I mentioned Steven Johnson’s Wonderland in my previous post. The book traces six stories
of how the human desire for novelty and playfulness lead to industries,
inventions, injustices, and other things of import. The six chapters cover
Fashion, Music, Taste, Illusion, Games, and Public Spaces. At first glance,
these might not seem important from an instinctual struggle-for-survival view.
The fun in reading Johnson’s book is seeing how he links one innovation to
another starting from human curiosity and enjoyment of that which is both novel
and surprising.Here’s how Johnson describes it in the book’s conclusion.
“It is in our nature to seek out things that surprise us.
But the ‘surprise instinct’ also helps us answer a more complicated riddle: the
innovative power of play, the way in which play compelled us to new cultural
institutions that had little to do with our biological drives… Genes tend to
steer us toward predictable goals… family, shelter, food. But the surprise instinct
propels us in the opposite direction… Sometimes change happens out of
necessity, out of the drive to satisfy our basic survival needs. But just as
often cultural change happens because human beings are bored with the old
experiences, and have a hunger for something new. This is the strange paradox
of play and its capacity for innovation: play leads us away from our instincts
and nature in part because of our
instincts and nature.”
Today’s post focuses on Chapter 2: Music. Johnson considers
biologically-driven arguments that relate our enjoyment music to some adaptive
value in early Paleolithic societies. Without a time machine, we won’t know if
these speculations hold any water. In the quote above, he hints that it is
human to be creative; but why this is so remains unanswered. In any case,
Johnson quickly moves from bone flutes to the Banu Musa, Islamic age builders
of early automatic devices. (This led to the famous Digesting Duck and other automatons of eighteenth century Europe.
Johnson focuses on one particular design: “The Instrument Which Plays by Itself.” According to Johnson, “the notes played by the
organ… were triggered by what came to be known as a pinned cylinder – a barrel
with small ‘teeth’… As the barrel rotated, those teeth activated a series of
levers that opened and closed the pipes of the organ. Different patterns of
‘teeth’ allowed different melodies…” And here’s the crucial bit: “[The] melody
could be encouded onto these cylinders by capturing the notes played by a live
musician on a rotating drum covered by black wax, strongly reminiscent of the
phonographic technology that wouldn’t be invented for another thousand years.”
The Banu Musa even called this process ‘cutting’, a word familiar in the world
of music recordings.
A self-playing instrument is certainly novel. It’s not
imperative that it exists for human survival, but it certainly is delightful
and surprising. The first time I saw a self-playing piano, I stared at it for
quite a while. It was strangely mesmerizing, or perhaps mesmerizingly strange.
But going back to Johnson’s thesis, what makes this instrument a crucial
landmark was its programmability.
Jacques de Vaucanson, French inventor of the Digesting Duck,
also created a famous music-playing automaton known as the Flute Player. His
fame led to a royal appointment where he planned to revolutionize the weaving
industry. The goal was to design a machine that “could be taught to weave a
vast set of potential patterns out of silk.” Vaucanson’s prototype looms did
not catch on, but a later French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard perfected them.
“Recognizing both the genius and the limitations of the pinned cylinder,
Jacquard hit upon the idea of using a sequence of cards punched with holes to
program the loom… [It was] a kind of binary system, the holes in the cards
reflecting on-off states for each of the threads.” For those of you familiar
with Charles Babbage and the history of computing, this all sounds rather
familiar.
But the story gets more interesting. Over a long period of
time, punch cards were the main devices for the input of digital information –
until eventually superseded by the keyboard. (As a computational chemist, I say
thank goodness!) Before reading Johnson’s book I had never thought to connect
the computer keyboard with the musical keyboard. There’s a good reason why the
piano, and other related keyboard instruments, are so widely played. With the
simultaneous use of ten figures, the music produced by a single individual is
amazing in scope. Not only that, the striking of the keys could be used to
“capture the notes played in some kind of permanent medium”. This is easier
said than done with an actual key-striking piano – by which I mean the keys
striking the backboard when you open up a piano. Inking the keys and rolling a
paper through the piano has its problems. (It would be eventually realized
electronically through the MIDI keyboard.)
However there’s another device that captures information by
inking keys that strike a moving sheet of paper – the typewriter. Johnson
writes that the “first functioning machine that a modern observer would
identify as a typewriter was patented in 1855 by an Italian named Giuseppe
Ravizza… calling his creation the cembalo
scrivano, the writing harpsichord.” Except for the fact that you should not
play ‘chords’ on the typewriter, it functioned similarly to the piano. The
QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to minimize inadvertent ‘chords’ by a very
quick typist. But with the modern computer keyboard, this is no longer a
problem.
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