a solo performance that he was asked to play on trumpet; I was asked to play a solo, and I didnt like the idea of playing a solo, so I wanted to have a dialogue just for one night. At first Im just experimenting with things, so it was not really planned, what I did. So the first machine, I did it just for one evening and I played with it, I thought it would be the first and the last machine, but it was so pleasant to do that I decided to go on with this activity...

Maxime Rioux & Automates Ki

Maxime Rioux is a Montreal based sound artist and musician, who is also known under the stage name of Maxime De La Rochefoucauld. He is the inventor of the The Systme Ki, a system for the automated control of acoustic instruments, principally percussion and stringed instruments which he has collected from different parts of the world. The name Ki is a Japanese translation of term Qi or Chi, which in traditional Chinese culture is understood as the invisible vital energy that flows through and animates living things; a metaphor for his system of control, which is based on the use of inaudible waveforms. These signals drive woofer speaker cones, which in turn drive the mechanisms which activate the instruments. The master waveforms and can be generated by synthesisers or sequenced with digital sequencing software such as Cubase.

Maxime also plays trumpet and improvises in collaboration with his automata. As with Pierre Bastien, this collaborative element, the act of engaging with the performance of the machine is important. I had some purist friends of mine who said, Why dont you just do an automaton, pure, record? I like to go further and do music... I think its nice to play with them. He also jokes that he wanted to beat other musicians to the possibility. At the beginning I was sure in the four or five years of this system that some American would come with the same fucking idea and play on top with other instruments; so I would rather pervert my own work before someone else! This lack of interest in a mechanical aesthetic is found in Riouxs system itself, which sounds surprisingly natural; in part because of the diverse cultural origins of the instruments involved, but also due to the organic, modulating rhythms that the system generates. Although the higher-level orchestration of the automata is taken care of by a digital sequencer, this fixed source material is made audible only through the implementation of activation systems that invite a level of unpredictability, removing any trace of mechanical precision. These modulations, occurring within the activation mechanisms, create a kind of syncopation, or groove, which is important to the particular appeal of the mechanical system. It is the introduction of unpredictability and variance during the performance stage which is of interest to Rioux, rather than the use of unpredictable methods of construction we see in Bastiens work. Rioux discovered the principle behind the system by accident, whilst experimenting with his Korg synthesiser and a few household items in his kitchen. One day I was in my kitchen and I got an empty bottle of wine and I put a cymbal on top of it. Then I put a stick inside the woofer and I had the Korg MS-10; I fluctuated some different frequencies and it grooved like jazz drummers... So I added a bass drum and stuff on the kitchen table and I phoned all my friends. Because they were driven by the same frequency, all of them, but it was making an automatic poly-rhythmical beat. It was amazing... So we were round the table and we couldnt believe it... Ive been doing that for ten or eleven years now.

Remko Scha & The Machines

Remko Scha, born in 1948, is a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, and one of the brains behind the Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam, an independent organisation consisting of machines, computers, algorithms and human persons, who work together toward the complete automatization of art production5. The president and spokesmachine of the institute is Huge Harry, an outspoken personality of the speech synthesis machine MITalk responsible for a number of essays outlining the future of automated art production and for representing the computational point of view with great vigour and clarity.6 The adoption of a robot identity is a way for Scha to take on a computational perspective and to talk about art production from an autonomous, non-human position. Huge Harry is often to be found arguing for a computational perspective against the anthropocentrism of conventional art production. Anthropocentrism is a typical Huge Harry term, Scha explains. When I write the story from Huge Harrys perspective I can just take it for granted that the non-personal, completely autonomous mathematical things can also be taken seriously, and then Huge Harry can happily talk about his anthropocentrism. In 1982 Scha recorded the album Machine Guitars; a collection of recordings of an installation, in which a suspended electric guitar was struck by a cord attached to an electric motor. The result was a uniquely relentless and minimal guitar music. The first version was a rotating motor, which was actually a fan motor with ropes tied to it so that the rope would hit the strings when the fan turned. And then what I did from the beginning was that they had variable transformers so I could vary the speed of the motor, so that I can have the thing go, ploink...ploink...ploink... or p-p-p-p-p-p-p depending on how I set up the speed. That was the first one; I also combined that with just using a

metal brush, and if it hit the strings very lightly you would end up getting this drone effect where you just dont hear any impact; you just get the drone. Schas mechanical system, unlike Bastiens or Riouxs, was specifically designed to foreground particular acoustic effects that can appear to musically modulate a repeated musical pattern. Indeed, these acoustic phenomena only become audible through the use of a highly regular activation system that eliminates all other forms of rhythmic variation. In this regard, The Machine Guitars differs from the Systme Ki, in that the system itself is not designed to introduce intentional end-point non-determinacy. But the systems are, however, similar in that, for their musical effects, they both rely on the action of undetermined physical phenomena upon them. This industrial, repetitive music was in part inspired by the mechanical aesthetic of the early British punk bands. I actually went to London before they had any records out and heard them all; I heard the Clash live and The Damned and The Stranglers and The Sex Pistols... the really basic thing that punk bands have in common, *is+ that they just go dat-dat-dat-dat. That aspect of the style that is just extremely basic and repetitive... I think my strongest experience in terms of that was actually The Clash live, and they were doing something that I dont think they ever put on record... It was completely mechanical in a sense; it was so over-stylised that it was mechanical. It was dat-dat-datdat with a very strong precision. Although Machine Guitars was completely automated in its execution, the experimental use of the electric guitar produced a style that had similarities to the post-punk aesthetic being developed in New-York at the same time. *Machine Guitars+ put me in the same boat with the art people in New York who were picking up the same vibes and who were also doing an art version of punk , like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, which was, in some sense, an exactly parallel development. They didnt do the mechanical version but it was also taking up something from punk and sort of moving it in to a somewhat more arty context; thats what my move had in common with what they did, so

thats why it was nice when I actually ended up meeting these people; I really liked what they did and they really liked what I did ..

Control and Surprise

Perhaps the crucial difference between mechanical and electronic systems of automation, is that mechanical systems allow the automation of pre-existent instruments or objects, such as guitars, drums, percussion, or phonographs. In theory, these systems allow the transformation any existing instrument into a self-playing instrument, in the way that a mechanical system for automating a standard piano would transform it into something functionally resembling a player-piano. This then allows the sound-artist or composer to make use of the particular acoustic or timbral qualities of any single acoustic or electro-acoustic instrument, whilst still enjoying the benefits of automation. The popularity of digital instruments, including sample based virtual instruments, intended to simulate real acoustic instruments such as the piano, is in part due to the level of automation and instrumental control that they allow. However, these instruments necessarily exist in an acoustically dead space, and although digital effects such as reverb and delay are used to simulate the highly complex acoustic phenomena found in a real space, they often fail to sound authentic. The use of acoustic instrumentation therefore offers the sound artist access to an acoustically complex sound, and the possibility of interplay between the instrument and real acoustic phenomena. The use of pre-existing instruments also allows the possibility of a comparison between human and mechanical playing on the same instrument, and by doing so, highlight the unique character and capabilities of mechanical performance. Remko Schas Machine Guitars took their inspiration, in part, from a mechanistic style that was popular in punk, but the use of the same instrument, the

guitar, in the automated piece, intentionally highlights the machines capability to exceed the limitations of human guitarists. The automated instrument is able to produce metronomic, relentless rhythms, capable of maintaining a uniform volume and playing at great speed for long periods of time. Punk guitarists may have been tending towards a mechanical style, but ultimately lacked the capability to perform with such metronomic reliability. As such the automated instrument becomes an ideal, superior performer. The collection of motors used to realise the Machine Guitars album were presented as The Machines, an autonomous machine band. The Machines issued this manifesto in 1980, highlighting their ability to play punk guitar better than any human counterpart:

THE MACHINES

The Machines don't like emotion. They like sound.

The Machines don't like expression. They like noise.

The Machines don't think. They hit their strings.

The Machines play loud. The Machines play fast. The Machines play for hours at a time.

No electronics. No synthesizers.

No computers. No people.8

The first piece, Shake from the Machine Guitars LP, is nearly six minutes of relentless industrial rhythm. Schas notes from 1980 describes the set-up used to produce the piece; A piece of cord is attached to an electrically driven uniformly rotating axis. The cord is swirled around and periodically hits one or more strings of an electric guitar.9 This set-up might perhaps have been expected to lead to a very static, uninteresting repetition of beats, but in fact, it is the very controlled, repetitious nature of the piece that allows the play of modulation phenomena to be heard, in the form of polyrhythmic patterns of accents on top of the regular beats, as Scha explains; The nice discovery with the ropes, and also the reason why I followed up on this after my first initial experiments, was that with a bit of luck you get fairly complex rhythms; because the rope starts vibrating in the air, and although the motor runs regularly the pattern with which the rope hits the strings is not regular at all; its based on a regularity but it has this vibration on top of it, which creates very nice drum patterns.

It becomes apparent then, almost paradoxically, that systems of instrumental automation, which appear to give the sound-artist total control over the sound produced, can be used to highlight autonomous phenomena that affect the system in ways that are beyond his control. These phenomena can be heard most distinctly in the kind of highly repetitious sounds that an automated set-up such as Machine Guitars can produce. In fact, the whole musical interest of the Machine Guitars concept can be seen to rely on these natural acoustic phenomena, and that it is therefore crucial that these pieces are realised in real acoustic space, rather than in a virtual space, where the modulation phenomena occurring in the various strings involved would simply not exist.

