Abstract:Marie-Dominique-Joseph Engramelle's treatise La tonotechnie, ou l'art de noter les cylindres (1775) claimed that automated instruments driven by pinned cylinders would grant listeners direct access to music as the composer conceived it. Standard notation was insufficient, as it did not capture the music's mouvement – its temporal flexibility from moment to moment. Denis Diderot provided an aesthetic justification for automated instruments in terms that linked them to materialist philosophy. Like android automa… Show more
“…In addition to its improvisatory listening algorithms, such as the ‘Rhythmic Phrase-Matching Improvisation’ module (Hoffman and Weinberg 2010: 3101), Shimon participates in the physical gestures of music making, including nodding to the beat, ‘looking’ at its marimba while improvising and ‘looking’ at other musicians while ‘listening’. These types of gestures, which were likewise present in eighteenth-century android automata (see Cypess 2017: 16–18), help to reinforce the tempo and groove of the music (Breton and Weinberg 2016: 108). Shimon is designed to perform with human musicians through the use of gesture-based, real-time machine improvisation modules, and in this context, its abstracted anthropomorphic form is more relatable than a robot that appears more human.Figure 7Shimon, Robotic Musicianship Group, Georgia Institute of Technology.…”
Section: Contemporary Instances Of the Anthropomorphic Analogymentioning
confidence: 98%
“…One example is the Archimedes ‘Automatic Wind Instrumentalist’, which served as the model for the ninth-century Banū Mūsā flute automaton, the ‘instrument which plays by itself’ (Farmer 1931: 85). Jacques Vaucanson’s 1737 ‘Flute Player’, perhaps the most famous and complex musical automaton of its age, was modelled after a human performer; Vaucanson developed it to imitate the actual physical processes undertaken by human flautists (in Ord-Hume 1973: 33; see also Cypess 2017; Kemper and Cypess forthcoming; Riskin 2003; Voskuhl 2013) (Figure 5). Though the notion of self-regulating systems at the centre of cybernetics was present in these early automata (Bedini 1964: 41), contemporary anthropomorphic musical robots move beyond modelling the mechanics of human motion, to include the control, communication and feedback systems of human performance.…”
Section: Contemporary Instances Of the Anthropomorphic Analogymentioning
Since the late twentieth century, the development of cybernetics, physical computing and robotics has led artists and researchers to create musical systems that explore the relationship between human bodies and mechanical systems. Anthropomorphic musical robots and bodily integrated ‘cyborg’ sensor interfaces explore complementary manifestations of what we call the ‘anthropomorphic analogy’, which probes the boundary between human artificer and artificial machine, encouraging listeners and viewers to humanise non-musical machines and understand the human body itself as a mechanical instrument.These new approaches to the anthropomorphic analogy benefit from historical contextualisation. At numerous points in the history of Western art music, philosophers, critics, composers, performers and instrument designers have considered the relationship between human musician and musical instrument, often blurring the line between the two. Consideration of historical examples enriches understandings of anthropomorphism in contemporary music technology.This article juxtaposes the anthropomorphic analogy in contemporary musical culture with manifestations of anthropomorphism in early seventeenth-century Europe. The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a flourishing of instrumentality of all sorts. Musical instruments were linked with the telescope, the clock, the barometer, the paintbrush, and many other instruments and machines, and these came to be understood as vehicles for the creation of knowledge. This flourishing of instrumental culture created new opportunities for contemplation and aesthetic wonder, as theorists considered the line between human being and machine – between nature and artifice. Manifestations of the anthropomorphic analogy in seventeenth-century conceptions of musical instruments help to contextualise and explain similar articulations of the anthropomorphic analogy in the present day.