Maxime Riouxs Systme Ki exploits the same apparent paradox as Machine Guitars, that greater levels of control allow for greater levels of non-determinacy within the system. Riouxs system

makes great use of hard to predict materials, such as springs, and deliberately builds activation systems that introduce a level of variance into what they play. The system allows the automatons to be orchestrated through conventional sequencing software, You put the chunk of low frequency, you move them, cut and paste, he explained, I want a cymbal that hits at this time, I just drag the little bump of three hertz and then I have my cymbal; it works. You can use any kind of program; if you know Cubase you can make my system work. But it is crucial to this system that the fixed, digital source material is realised through an unpredictable, mechanical activation system. The System Ki allows Rioux to experiment with non-determinacy in a way that is not possible in other more strictly automated systems, like the numerous recent automation systems which trigger instruments directly using midi-solenoid technology; If you look on the internet you probably saw some robots; they all use motors, solenoids, and its so stupid. Most of them, I would say ninety percent of them, its stupid brain-dead people who want to make robot music... Its not human; I mean theres no accident. It is specifically the introduction of this accident that is crucial to the musical appeal of mechanically automated music, so automation systems that do not allow any level of randomness can perhaps be seen as less musically complex; in Orchestraki I did some drums that sound a bit like a real drum. Sometimes you think, Ah! It might be a real drummer. I think its because of this little randomness. Riouxs intention here is not necessarily to simulate human playing mechanically, but to introduce a level of variance in to an otherwise rigid system. It is this apparent ability of automata to improvise and surprise their designers that is what really separates physically engineered mechanical machine music and digitally sequenced music. Pierre Bastien explains: Im currently working on this installation called Paper Organs, which has a blowing system; a blower blowing on some reeds and on top of the air-flow a piece of paper is waving and clicking. And this combination, for me, its always beautiful to look at and hear also; so that there is percussion, but very light percussion of the paper, combined with a cord; and also the visual aspect

of this is that the paper starts living by itself and improvising its part; that is wonderful. When a machine starts improvising its much more impressive than when it just plays its part.

Alien Cultures

As we have previously noted, the use of a mechanical automation system allows the sound-artist to exploit the timbral qualities unique to any particular pre-existent instrument. Both Pierre Bastien and Maxime Rioux use mechanical players to perform with acoustic instruments, taken from different musical cultures around the world. Maxime Rioux describes some of the creative benefits of working with real instruments. In Spain it was great; I had two nice acoustic guitars, really Spanish looking, and the springs were doing [makes Spanish guitar sound with mouth]. And I tuned it in, each string. I dont change the chords, right? But when it sounds good, the spring goes on one string, and then the other, and it sounds like [repeats Spanish guitar sound]. So the two guitars were in the front of the stage and then I had castanets. And just before the show they look at all the instruments; some very vernacular like alcohol bottles with a surface like diamonds and you scrape on it with a key, thats a classic... I had all those instruments; people clapped before the show! It was gratifying. I think they knew I had worked for a week and saw they the instruments on stage and the show was great. We are used to associating certain instruments, and their attendant timbral characters, with specific musical traditions, and as such we expect to hear them played in a certain style or to hear them in a certain context. Mechanical performance of these instruments subtly undermines what we expect to hear, as although the timbre of the instruments sounds familiar and natural, the way in which they are played by the automation system is not based any cultural style. Maxime Rioux explains; When you think about sound, sometimes sound can be really cultural. When you hear a tabla, and you

make an Eskimo play a tabla he will play his cultural beat on the tabla. But if you dont know he is an Amerindian playing the tabla you will think its Indian, because the sound is so impregnated in the Indian culture. If these instruments are played by the mechanical system, the style of playing is no longer linked to the human body, and is no longer the product of any particular human culture; the sensation this produces can be unsettling. The music seems to originate from somewhere which is always elsewhere. This affect was noted by Maxime Rioux when playing with his Automates Ki in Africa. In Senegal, I used all their Djembe... people thought it was from Sierra Leone, from their neighbouring country, but not their own beat! The fact that the automatons actions are necessarily inhuman and mindless leads us to consider whether the automaton, who is not musically trained, who is part of no culture, and does not possess the musical thinking of the human being, is therefore able to transcend the limitations of human creativity. Traditional composition and performance-based improvisation is limited in its scope and originality by human perception and cognition, specifically by the musical intention and training of the composer or performer. This leads to a certain repetition of musical ideas; a staleness and a recycling of tired forms, which the automaton musician seems to be able to transcend, by virtue of its lack of humanity. Mechanical automation systems are only designed to superficially replicate the physical actions of performance; they have no corresponding mental process; they dont know what they are doing or even what music is. It is this ambivalence towards music, inherent in autonomy, which allows them to do what human performers find so difficult, which is to act in ways that contradict the conventions of musical performance. Remko Scha felt that automation could be used as a way to proceed beyond the human imagination and its unavoidable limitations. I was also interested in Jazz, and in particular Free-Jazz, say, the Onnette Coleman branch of completely improvised Free-Jazz. I felt [at the time] that one could do nondeterministic things just by completely improvising them, which seemed an obvious idea to me; now

I understand in hindsight it is clear that it is in some sense a utopian idea, because it is very difficult for people to really improvise; to really realise this freedom thats implicit in an awareness of all possibilities; its something that people in fact cant do very well and a lot of improvisation is even more conventional than a lot of composition . And I can say this now very clearly and strongly because I have experienced this at the time. The antidote to these perceived limitations of improvisation was the development of automation. And as part of that already there was the idea of automating parts of these processes so that they wouldnt be necessarily dependent on people; that we would actually construct complex things which would produce sound all by themselves The odd syncopations of Pierre Bastiens hand-made automata, or the alien, unpredictable performances of the Systme Ki are unlikely to be spontaneously arrived at by human performers. The fact that machines have performance actions completely different to humans and allow forms of random variance to affect their performances, means that they have the potential to offer musical forms that are autonomous of the composers or improvisers imagination, or as John Cage would refer to it, fresh bread9. The use of chance operations within composition in the 20th century, for instance in the work of John Cage or in the tape cut-ups of William Burroughs, are methods employed with similar aims; methods by which the composer can attempt to introduce in a controlled fashion, elements autonomous of his own imagination into the composition. The aim is to produce unexpected results, or music that could not be composed solely by the human imagination. There is a desire to make audible something autonomous of our perception, rather than art simply being a map of our own perception of the world, reflected back to us and offering nothing original. Maxime Rioux seems to agree; when asked whether his system was developed to simulate human playing, he responds; No, I would say the opposite actually. Because usually, these automatons... the principle behind that is trying to imitate the movement of the human being. My system is like what can I do with the system?

Fresh Bread

The use of mechanical automation then, allows the musical incorporation of autonomous acoustic phenomena and introduces an inevitable degree of non-determinacy to the system, and therefore allows the creation of styles of playing and performance which are beyond the physical capabilities of human players, and which ignore the tendency of human musicians towards certain culturallytransmitted or biologically determined playing styles. By allowing the exact performance of the music to be undetermined or unpredictable they allow chance or non-determinacy to have an effect on the music in a semi-controlled fashion. This is used both as an end in itself and as a prompt to refresh traditional forms of human musicianship. The strength of these mechanically realised works lies in their ability to make the autonomous world intelligible to us, by mediating it through a musical framework. This mediation, or fusion appears to be necessary to bring two equally unattractive poles of musical form together into one system, in an attempt to overcome the problems particular to each. Traditional works, the products solely of the human creative imagination, can seem limited in scope or originality, or to offer nothing original at all, but, on the other hand, can at least be understood musically. Conversely the autonomous language of nature promises the composer genuinely original information, but lacks musical characteristics, such as rhythm and pitch. Direct products of nature presented as artworks, such as environmental sound art, or audible transformations of inaudible mathematical processes, are listened to a in a different way to music, because they lack musical organisation, as Scha explains. By avant-garde music weve learnt to listen to all kinds of things; and then it is, in fact, the case that if you do any kind of mathematical structure that we havent turned into sound yet, and turn it sound, it yields a listening experience with its own kind of identity and its own kind of quality, which you can appreciate therefore, as an avant-garde piece. Its easy, its not difficult, But these works of non-musical sound art fail to speak to us in our

own artistic language, they are autonomous, yet they are not music, and therefore fail to engage with our perception in the same way that music has specifically been designed to; On the other hand, if ones honest, one can also see a certain limitation [to] those kinds of experiences, if you compare them to, say, nineteenth century string quartets or even a half-way sophisticated pop-song. There are things about music that we dont get for free from the mathematical structures; and if we also want to engage in those musical dimensions then it turns out to be very difficult. The problem, that autonomous music, in its various forms, hopes to solve, is how to bridge the gap between mathematics and human perception. One way is to use algorithms to generate intelligible musical forms that incorporate mathematical principles such as non-determinacy, but this also, according to Scha, has its drawbacks in reality. The people who sort of emulate traditional, conventional tonal music with computational means have created stuff that is really boring; it turns out one can do it; but its always stays too close to the original, it gets to be really derivative. This is too near what we have already; successful autonomous music then, attempts to tread a fine line between the nonintelligibility of nature and the boredom of convention. It can be seen then, that the use of automation is one of a number of methods used by composers to attempt to incorporate autonomous phenomena within a recognisably musical system; to make autonomous music, rather than sound-art. Other methods have included efforts to involve animals, or non-musicians in the production of music. Animals are as equally oblivious of mans musical imagination as machines, and can be trusted to provide original input into the musical system. But the autonomy of nature has to be mediated through the musical system so that it is intelligible, and this is where the use of imaginative mechanical systems can be absolutely crucial, as Pierre Bastien describes, Now Im helping some young artists from Belgium. They invent instruments and they have an installation with a hen; an installation or a piece of music; and they amplified a piece of metal or wood and they have this animal, the hen, on top of that walking, and they feed the hen with some corn and the hand is picking the corn or the seeds. And every time she is making sound, so picking different seeds will make different rhythms. And this is beautiful; this is machinery for me.

I like to look at it. And I saw that at the Barbican they will have a piece with electric guitar and some birds coming on top of the guitar [Installation by Cleste Boursier-Mougenot for The Curve at the Barbican Art Gallery]; the guitar is horizontal and the birds are working on the neck and playing the guitar; also its a machine. We see in the work of 20th century sound-artists, such as Roussel and Lucier, the same attempts to automatically generate musical material by the use of insentient consciousnesses such as animals, or unconscious brain activity. These works have parallels with the surrealists experiments with automatic, unconscious writing and use of dreams, which they employed as methods of overcoming the creative limitations of the human mind. Pierre Bastien has been influenced in part by Raymond Roussel, the pre-surrealist poet and artist, who created musical contraptions which anticipate the concerns with non-determinacy of experimental music of the 20th century. Roussel used animals and mechanisms to create autonomous musical artworks, as David Toop describes. Staged for one week at the Parisian Thtre Fmina in 1911, Roussels Impressions DAfrique featured among its scenes the trained earthworm whose undulations in mica trough dripped mercurial water onto the strings of a zither to produce complex melodies. Roussels fantastic inventions lay in an interzone between vaudeville, anthropological Surrealism and future audio art. A fictive art that was improbable yet tantalisingly possible, the living sound sculptures of Impressions DAfrique touch sensitive areas of cruelty, dream, perverted science, alien systems and an atavistic social subversion.10 Rioux has recently realised the Alvin Lucier conceptual piece, Music for Solo Performer, using his Systme Ki. In this instance the source signal to drive the automata was derived from the brain waves of his partner for the project, Andrew Brouse, recorded using an EEG device. This is another example of a conceptual work where the source material is autonomously generated by a musicallyambivalent consciousness. Ultimately, according to Bastien, all of these disparate methods are concerned with finding different ways of producing sounds without human playing. Probably [it]

comes from just trying to escape traditional ways of playing music, like hitting a drum kit or playing chords on guitar. So hand, birds, or whatever... machine, they play all different things. So they will surprise us sometimes better than the most creative musician.

Experiences of Surprise

Making music with mechanical automation and acoustic or electro acoustic instruments can be seen then as a way of abdicating the traditional romantic role of composer, whos purpose it is to communicate purely his own subjective state, and to instead try to give voice to autonomous natural phenomena, such as the physical behaviour of sound, mathematical laws found in nature, or unexpected behaviours as might be found in non-human species. The use of a mechanical automation system creates a space where these phenomena can manifest themselves, and influence the production of the music itself. These autonomous phenomena are crucial to the work of all the artists considered in this essay; they all rely to some extent on happy accidents, or invite randomisation in to the process of their music making, in order to attempt to transcend the limits of their own creative imaginations. The construction methods of Pierre Bastiens automata invite unpredictable musical outputs. Riouxs Systme Ki introduces unpredictability within its very activation system. The interest of Schas Machine Guitars relies on the action of autonomous acoustic phenomena.

Remko Scha is keen to promote the creation of what he sees as objective music. I like to emphasise the autonomous aspects of the whole thing; the fact that I am, in some sense, just showing natural phenomena. And I dont want to downplay the importance of my own interventions

and my own judgements and how I deal with this; I can be proud of that, but its more like the pride of a discoverer or someone who knows how to get from here to there and had a feeling of where to go and used a compass; they actually knew how to find this place which other people couldnt get to. Im proud of what we did there, but at the same time its not like I created it, I discovered it. My first and strongest experience with my own music were experiences of surprise. I still remember vividly I had this little fan, a very cheap little fan, and I tied a shoelace to it and I got this guitar out of the basement and I set this thing up and I expected this, doing-doing-doing, so a boring little thing; but I was just going to see if the variable transformer worked at all to see what this did; and I had a whole fantasy that I would need twelve of these little motors and a lot of guitars in a row; a complex set up to then really end up making some music with some complexity. What happened, in fact, was that I turned the thing on and it goes, dum-dedumdum-dedum; and Im completely surprised. I turned on the string and it was just something completely different to what I had expected, and something much more complex than what I had expected and something much more musical than what I had expected. In The Music of The Spheres Jamie James explains that this conception of music as an art of individual expression, rather than as the product of autonomous, mathematical phenomenon, only became current with the rise of the romantics in the 18th century, Music remained an important constituent of mathematics in European education until the nineteenth century... The whole notion of individual expression begins if only obliquely with Ciceros homines docti, and very slowly builds to an overwhelming crescendo in the music of the Romantics, where the voice of the individual is of supreme importance.11 This conception of music as subjective expression is rebuked by Scha, speaking as the IAAAs Huge Harry, Let's face it. Music is not a means of communication. It is meaningless material, used for open-ended processes of aesthetic reflection by a multitude of culturally diverse audiences whose interpretations are totally arbitrary. There are no serious reasons for making one particular composition rather than another.12

So up until the romantics, music, linked to the laws of nature themselves, was regarded as something autonomous of the creative imagination, the music of the spheres itself, the sound of the harmony of the universal machine; a system completely autonomous of humans, continuing to sound whether we hear it or not. As soon as you have technology, then in principle you have the possibility of embodying this mathematics, and then you have a machine that does it; that is a possibility which then arises. And its a fascinating possibility... Scha speculates, especially if you still believe its the harmony of the spheres... then it would be very nice to have this little machine that embodies that... from that point of view its not surprising that at a given point in a cultural development this kind of fascination comes up and then once it has come up it will refuse to disappear. Schas aim, as an automata engineer, is to develop systems that make these natural laws audible; a tour guide through the autonomous world, rather than through his own emotions. The works of Pierre Bastien and Maxime Rioux are not directly concerned with specifically acoustic phenomena, yet both systems have been designed to allow chance, unpredictability and other autonomous natural laws to have an effect on the music that is produced. All the artists have therefore created systems whereby something that is independent of their own subjective intentions can be introduced, whether in the construction phase or the performance phase. The composer therefore, is as often as surprised by what music results from his experiments as the audience he performs to. He is in effect a part of the audience as well as the composer or performer; he is audience to his own work, which performs autonomously of him. Ultimately, some of these autonomous phenomena, chance, and acoustic phenomena, can be programmed into digital software. Algorithmic composition is concerned with the creation of autonomous artworks, mathematically randomly generated in digital environments. Mechanical automation, however, allows the artist to directly exploit real autonomous physical phenomena, such as non-determinacy or acoustic phenomena, and allows interaction with physical objects and animals, without the simulations of the virtual environment. In this respect although mechanical

automation may superficially appear outdated it offers us something that is simply not possible in the virtual domain; a direct dialogue with autonomous phenomena that exist in the physical world; phenomena which help us to attempt to transcend the limited nature of our own perception and our own imagination.

Notes
1

Oxford Music Online. 2007-2010. Entry for Mechanical Instrument. By Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume [Online] (Updated 2010) Available at: http://0www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wam.city.ac.uk/subscriber/article/grove/music/18229 [Accessed 26 January 2010].
2

Oxford Music Online. 2007-2010. Entry for Mechanical Instrument. By Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume [Online] (Updated 2010) Available at: http://0www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wam.city.ac.uk/subscriber/article/grove/music/18229 [Accessed 26 January 2010].
3

Oxford Music Online. 2007-2010. Entry for Ballet Mcanique [Online] (Updated 2010) Available at: http://0www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wam.city.ac.uk/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e559?q=ballet+mecaniqu e&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit [Accessed 26 January 2010].
4

Relay. 2009. Play Scissors Play by Pierre Bastien[Online] (Updated March 2009) Available at: http://www.modelart.ie/relay/pierrebastien.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].
5

Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 2007. Homepage [Online] (Updated October 2007) Available at: http://iaaa.nl/home.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].
6

Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 2006. Huge Harry [Online] (Updated June 2006) Available at: http://iaaa.nl/hh/cv.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].
7

Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 1980. The Machines[Online] (Updated August 2009) Available at: http://iaaa.nl/music/machpictpages/artzienpict.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].
8

Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 1980. Automatic Music by Remko Scha [Online] (Updated August 2009) Available at: http://iaaa.nl/music/machpictpages/artzienpict.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].
9

Cited in Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 1995. A Computational Perspective on Twenty-First Century Music by Huge Harry [Online] (Updated September 2004) Available at: http://iaaa.nl/hh/brettonh.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].
10

Toop, David. Humans, Are They Really Necessary?, in idem (ed.), Undercurrents(London: Continuum, 2002), p. 121-122.
11

James, Jamie. The Music of the Spheres (London: Abacus, 1993), p. 67.

12

Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 1995. A Computational Perspective on Twenty-First Century Music by Huge Harry [Online] (Updated September 2004) Available at: http://iaaa.nl/hh/brettonh.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].

APPENDIX 1 Transcription of Pierre Bastien Interview, 12/01/09

How did you first become interested in musical machines? Why did you first think, I want to make music with machines rather than with instruments? The first reason, chronologically speaking, is that I was asked to play a solo, and I didnt like the idea of playing a solo, so I wanted to have a dialogue just for one night. At first Im just experimenting with things, so it was not really planned, what I did. So the first machine, I did it just for one evening and I played with it, I thought it would be the first and the last machine, but it was so pleasant to do that I decided to go on with this activity. So the first time I was not aware of anything, I just knew of course a bit of the pioneers, the antecedents. Was there anyone you were influenced or inspired by? At that time I was twenty years old, I was very much into Dadaism, so I liked the mechanomorphic paintings by Francis Picabia; I knew of course the work of Marcel Duchamp; I was also a reader of the French writer Raymond Roussel who invented so many machineries; so probably all this, plus also I was a big fan of Jean Tingueley who did a lot of big Machineries and also I knew a little bit about the work of two French pioneers in inventing new instruments, the Baschet Brothers, who actually were more famous in the United States than in France, at that time, in the 1970s I mean. So altogether that probably pushed me almost unconsciously to build this first machine. It was a very simple machine playing little Indian cymbals. It was just to avoid soloing; that was the first idea. And then it suddenly became interesting to have some sort of musicians at home, so instead of playing with real musicians whom you have to call and make appointments and discuss

with etc. So it was very convenient to have those little musicians, little robots at home and play with them at any time. You call them little people, little robots, is that the way you really think of them, rather than as little machines? They are robots. Robots; I think the term comes from some eastern countries in Europe and it means forced work; it means work, and these machines, they work and they do they do their job at any time, so they are really robots, yes. Do you treat your band as a backing band, and you have complete power over them and you can tell them when to start and when to stop? Yes, well, its not too bad as a composer to have complete power over the musicians, which doesnt happen much in my sphere; because Im mostly in touch with improvisers or people who already have an idea about music. I come from the popular side of music, not really the well educated, compositional music. So at first, when you play, you play with friends, you have bands with your friends, but your friends they disappear one after the other; then after a few years you remain most alone from the original band. The original band is always nice; its collective and you compose collectively, its not a problem with the first band; and then the next band, they are more difficult to deal with, because you have to hire people or ask some other musicians to join your orchestra and mostly the other musicians, they have their own ideas about music; so they play yours, but they are a bit reluctant about it all the time. And the machines, that was a way to have some good humoured musicians around you. Some willing workers? Yes.