“…In addition to its improvisatory listening algorithms, such as the ‘Rhythmic Phrase-Matching Improvisation’ module (Hoffman and Weinberg 2010: 3101), Shimon participates in the physical gestures of music making, including nodding to the beat, ‘looking’ at its marimba while improvising and ‘looking’ at other musicians while ‘listening’. These types of gestures, which were likewise present in eighteenth-century android automata (see Cypess 2017: 16–18), help to reinforce the tempo and groove of the music (Breton and Weinberg 2016: 108). Shimon is designed to perform with human musicians through the use of gesture-based, real-time machine improvisation modules, and in this context, its abstracted anthropomorphic form is more relatable than a robot that appears more human.Figure 7Shimon, Robotic Musicianship Group, Georgia Institute of Technology.…”
Section: Contemporary Instances Of the Anthropomorphic Analogymentioning
confidence: 98%
“…One example is the Archimedes ‘Automatic Wind Instrumentalist’, which served as the model for the ninth-century Banū Mūsā flute automaton, the ‘instrument which plays by itself’ (Farmer 1931: 85). Jacques Vaucanson’s 1737 ‘Flute Player’, perhaps the most famous and complex musical automaton of its age, was modelled after a human performer; Vaucanson developed it to imitate the actual physical processes undertaken by human flautists (in Ord-Hume 1973: 33; see also Cypess 2017; Kemper and Cypess forthcoming; Riskin 2003; Voskuhl 2013) (Figure 5). Though the notion of self-regulating systems at the centre of cybernetics was present in these early automata (Bedini 1964: 41), contemporary anthropomorphic musical robots move beyond modelling the mechanics of human motion, to include the control, communication and feedback systems of human performance.…”
Section: Contemporary Instances Of the Anthropomorphic Analogymentioning
Since the late twentieth century, the development of cybernetics, physical computing and robotics has led artists and researchers to create musical systems that explore the relationship between human bodies and mechanical systems. Anthropomorphic musical robots and bodily integrated ‘cyborg’ sensor interfaces explore complementary manifestations of what we call the ‘anthropomorphic analogy’, which probes the boundary between human artificer and artificial machine, encouraging listeners and viewers to humanise non-musical machines and understand the human body itself as a mechanical instrument.These new approaches to the anthropomorphic analogy benefit from historical contextualisation. At numerous points in the history of Western art music, philosophers, critics, composers, performers and instrument designers have considered the relationship between human musician and musical instrument, often blurring the line between the two. Consideration of historical examples enriches understandings of anthropomorphism in contemporary music technology.This article juxtaposes the anthropomorphic analogy in contemporary musical culture with manifestations of anthropomorphism in early seventeenth-century Europe. The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a flourishing of instrumentality of all sorts. Musical instruments were linked with the telescope, the clock, the barometer, the paintbrush, and many other instruments and machines, and these came to be understood as vehicles for the creation of knowledge. This flourishing of instrumental culture created new opportunities for contemplation and aesthetic wonder, as theorists considered the line between human being and machine – between nature and artifice. Manifestations of the anthropomorphic analogy in seventeenth-century conceptions of musical instruments help to contextualise and explain similar articulations of the anthropomorphic analogy in the present day.
“…In the case of implied meaning, I have based my categorisation on my own judgement of the contextual implementation of performative/performativity. In fact, 32% of the surveyed journal articles containing the words performative/performativity (i.e., 15 out of 46) only use the word once (Arendell 2015;Bianchi, 2017;Bonds 2017;Citron, 2017;Clarke et al, 2016;Cypess, 2017;Goldmark, 2017;Korhonen-Björkman, 2019;Lie, 2019;Mathew, 2018;Rindom, 2019;Romero 2019;Saltzstein, 2019;Spohr, 2019;Weaver, 2017). Some only use the word when contained in citations of other authors (Lie, 2019;Slater, 2016;Vandagriff, 2017;Venn, 2015).…”
“…Dans le paradigme baroque, les machines sont des « agents of enchantment » (Dolan et Tresch 2011, 5) et les frontières restent vagues entre naturel et artificiel, homme et machine (Richards 1999) . Descartes a comparé le corps humain à une machine, et les androïdes -souvent des automates musiciens (Restelli 2008)visent à reproduire mécaniquement une impression de nature ou encore à éliminer l'imperfection qui est propre à l'humain (Cypess 2017) . En revanche, la révolution industrielle va de pair avec une certaine crainte à l'égard du pouvoir de la technologie (l'homme-machine n'est plus le rassurant androïde musicien, mais la « créature » du D r Frankenstein), et le paradigme idéaliste instaure une nette division entre l'esprit et la matière ayant comme conséquence la haine des machines dans le champ de l'art .…”
Le dossier Machines et imaginaires musicaux (1900–1950) / Machines and the Musical Imagination (1900–1950) conçoit une réflexion autour de trois axes sur les rapports entre la musique et les machines au début du XXe siècle : 1) la spécificité de cette époque dans l’histoire de la représentation des machines en musique; 2) les topoï de cette transposition; 3) la complexité des interactions entre machines, musique et société.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