Do you ever feel as if once you have created a mechanical player, do you ever feel as if it has a personality of its own? Does it ever surprise you? Does it ever play differently to how you designed it? Yes, it happened a few months ago when I was asked to take part in the Relay process [online music project - http://www.modelart.ie/relay/].I described exactly this phenomenon, that I rediscovered the qualities, good and bad of one of these robots, by playing with a machine I hadnt played with for years; and its a possibility, yes. Its a big word for a little machine. Because Im not very handy I always build machines that are not completely well scientifically made; its just experiments every time, its prototypes; it is very seldom that I do twice the same installation or the same machine, so they are all prototypes. They work, they do their job, but they are not perfect, never, I dont know why, but its a bit like when Im doing some jobs at home, like putting up some curtains or whatever; its done but its never perfect. So in the music it is a bit the same. I took advantage of that in the music; that the machines sound completely different from some other stuff I hear around, like the electronic machines, for instance, or even some Bricolage. Generally with more handy people doing the same kind of work the machines play a bit too strict. With mine they play around the tempo, sometimes, and that makes a kind of style. Does that make it more interesting to play along with when youre playing? Yes, for some musicians, for more and more musicians, I realise now that more and more musicians like to play with the machines and follow the kind of groove they have which is a bit different from the rest. How do you find inspiration for making new machines? My inspiration is not the problem actually, the main problem is time, and also because I did so many now. After thirty years doing that I have probably two hundred objects, robots, so I have to make the maintenance of them; and also when I am asked to make an installation somewhere I have to go

there and put everything together again and take it down some weeks later, so its a lot of work. Inspiration I think it comes just by working, by working on it. Do you have any favourites after having made so many players? Do you have any ones that have really worked successfully? Any personal favourites? Yes. Only there is this kind market in music, probably only a limited number of venues or festivals where you can play. I was very happy with the band I had five or six years ago, it was a good combination, with a Casio-tone; on the Casio were turning some rolls with pins on the rolls, and the pins were pushing the keys and with that I could play... well, the machine could play chords; so grids, grids of chords, and also bass lines etcetera. It was a very complete machine, but I had to end with it after a few years playing with it. I noticed that a few people felt, even when I was changing the music, that because they were seeing the same object they had the feeling I was playing the same programme, the same repertoire, the same material; so I could have renewed the music; well, Im a bit the victim of something that helped me a lot; playing music that is visually interesting. That helps me playing in museums and galleries, and its also a great help for the listener who can enjoy also the visual aspect of the music. This is a good point. The other side of it, when people see the same machine they have the feeling that they hear the same music which is not completely true. So do you feel there are limitations occasionally to your players; they have to play the same thing over and over again? Well, no, the machines Im doing now, thats what Ive tried to explain, like this Casio machine could play very very different things. For the first time with the Casio I found a way to have one machine that could evolve a lot; before that I was making, every time, a new machine for a new piece. And with the Casio I started with one machine that could play any kind of music; any kind of new pieces. I could compose just by, instead of composing with a sheet of paper and a pen, I was composing with glue and cardboard and making those rolls; and every time I was doing a new piano roll and the

music would change, and the piano roll was made in a few hours; three or four hours and it was done. That was an evolution for me, but for the reason I explained that people visually were looking at the same machine again, they had the feeling that it was not a real evolution; then I did also some Meccano machines like always. Well in combination with the Casio tone I had a Meccano machine where I could change the last part of the mechanism on two separate axles, so I was playing rhythms with this machine, a bit like a DJ on turntables, this machine was turning two different functions and I could change the left module and have different music resulting. So you could kind of program what you have already? Yes, it was kind of programming I could do on stage in a few seconds. Youre an instrument builder, obviously, but you also compose your own music, so how do these two roles fit together? Do you feel theyre different roles or do you just not worry about it, you just make the instruments and see what comes out or do you try to compose as you go? Its a bit a mix of everything, sometimes Im leading by a good mechanical idea, like if I say now what Im doing, one of the last machines *I made+ is a small bass player in a way, only its very small; its only a few inches high and its also a machine that can evolve. There is a kind of mechanical finger turning in the middle and around that I can pull some rubber bands. I have eight rubber bands circling the mechanical finger, with this, and also by changing the speed that the mechanical finger is turning, I can have many different bass lines. Bass lines, made of, if I need, for instance, five strings, five notes, or up to eight, from one to eight and with different speeds and of course because the rubber bands are circling the finger I can make also different rhythms, you can have the waltz, for instance, or whatever. So, I found this idea so good that now I am trying to compose around this idea, but sometimes its the other way around; I have in mind some music already and I try to put it in a mechanical form. Ok, so you have an idea of the music as you are creating it.

Yes, and I try to put it into the machinery. It depends; sometimes the machinery is first and then, thats what Im doing now precisely in these new recordings, I have those bass lines first and then I combine with also some mechanical flute players, and then I try to add some manual or human parts and, well, its not that easy; because those machines, they have this very specific swing and its not easy to be as good as them. You said before about the visible aspects of your music and your players are very artistically interesting, aside from any music that they create. Is this visual side to you just as important to your music as the music itself? Well yes, I never I did anything that wasnt visually interesting in one way or another. Well, I think we dont play for blind people, or not often, so generally people have eyes and they should also enjoy the show by looking at it. This also comes from the way Im recording music; even when at home I have plenty of instruments form all over the world, so when Im recording it takes a long time before I pick the right instrument and the right place. Sometimes I hesitate between Tibetan horn, or would it better with an African horn? Or would it be better with a string instrument from India? or whatever. I can pick a lot of different instruments, so it takes a long time experimenting with this or that. On stage its a bit different; I cannot take everything. Even also the machines; I should work two weeks to build up if I were supposed to take all the machines for every concert. So this is impossible, so I take only a few things with me; three or four machines, one or two instruments; so that reduces a lot what I can put on a record and what I can put on stage, so I try to compensate what people will miss form the recordings with all those instruments, all those tones from all over the world. I try to put on stage something as rich as that. Of course on stage you seldom close your eyes to listen to music so why not to have something to look at. And what would be better than the machines there themselves? I think its important to show.

A lot of people make music nowadays in a virtual environment with samplers and sequencers and so on. Is that anything you have tempted by? Why have you chosen always with real machines? No, Im not tempted by those virtual things. Like on my computer, of course, Apple, also has a lot of Apple loops, they call that. I never go to that department of the program. I never use that. I think its a pity for the musician because who had the fun then? The musician has much less fun because Apple have already have had the fun, I think. Well, the engineers who designed the loops had the fun, so I want to have the fun from the beginning to the end. So weve talked about some of the things that have influenced you before, and theres been a long history of automata playing music, and so on. Theres the flute player by Vaucanson... That was fake I think... I was just wondering, people have been fascinated for years by seeing machines play music, robots play music. Why do you think its so fascinating for people to see a machine playing music and moving by itself? Thats a good question. I dont know, yes. Well people were fascinated also in the case of Vaucanson or the Hoffman tales; they were also fascinated by robots who could play chess for instance, or with also talking machines. There is a wonderful talking machine now made by Martin Riches, a British artist who lives in Berlin, who made several talking machines that are wonderful. And Im also fascinated like many others. I remember what the people said about the Dadaistic approach and the Futuristic approach, which was completely different, to machinery. In Futurism there was a fascination and they were idealising the machines and the Dadaists were more ironic about that. I think I have this aspect more and this side more. You feel more Dadaist?

Well, for me its obvious that the machines are made in a way that they are a joke about music. For me it was always important to... I learnt how to play several instruments; guitar, then double bass, and now Im playing trumpet and I play many many different instruments, there is always a kind of, well, long years to study and a lot of theories about it. And all this appeared to me always like a loss of time; losing my time. I think that there were also some great musicians who played with their own theories, their own approach of the instrument; so my robots are, a bit, joking with those years of studying; how to play the bow on a violin. You know, I have spent years learning how to push and pull the bow on the strings. In the case of a robot you do that in a few seconds. You can teach it very quickly. And the robot does it perfectly! Have you had any intention to replace the human performer and show that you can make music without humans, even though people tend to think that music is a very human activity? No, I dont have this ambition. I have fun doing what I am doing with the machines, but also I like to play many instruments. I like to play with other musicians also, thats always good. But I think also that music can be made only with machines, so I think that everything is open and what Ive chosen is a combination of human playing and mechanical playing, but other options are also good, I listen to any kind and enjoy any kind [of music]. As I said, I started around 1978, something like this, doing this activity; Im very glad that this movement with electronic music came, because it made me less solitary. If this had not happened, I would have been a complete outsider for all my life. I am still, but a bit less, I think. So thanks to the electronica. When you see your machines moving by themselves, do you ever think of it as magic, that things are moving? Do they have a strange uncanny feeling? Youve talked about being influenced by literature and so on, there has always been a fascination with strange uncanny actions, is that something you feel towards your own work occasionally?

Im sorry, I forgot what uncanny means but for the rest I think I understand what you say. Kind of unsettling perhaps, unreal. Unreal, yes it makes it unreal, and more strange and magical at the same time. Well in my case, and in many cases, it is due to the electricity, which is a magic thing. So probably we are not that responsible for the magic effect of our contraptions, but its always marvellous. For instance, now Im currently working on this installation called Paper Organs, which has a blowing system; a blower blowing on some reeds and on top of the air-flow a piece of paper is waving and clicking. And this combination, for me, its always beautiful to look at and hear also; so that there is percussion, but very light percussion of the paper, combined with a cord; and also the visual aspect of this is that the paper starts living by itself and improvising its part; that is wonderful. When a machine starts improvising its much more impressive than when it just plays its part. I have some friends and colleagues who are more specialised than me on robots that can improvise, but I like to do that also, more and more. Now Im helping some young artists from Belgium. They invent instruments and they have an installation with a hen; an installation or a piece of music; and they amplified a piece of metal or wood and they have this animal, the hen, on top of that walking, and they feed the hand with some corn and the hen is picking the corn or the seeds. And every time she is making sound, so picking different seeds will make different rhythms. And this is beautiful; this is machinery for me. I like to look at it. And I saw that at the Barbican they will have a piece with electric guitar and some birds coming on top of the guitar [Installation by Cleste Boursier-Mougenot for The Curve at the Barbican Art Gallery]; the guitar is horizontal and the birds are working on the neck and playing the guitar; also its a machine.

So you are interested in different ways of converting the action into sound, I guess? Yeah, different ways of producing sounds without human playing. Probably that comes from just trying to escape traditional ways of playing music, like hitting a drum kit or playing chords on guitar. So hand, birds, or whatever... machine, they play all different things. So they will surprise us sometimes better than the most creative musician...Sometimes, not always. So are you interested in process music, where you leave something recording and let it take its course? Yes, in a way, to invent some new music. Well, the good thing was that with the bag of machines I did, and Im not the only one of course, so I could say we did, and also this kind of research with animals playing instruments etcetera; the good thing is that we can still use old instruments, known instruments, and they will play new music. This I was very much interested in; taking again the same instruments, the same tools, but by combining with a new tool try to get some new sounds, new ways of playing. OK, so perhaps making music using robot players may be similar to using animal players or using nature, its a way of getting music that comes from somewhere else than just ourselves; from somewhere outside. Yes and its a way also of renewing, refreshing the forms.

APPENDIX 2 Transcription of Maxime Rioux Interview, 14/01/09

Ive been listening to the album Orchestraki. Is it pronounced Ki? Ki is like the Chi; the invisible energy that makes things move; so its an analogy to the inaudible frequencies that I use to run my system. Its totally analogue from the base. Ive got computerised just three years ago, but computerised doesnt mean that the music changed; its just that I can control the bass drum; I can control the cymbal individually; make them start, make them stop, orchestrate the whole thing. But basically I can run it with an analogue synthesizer or voice or any kind of inputs. Brainwaves... Yeah, I saw the Alvin Lucier project [Music for Solo Performer] thats on the internet as well... I think I never heard the piece. I think it was recorded back then [1983], but I never saw or heard the piece. But I got the notation; its a conceptual piece; you read some text and he talks a little bit about the technical things, but it doesnt say at the end how the piece is transferred from electronic brainwaves, like eight hertz alpha waves, into an acoustic phenomenon. It doesnt really say about it. But what I figured he did at the time; he put speakers on top of snare drums, just making the snare vibrate, like... [makes noise of snare vibrating]. I think that was it, you know. So he was just making it vibrate at eight hertz with the speaker... Yeah, like a snare drum or things like that, making the vibration. I have no clue, I havent heard the thing but it makes sense that I used my system with this piece. Its relevant. I hope he saw it! Im sure Alvin Lucier saw it.

I think I did come across today on the internet I saw someone had ripped the vinyl, I think its Alvin Luciers picture on the front. Hes got the things attached to his head. I havent heard it yet. Ill send you the link if I can find it. Yeah, if you find it send it to me as Id like to hear the real version. But I guess once youve got these brainwaves you can do what you like with them cant you? Theres so many ways of turning that in to sound... Yeah, its what makes bad art or great art; you can have a concept but if the result is non-musical or uninteresting its not worth the idea in a way. Its also... I dont know if the music stands by itself, if I close my eyes, because I think I never listened to it without seeing it with the video. But I think its a kind of a convertible piece of music, reminds you a little of bit of being in an alpha-wave state, closing your eyes and relaxing... But exactly, you know, you can do anything. You transfer the eight hertz... Lets say five times to an audible frequency state; its uninteresting, theres nothing there, its just *makes a siren noise+. What do you with that? You know, its boring; theres nothing there. Ive got a few questions here basically about how you started off doing this, kind of making music with machines. Do you call them automatons? I wouldnt call them automatons, but it has to be understood as automatons else otherwise its robots and robots has this... you know, legs and arms and the reference to the human body. Automaton is better, but the automaton is based on circular energy; motors, clocks, everything that turns like this [makes circular motion]. Since I use a woofer, a small woofer with inaudible frequencies, its a movement that goes like this *makes backward and forward motion+ and theres no mechanism in the electro-magnetic field, because the cone has no friction, almost. Its a coil that moves with electro-magnetism, so its not mechanical, so its not an automaton. Because if you look on the internet you probably saw some robots; they all use motors, solenoids, and its so stupid. Most of them, I would say ninety per-cent of them, its stupid brain-dead people who want to make

robot music and it sounds shit. Its not human; I mean theres no accident. Theres a little randomness in my system, but I can program, if I want, a four-four beat with a cymbal, bass drum and a *makes sound of conventional drum pattern+. Thats not my point, but in Orchestraki I did some drums that sound a bit like a real drum. Sometimes you think, Ah! It might be a real drummer. I think its because of this little randomness. Its like your smallest bone in your body, the little vibrating bone *points at ear+. Its very similar to that. Sometimes if the sound is louder your bone will vibrate more and you will hear different tonalities suddenly, so that when the middle piece which is attached in the middle of the woofer that [...inaudible...] percussion that you probably saw some of them. They oscillate like a bone. But your question, how I went to that... In 1980; just a little experiment; I had a big woofer and I made a small egg vibrate in the middle of the speaker. It was like an installation, because I studied in visual art so it was an installation with an egg. I think the radio was playing or something like that. And I forgot about this experiment for a while and then I think in 1989 or 1990 I proposed a grant to the Quebec government to make wine glasses vibrate; an installation of wine glasses hanging from the ceiling. But it was just an idea, right? I had no technical idea of how I would do that. But I came to the conclusion that I could hook up a little woofer and make the glasses vibrate. So I did this piece. It was eight of four glasses suspended upside down; there were four and I had eight of them in the space and I did the piece in the dark. So people were going, oh shit, because I recorded the inaudible frequency on an eight-track machine at the time with tape, so sometimes I had the chandelier vibrate on one side of the room and the other side. So it started like that; it was a good project. But one day I was in my kitchen and I got an empty bottle of wine and I put a cymbal on top of it. Then I put a stick inside the woofer and I had the MS-10, the Korg MS-10, I fluctuated some different frequencies and it grooved like jazz drummers [makes sound of Jazz drumming]. So I added a bass drum and stuff on the kitchen table and I phoned all my friends. Because they were driven by the same frequency, all of them, but it was making an automatic poly-rhythmical beat. It was amazing, because every mechanism is complementing each other, because the mechanism is

different. So we were round the table and we couldnt believe it... So Ive been doing that for ten or eleven years now. So youve kind of explained it with the inaudible frequencies that drive everything... but Im still trying to basically understand exactly how it works... Well, theres on video that maybe you didnt see on YouTube; its called How It Works. Yeah, that sounds like the right one! You see I use digital performer. I can use Cubase, or any kind of other sound software, which is nice. I have two MOTUs hooked up together. Because people who do robot music, they all use MAX/MSP and it takes them six months to make a little motor. Its a pain in the... Im laughing when I saw them with MAX/MSP. They say, Maxime, you should use MAX/MSP and go digital, go digital. I said, I have a better system, its so much easier. You put the chunk of low frequency, you move them, cut and paste; I want a cymbal that hits at this time, I just drag the little bump of three hertz and then I have my cymbal; it works. You can use any kind of program; if you know Cubase you can make my system work. So your pieces are all sequenced through Cubase and you have different tracks playing different instruments? Yeah, one track is the bass drum, the other track is... Is this how youve always done it? No, at the beginning I just used live analogue synthesisers to drive *the machines+. I dont know how I did it; but the music was a little bit different because I couldnt compose... Was everything on the same pulse then? Everything was on the same rhythm?

Sometimes, yes. You obtain the best music, in a way, when you use the same wave, but you can stop it, you can put a gate on it so just the big peaks are hitting; or you can put another track that has another beat on it, then you figure out how to match it. And when you play back its exactly the same: it stops at three minutes thirty three seconds and starts again, I mean, people they say, There is a lot aleatory of your system, I said yes but its at the very end of the system that is aleatory, but otherwise its kind of controlled. You want to keep that random element, is that important to you? Yes, its part of the system. But also the other part of my work when I played in my last show, which was in Spain, in Madrid, I always do this; I come two weeks before or a week before the show; I bring just the mechanism, the woofers with me as luggage and I collect instruments from France there, so I collected all the instruments and I built an orchestra. In Spain it was great; I had two nice acoustic guitars, really Spanish looking, and the springs were doing [makes Spanish guitar noise]. And I tuned it in, each string. I dont change the chords, right? But when it sounds good, the spring goes on one string, and then the other, and it sounds like [makes Spanish guitar noise]. So the two guitars were in the front of the stage and then I had castanets. And just before the show they look at all the instruments; some very vernacular like alcohol bottles with a surface like diamonds and you scrape on it with a key, thats a classic... I had all those instruments; people clapped before the show! It was gratifying. I think they knew I had worked for a week and saw they the instruments on stage and the show was great. How do you choose which instruments to use, like different types of drums; you seem to have instruments from all over the world and you were saying about picking up things from garbage cans...

You know I go everywhere, I can find really nice brand new instruments, or something maybe from a can, but basically its the quality of the sound that interests me more than trying to find something in the garbage, but inkjet printers, theres so many of them in the garbage, some for ten bucks or...

But your music; the instrumentation is acoustic instruments, it sounds quite organic, rather than... If you said, robot music, you might be thinking of mechanical sounds, or electronic sounds, which you dont really go for... Yeah, Im proud of that, I really am proud of that, because usually when you say, Oh, youre doing some robot music, already in their heads is Kraftwerk or like *makes sounds of clichd mechanical music]. Who wants that? Thats something youve never wanted to do? I think its groovy because of the springs, this kind of aleatory that can be controlled. Are you trying to simulate a human playing as much as possible? No, I would say the opposite actually. Because usually, these automatons, the circular motion principle I was talking about, the rotation automatons, the principle behind that is trying to imitate the movement of the human being. My system is like what can I do with the system? It just happened to sound a bit like human playing, but its part of the system itself; its like that from the base. It can groove sometimes; the beat can groove sometimes and I never heard robot music grooving before! Sometimes its difficult to tell, when listening to your recordings, who is playing what, which is the machines, which is the player... I mean how many people do you have playing over the top with instruments?

Most of the overdub is either trumpet or some keyboards, saxophone... Because I had some purist friends of mine who said, Why dont you just do an automaton, pure, record? I like to go further and do music, you know; dont have boundaries of conceptual... I think its nice to play with them and at the beginning I was sure in the four or five years of this system that some American would come with the same fucking idea and do it and play on top with other instruments; so I would rather pervert my own work before someone else would put some stuff on top! But it never happened. Im keeping in touch sometimes when I see robot music; I go to this site and say, Oh OK, thats just boring solenoids hitting a snare drum or whatever. Ok, Im still safe. Because there are few people who know how the system works from the base to the top, I think there are two people that really know how it works. I guess if you start from the beginning youll figure out how to make it. But someone will do different music, right? Because I love Classical Indian music, African music, poly-rhythms and all that. If someone likes rock or something, or noise music... I dont think Im doing noise music. Someone came in and brought in an instrument a moment ago, so you dont build all your instruments yourself? We had to make a special instrument for this principle of the muscle wire, because theres peculiar things that we have to do on the instrument; maybe a regular violin wouldnt have room to... I mean, it heats at ninety or one hundred degrees, so everything burns. So we built an instrument especially for that. Maybe if this instrument works we will try to find brand new instruments on the market that resemble the length and the possibility that we can apply [heat proofing] on that brand new instrument. Because I dont want Sam to work six months making a special instrument: its a beautiful instrument but I dont know if this prototype works. But thats funny that we talked and I got this instrument tonight! Do you think of yourself as a musical composer, or as an engineer, or as an installation artist, or...

Well its a bit frustrating right now; Im really into technical problems to solve. I know the project is possible, I can hear the music but just it will be in three or four months from now. Its a bit frustrating because Im not working on music right now. It works by certain parts; the beginning is finding an idea. When I got the muscle wire, I ordered them from California; I wanted to make an arm; usually in robotics they use it to make arms move. It was used on the Mars Pathfinder because its light. I think one pound in space costs one million dollars to lift. So, muscle wire; they used it for the Pathfinder, but when I tried to hit the percussion with the muscle wire; theres nothing like a woofer to hit the skin; it makes no sound, no motor, the electromagnetic field is totally noiseless... its almost a perfect object. But at one point I put some music inside the muscle wire and it changed pitch, I thought, Thats it! I will make an instrument with this principle. So composing new music, is that completely tied in to making new instruments, do you think? The process is very much linked. Because of course I wouldnt be able to make *hums clichd overcomplicated classical melody+, its not there. Some stuff I wont be able to do, so I have to work the process slowly, accepting certain limitations of the system, but trying to push it the farthest before I give up. If it doesnt want to do it I have to accept it at one point, OK, thats what its going to be, so the theory is building while Im building the instrument and unfortunately, usually I have, lets say, twenty percent of the time Im purely making music, but the eighty percent is just building the stuff! I have talked to Pierre Bastien this week. Thats funny because people compare me with him; hes a trumpeter, Im a trumpeter, hes French... Is he someone youve listened to much at all? You know his work? Its different. Because I saw him live once, here, and I didnt know his record, but I had to go to see it, because people compare me so much with him, so I went to see it. So basically his automatons are turntable based; you know, forty-five, thirty-three, sixteen speed; on the old turntables they had different speeds back then. But he puts things that rub, the turntable turns and [makes sound of

rhythm+. So hes using the circular, old concept of an automaton, I remember he did sort of a tango and then he played a trumpet. I mean, ok, thats cute; hes a better trumpeter than me for sure, but I said, well, whats the purpose of trying to make mechanical music that really sounds mechanical? Sometimes you have someone in the same field of you and he can be at the opposite. Like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. They were doing abstract art, pretty similar, they were both abstract expressionists in the same period, but philosophically... theyre not opposite, but almost. I read somewhere, I think it was someone who has interviewed you before, and you said when you take your music to places around the world people always think its an alien sound. Is this what youre kind of aiming for really, rather than trying to sound like a stereotypical robot sound, youre trying to go for something totally alien, totally different? Yeah, because, when you think about sound, sometimes sound can be really cultural. When you hear a tabla, and you make an Eskimo play a tabla he will play his cultural beat on the tabla. But if you dont know he is an Amerindian playing the tabla you will think its Indian, because the sound is so impregnated in the Indian culture that if I ever have an automaton tabla this association is linked to the sound of the instruments. Its like in Senegal, I used all their Djembe, this is probably what you heard about, people thought it was from Sierra Leone, from their neighbouring country, but not their own beat! I was insulted in Senegal; some guy took about half an hour to explain to me that, Djembe has its own language and you cannot change it, and I was doing a really bad thing that I used Djembe in another way. I couldnt believe it, you know! I listened to him, but... and also just before I left I said, Lets see. One African will say, You are stealing our music from us. You know I was laughing in Montreal: I went there and one guy said it, You white people, youre stealing our black music! A big part of this music is the instruments playing by themselves... Magically playing themselves... Kind of coming to life by themselves... Do people have reactions to that?

When its live, either in Africa, Norway or in the States; everybody is fascinated. The kids... the grandmother... Its a hit! I mean, I dont know why, Im frustrated in Montreal; I never play in Montreal, its sad. Theres been quite a long history of people making music with automatons since the 19th Century. Why are people so fascinated with seeing robots play music? I think you cant answer that question, but were fascinated to be just in front of a computer; youre in London and its amazing *referring to Skype video call+. Theres a fascination thats there already. Henry Ford did the first automatic robots, like just the chain line; he didnt have the mechanical robots. But the Japanese are fascinated with robots; thats another question. First of all I should go there, they would be crazy, they would find it so incredible. If theres people in the world who are fascinated by robots, its the Japanese. You know the little ugly white dogs... The robot dogs you mean? Yeah, the small, white... They dont shit! I read about the Alvin Lucier brainwave music that we were talking about earlier; I read on the internet, some bloggers didnt think it was real. It was just a hoax. I dont know if youve read this? Probably because when you see eight hertz moving through a woofer, you have no doubt its coming from his brain. Because we had a really very expensive machine they use in medicine to cut all the frequencies up and all the frequencies down and it really filters; its a professional machine. When it was plugged on Andrew I had no doubt it was coming from him. What can move a speaker up and down, noiseless? Usually you would have a buzz or sixty hertz tone coming from the speaker. No it was real. I had also an oscilloscope so I could see the wave, you know, its true! But theres so many things on YouTube that are bullshit, you know?

APPENDIX 3 Transcription of Remko Scha Interview, 15/01/09

First of all, maybe you could talk about your scientific, academic career and how that relates to your artistic work. Well the most direct connection is with the beginning of my academic career, which is when I studied physics. To some extent physics is a theoretical subject; it is mathematical theories for understanding nature, but ones reasons for studying physics can very well also involve an interest in the phenomenology of natural phenomena. So that there is a connection in my awareness of basic physics, basic mechanics and also an artistic kind of awareness of those phenomena; so also an awareness of the metaphorical potential of physics, which I think any physicist has, though most of them dont necessarily do much with, because they are busy enough doing their physics. But if you are a physicist and you have a certain understanding of, say, resonance phenomena, then that also provides a perspective on psychological or sociological phenomena. So to be interested in these physical phenomena also has further implications which can be used artistically. Of course when I studied physics I didnt spend a lot of time on the kind of phenomena that I ended up exploring with my Guitar Machines, because you have to learn thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics and all kinds of things that have nothing to do with it, but the basic stuff, things like resonating strings, which is a very basic thing that comes back all over physics, you see it in string theory recently, which didnt exist yet when I was studying physics, but the idea that all of nature is in some sense a matter of wave phenomena, that is an awareness which comes straight from quantum mechanics already, so that is something which has certainly been on my mind for all that time. Later what happened was that I was, in some sense, disappointed in physics, because it didnt quite live up to my aesthetic standards, which were based on the beauty of high-school physics, when you

just do, say, basic laws of mechanics such as Newtonian gravity. You are used to being able to really compute things with very stark, simple formulas that you can understand and where you feel that you really grasp what is going on. Now if you get to the state-of-the-art of current physical theory the whole thing ends up getting much more messy; you have partial theories covering this or that, and the big question about how we integrate them is not answered. And even the partial theories about particular sets of phenomena get so complex that if you do any non-trivial problem you cant compute it. What you end up doing is spending a lot of time on fairly complex mathematics and then on techniques for, not solving your sets of equations, but approximating them, because they get to be too complex to solve analytically, so you have all these differential equations which in principle describe your phenomena, but you cant really get an analytical description of your phenomena out of them; you have to really get very clever about how you do approximations, like which things you can neglect at a certain point in your computations so it doesnt harm the whole of the computation. Thats an art, and it has some beauty, but it was a different kind of thing to what I imagined physic s was. It ended up being extremely abstract; just formulas, and your teachers even tell you, dont even try to understand what it means, its just formulas. So the whole idea of understanding matter and understanding the universe has sort of disappeared out of sight and you are just in the middle of this mouth, and its clear the only way to do state of art physics is to completely immerse yourself in this mouth for the rest of your life. And thats what I did not want to do. So when I was studying physics the other thing that happened was that I developed an interest in computer programming and in research about human auditory perception in particular; so those were topics that I studied during my physics engineering degree studies and thats what I followed up on when I graduated. I got a job with Philips Research doing research on Artificial Intelligence, then focussing on Computational Linguistics. My academic career from that point on has been in Computational Linguistics which has to do with theoretical linguistics, such as Chomskyan Syntax and that kind of thing, and logical semantics.

Those are the things I have then worked on, but there I also had a hidden agenda about art, which was initially more about visual art than about music, which is the idea of generative art; the idea of devising algorithms which can generate non-trivially large and interesting classes of images; which also relates to computer music, which is also something I was aware of already when I was studying physics; I read the first books about computer music when I was studying physics; I read the first books about computer music which appeared in that period, in the early sixties. Also I remember, and its good to talk about these things every once in a while because I almost forgot these things, I also had, in some sense, a perhaps naive but nonetheless interesting and possibly fruitful idea about what making art involves and I felt that if we were going to do... Because there was computer art already in the sixties and it was very simple, not to say simple-minded. It almost took, lets say, the deliberate simplicity of, say Mondrian-style Constructivism, and it was almost taken as an excuse to write very simple algorithms and get away with it. I was aware of that and I had an interest in that, but I did not necessarily have the feeling that, OK, Im going to do that thing too, but I did have an interest in saying, Whats the next step after that? Of course you can make these things a bit more complex, and I had ideas about that, but you can also have a vision about, where are we going to end up if we want to take this seriously?And then you think if you are going to take art making seriously its got to be a branch of artificial intelligence, if we want to do really complex things, if we want to understand human intelligence and human perception and bring those insights to bear on the processes of art-making. So that was also a reason to be interested in Artificial Intelligence, but it turns out these things are very complex and we are very far away from understanding human cognition at this point; but what I got out of that is a lot of the concepts which are used, for instance in linguistics, say, the notion of a grammar or the notion of an algebra, the way you use it in semantics; so these notions can also be applied if youre going to do image generation or sound generation, so thats been useful. How did you first get into making machine music? When did that come about?

It was at the same time as I was studying physics, which was the mid-Sixties, so thats the period of happenings and things like that. Of avant-garde rock and roll; when rock and roll became sophisticated; the time of Soft Machine and Frank Zappa. And so what happened is, I had an interest in electronic music. This was one of the things in the back of my mind when I went to study physics; I thought Ok, if Im going to want to do electronic music ultimately, its not bad to do a little bit of physics first so you know what youre talking about. Who were you particularly listening to in Electronic Music at that time? [Karlheinz] Stockhausen... [Henk] Badings; Badings is probably not very well known, so all the early stuff... So, then again it was in one sense simple and simple minded but one can have a vision that this is just the beginning of something. That in order to really fulfil the promises of this stuff that one should not be say, an end-user of the electronic equipment, one should understand what is going on and also have an understanding of human perception if you want to exploit all the possibilities. So, that was all in the back of my mind when I went to study physics. I also had an interest in... Well the most important artistic or aesthetic influence was probably John Cage at the time; I really had an interest in chance; we say non-determinacy, but Im not being a physicist, thats translated into mathematical notion of chance, so that was a big influence. What I did not have was a classical music setting as my context, so one of my things I really didnt understand about John Cage was why he wrote scores at all. I was also interested in Jazz, and in particular Free-Jazz, say, the Onnette Coleman branch of completely improvised Free-Jazz. I felt [at the time] that one could do nondeterministic things just by completely improvising them, which seemed an obvious idea to me; now I understand in hindsight it is clear that it is in some sense a utopian idea, because it is very difficult for people to really improvise; to really realise this freedom thats implicit in an awareness of all possibilities; its something that people in fact cant do very well and a lot of improvisation is even more conventional than a lot of composition . And I can say this now very clearly and strongly because I have experienced this and at the time. So thats the background to my earliest music

which was a collective which I organised called the New Electric Chamber Music Ensemble, where we basically made improvised multi-media music involving lots of electric appliances and very primitive live electronics. So that was my first venture in to music and I dont have a strong background in terms of playing instruments and things like that; I played the recorder when I was a kid and a bit of piano and taught myself a bit of clarinet but its all even below basic; its just fiddling around. I had these ideas more like a composer, but then like a really Post-Cageian composer who sort of organises improvisations rather than writing pieces; that was the way I was involved with music in the mid-Sixties. And as part of that already there was the idea of automating parts of these processes so that they wouldnt be necessarily dependent on people; that we would actually construct complex things which would produce sound all by themselves; that was already a part of the agenda at that time, but we didnt do much about it because there was too much going on with all the people on the stage at the same time. So that sort of kept dormant a little bit and thats a thread I picked up much later, around 1980, when I was experimenting with automatic processes on electric guitars, which is something I inherited from the stuff I did in the sixties. In the meantime we just did some improvised music, but that was, in some sense, without external pretences; as an activity for yourself; its a normal thing for a human person to make music. So one doesnt have to do that in a way thats inscribed in art history or that is intended to be performed for large audiences, or whatever; one can just make music as an activity; and so thats what I had been doing in the meantime, in some sense keeping the music stream alive without needing to have any pretences with it. And then in the early eighties, there was something about British Punk which reminded me of my own plans regarding the mechanical treatment of electric guitars, where I felt Ok, this would not be a bad moment to actually do this, because it seemed liked there would be an audience for it. So that was an impulse that helped me start doing this. Was there any particular British punk bands you were referring to there?

It was the whole movement, I mean I actually went to London before they had any records out and heard them all; I heard the Clash live and The Damned and The Stranglers and The Sex Pistols, of course. Im not referring to a very direct influence, I think what Im referring to is not exactly one particular band, but really the basic thing that basic punk bands have in common, that they just go dat-dat-dat-dat. That aspect of the style that is just extremely basic and repetitive; basic guitar playing, and not much more; and just doing that can create a very strong experience. I think my strongest experience in terms of that was actually The Clash live, and they were doing something that I dont think they ever put on record; they became something much more melodic and musical; even their first record was already a pop record compared to the really basic punk, but when I saw them live they really seemed to me like epileptic robots. So I really felt sorry I wasnt a journalist and I didnt have to write up about it as I had these nice phrases popping in to my mind, like epileptic robots, because it was completely mechanical in a sense; it was so over-stylised that it was mechanical. It was dat-dat-dat-dat with a very strong precision. But at the same time it was a very spastic version of human motorics at the same time, and that was really impressive. And many bands at the time did things like that, but the strongest version I heard about was The Clash live, I think at the opening night of the Roxy Club. So thats the background of how I started with these Guitar Machines, which put me in the same boat with the art people in New York who were picking up the same vibes and who were also doing an art version of punk , like Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, which was, in some sense, an exactly parallel development. They didnt do the mechanical version but it was also taking up something from punk and sort of moving it in to a somewhat more arty context; thats what my move had in common with what they did, so thats why it was nice when I actually ended up meeting these people; I really liked what they did and they really liked what I did so that was a nice... Was this as the Apollohuis? Exactly, yeah, so that was that period yes.

Did The Machines play at the Apollohuis as well? Yes, that was the same period basically. Ok, so maybe you could talk about the Machines concerts; how did they work technically, with the tools attached to electric guitars? How was it set up? Theres different versions of it. The first version was a rotating motor, which was actually a fan motor with ropes tied to it so that the rope would hit he strings when the fan turned. And then what I did from the beginning was that they had variable transformers so I could vary the speed of the motor, so that I can have the thing go, ploink...ploink...ploink... or p-p-p-p-p-p-p depending on how I set up the speed. That was the first one; I also combined that with just using a metal brush, and if it hit the strings very lightly you would end up getting this drone effect where you just dont hear any impact; you just get the drone. The nice discovery with the ropes, and also the reason why I followed up on this after my first initial experiments, was that with a bit of luck you get fairly complex rhythms; because the rope starts vibrating in the air, and although the motor runs regularly the pattern with which the rope hits the strings is not regular at all; its based on a regularity but it has this vibration on top of it, which creates very nice drum patterns. Whereas with the brush you just get this drone and you could combine that; you can also get the brush to really hit the guitar very strong so you get this scraping kind of sound or then you can put it stronger and you can grind the string to pieces; and thats then the end of the piece; thats how I did my first pieces; they would end naturally in that way because then the strings would be broken, actually. I needed a new set of strings for every performance. And then later, maybe the most interesting version, or the most versatile one, would be with standing waves in ropes. So thats when I started to use the sabre saws, where I used not a rotary movement, but an up and down linear movement, to create standing waves in ropes, and then if you

vary the speeds of the motors you end up getting a very wide variety of different kinds of wave patterns in the ropes; and thats been the basis of the more complex pieces that Ive done. So, with The Machines, Ive read some of the literature on your website, you talk about them as if they are a real autonomous band of performers. The quote is The Machines formed their own band in the late seventies, thats from your website, what was the intention behind treating them in this way? Well, its to some extent a joke, of course, but there is a reason for the joke; I like to emphasise the autonomous aspects of the whole thing; the fact that I am, in some sense, just showing natural phenomena. And I dont want to downplay the importance of my own interventions and my own judgements and how I deal with this; I can be proud of that, but its more like the pride of a discoverer or someone who knows how to get from here to there and had a feeling of where to go and used a compass; they actually knew how to find this place which other people couldnt get to. Im proud of what we did there, but at the same time its not like I created it, I discovered it. My first and strongest experience with my own music were experiences of surprise. I still remember vividly I had this little fan, a very cheap little fan, and I tied a shoelace to it and I got this guitar out of the basement and I set this thing up and I expected this, doing-doing-doing, so a boring little thing; but I was just going to see if the variable transformer worked at all to see what this did; and I had a whole fantasy that I would need twelve of these little motors and a lot of guitars in a row; a complex set up to then really end up making some music with some complexity. What happened, in fact, was that I turned the thing on and it goes, dum-dedumdum-dedum; and Im completely surprised. I turned on the string and it was just something completely different to what I had expected, and something much more complex than what I had expected and something much more musical than what I had expected. What I did then, was that I gave up my original plan completely, so that with all these motors and all these guitars; Ive never done that. I felt like it wasnt needed. With the mechanised minimal music that I was sort of thinking of I would have to work very hard to get the

complexity that I get for free if I just accept this present and go with that. So, it really is the case that these things just happened. The same thing happened when I first did the thing with the waves in the standing ropes. I didnt design it to make that; I was just finding out what different inputs do and then zooming in on the ones that work, of course, it would be perverse not to. But I feel like a discoverer in this sense, and when I give a concert I dont have a fixed plan; when I give a live concert I dont know what youre going to hear and usually it works out; but its always tricky and exciting because its varied; if Im a bit lucky I encounter things which are interesting enough to let the audience hear. Its more that Im like a tour guide; there are these possibilities in a certain installation that I make and I know how to explore it; I understand this stuff a little bit; I can give a nicer concert than if I invited a random member of the audience; because I understand this stuff, but I give you a guided tour through this landscape. So you dont think of yourself as a composer in any way? You think of yourself as enabling natural phenomena to be heard? Yes, its like that. Its not like Im constructing things. Im not thinking up things. Im not composing in the sense of putting things together. I discover stuff. I was wondering whether I could ask about the Institute of Artificial Art, in particular Huge Harry. I have read some interesting things that Huge Harry has written about the future of music and music creation. I was wondering essentially what the aims of the Institute of Artificial Art were and why it was created? What it aims to achieve? Well its a similar story; in some sense there is an element of parody there, but there is a reason for it because, in some sense, I mean it; that one can have an agenda of doing this kind of art and this kind of approach art, where its not focused on what an individual person wants to show or to express; where its focused on just exploring the space of all possibilities and seeing what we can do with that, by using autonomous physical processes or mathematical descriptions and whatever we

can come up with. Huge Harry is a nice device for presenting an ideology in a stronger way than I could do under my own my name; being a human person with all the limitations of a human person; but I can by giving the computer a voice do a slightly exaggerated version of what I really want with this; and this also works then sometimes surprisingly well; exactly by taking this computational point of view, if I write a text for Huge Harry I get into his skin, so to speak, and I look at human art activities from this computational point of view. You sometimes discover things that you think up as a joke, because that is how a computer would look at a human person, but you discover it makes sense, so it becomes a useful literary device where you have use the computational viewpoint to get a fresh look at what people do and I have actually found it interesting myself, writing these pieces. You talk about Anthropocentrism in these texts. Is this really what youre trying to move beyond in these writings? To move beyond the just simply human expression? Yes, this Anthropocentrism, thats a typical Huge Harry term; which he can use because he can take for granted that there is also the computers, and they are different, and they should be taken equally seriously; and when Huge Harry says that he doesnt have to argue for it, whereas if I would say that, as a human person, it becomes a much more complex argument. Because then theres always this thing; well, but you are programming it anyway, and you have to take responsibility, etcetera, which is all true, but its not the end of the story and its not the aspect of the story that needs to be emphasised all the time, although people are used to emphasising it all the time. So when I write the story from Huge Harrys perspective I can just take it for granted that the nonpersonal, completely autonomous mathematical things can also be taken seriously, and then Huge Harry can happily talk about his anthropocentrism.

In the article, A Computational Perspective on 20th Century Music, youve written that Human composers can become scientists who gradually develop an all-encompassing mathematical description of the space of perceptual possibilities... and you say that once you have a system you

can randomly generate patterns within it. Do you still see music progressing in this way, in the future?

Well, yes. I see it as something which can one aim for and which will yield interesting things in the process of trying to get there and extremely interesting things if we persist. I still do believe in that, and the slight hesitation that you hear in my formulation is because I do have an awareness, which I think I already had at the time when I wrote that text, but thats again the difference between Huge Harry and myself; Huge Harry can be more blithely optimistic about this, being a computer. I was certainly aware that this is very complex. Its not so clear at this moment, if you wanted to follow up on this research agenda, to actually do it, then its not at all clear at this moment what it is one would need to do. Say, if I take the intent of Huge Harrys remarks there completely seriously in the context of a common, broadly defined interest in music and musical experiences, then I think on one hand its too easy, because by avant-garde music weve learnt to listen to all kinds of things; and then it is, in fact, the case that if you do any kind of mathematical structure that we havent turned into sound yet, and turn it sound, it yields a listening experience with its own kind of identity and its own kind of quality, which you can appreciate therefore, as an avant-garde piece. Its easy, its not difficult, its easy. And the fact that nonetheless many people make very similar pieces; theres no reason for that; theres a large variety of things of that sort that one can do, and its nice and when people do things of that sort I enjoy listening to it. So this is all nice and interesting and one can be happy with that, and I am happy with that; that should also be emphasised. On the other hand, if ones honest, one can also see a certain limitation of those kinds of experiences, if you compare them to, say, nineteenth century string quartets or even a half-way sophisticated pop-song. There are things about music that we dont get for free from the mathematical structures; and if we also want to engage in those musical dimensions then it turns out to be very difficult, because the people who sort of emulate traditional, conventional tonal music with computational means have created stuff that is really boring; it turns out one can do it but its always stays too close to the original, it

gets to be really derivative, just like another one of something. And then one can even be surprised that it works. And I have sometimes been surprised by some students of mine, who dont even know a lot about music, or about anything; they can program and they have some basic notions, and then they get some statistics about chord progressions and melody shapes and you can make an algorithm and it makes house music; its not difficult. Its a student project for a clever Computer Science student who knows a little bit about music; it should take a few months and then you have it. And then you may be surprised that it works at all, because it sounds completely reasonable, but it doesnt sound more than reasonable; its just that. So you can be initially happy that it works at all, but if youre trying to make this next step of saying OK, this is a good beginning, now lets spend another three months and get the exciting version of this, which comes up with exciting new stuff, then it doesnt work. So whats going on in terms of our understanding of how the old fashioned, traditional music all works; well, we havent put that in to mathematical terms yet. Although its clear we know a lot about it; all classical music theory is about that; we know a lot about these things, people write books about them; there are people who understand things about melody shapes and chord progressions in a deep way, but we havent been able to put that in to a mathematical form so that it gives us new stuff. So theres a big gap between... So this vision that if we put everything we know together we get this sort of grandiose vista of all possible musics, we dont have it yet and its also not even clear how to proceed how to get there. But I still think its a good idea.

So, is perhaps some of your work trying to create the artistic illusion that this point has been reached already?

Well at least as far as The Institute of Artificial Art is, in some sense, a literary fiction; its not like were trying to make believe its already there, but, in some sense, it makes believe that we are farther ahead on this path than we in fact are, and it certainly makes believe that we know how to proceed; that there is just this research agenda and we are just going to do it. There are big

uncertainties there which are not highlighted in the P.R. of the institute of the Artificial Art. That is the case. It is to the extent I leave those out it becomes literary fiction.

There has been long history of people trying to make music with artificial means, with automatons and so on. Why do you think this has been such a fascination for so long?

Well, it depends how you define long, of course; but essentially, lets say since Mozart, since the Seventeenth Century. It doesnt go back much further, but its a few centuries. I think people in other cultures they didnt have those fantasies particularly and I dont think the ancient Greeks had them also... well, theres a Chinese story about an automatic nightingale, but the Chinese culture has more in common with ours than we often think it has, because the Chinese have this level of technological sophistication also. I do think it belongs to a development of culture where you have this technology and then once you have this technology there is a certain perspective on music where you think of it as something objective; as a natural phenomenon. So the idea of the music spheres, that is much older, that does go back to the Greeks, so the perspective on music where you dont see it as individual expression but exactly as a manifestation of very basic cosmic structures, for instance if you think of the Greek version, or in any case objective things, mathematical things. I think that is very old, thats very basic. Now if you ask where that comes from that becomes a very difficult question. There is something in our perception of music; it apparently resembles our perception of nature and of the stars and our perception of mathematics as soon as we have invented mathematics. Apparently those connections are clearly there in how we experience it. And as soon as you have technology, then in principle you have the possibility of embodying this mathematics, and then you have a machine that does it; that is a possibility which then arises. And its a fascinating possibility, because it then becomes a very abstract thing to do, especially if you still believe its the harmony of the spheres and God knows what. Especially if you believe that, then it would be very nice to have this little machine that embodies that. That ends up having the same kind of beauty as that you actually invent Newtonian mechanics and you really grasp how the cosmos

works. So thats the parallels that I see, and from that point of view its not surprising that at a given point in a cultural development this kind of fascination comes up and then once it has come up it will refuse to disappear.

I have a quote here from Huge Harry who says I dont express myself; I just manifest basic conditions of the universe.

Yes. Exactly! Thats it. I remember writing that and liking it.