Zakira’s Roses

Term paper for LS 819, Special Topics: 18th Century Music. Summer 2008.

On May 13, 2008, Honda’s ASIMO robot conducted Yo-Yo Ma and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a performance of “The Impossible Dream.” The robot was designed as both an artificial intelligence and medical-mechanical experiment, and this event was intended to draw attention to both Honda’s public profile and the DSO’s music education fund. As the first symphony orchestra to be conducted by a robot, this event was also a historic moment for artificial life.

Two hundred and seventy years earlier, Jacques Vaucanson presented a robotic flute player to the Academie des Sciences in Paris. This was the first public performance of a musical android: bellows-powered air came through the flexible leather lips of the Flutor, whose fingers covered the holes of his flute to produce music. The Flutor was the most advanced European automaton to be built. With the other Vaucanson creations, a tabor player and the infamous “defecating duck”, it began a trend in artificial life that spanned the century.

Artificial life is distinct from artificial intelligence. While the latter focuses on the reproduction of motivation and decision-making, the former focuses on behaviour. Artificial life experiments duplicate the motions and responses of living beings. Automatons of the eighteenth century were unique because they attempted to duplicate the outward actions of the living and the inner processes of biology. This trend has only been revived in the latter quarter of the 20th century.

Automatons were built from metal, wood, leather and paper and their movements were controlled by levers, cogs, and rotating drums. Action was “programmable” through interchangeable cam or pin-and-cylinder construction. In the eighteenth century, machines replicated animals, economies, and humans. Of android-type machines, fortune tellers, artisans, writers and musicians were built.

Android musicians were separately able to play the drum, organ, flute, and dulcimer. Often they were programmed with multiple compositions to perform. Musician automatons were not mere music-boxes. When activated, their motions produced sound from real instruments and also simulated human behaviour: courtesy, breath, and emotional affect appropriate to their performance. The instruments were real instruments, but the musicians were androids.

In Europe, the production of automatons was closely linked with clock making, comprising a value-added feature to clocks constructed for important patrons. By the eighteenth century, automatons were being developed independent of the clock making industry and had become artisanal products in their own right. Non-representational automata such as musical clocks and music boxes were other popular products in this genre.

The literature on automata and mechanical music comes from a variety of disciplines, most often not musicology. The eighteenth century automaton has been analyzed as a metaphor for industrialization or the historical status of women, and in post-modern literary criticism. Android automata and mechanical music in general are also special interests in the history of technology, computers, and the development of artificial intelligence.

Although android automata may now function as powerful metaphors about the relationship of humanity with technology, they may not have had such significance in the eighteenth century. For the average person, the modern metaphoric automaton with its implications about a robotic and controlled human race appears to not have been of interest (Voskuhl, Producing Objects, 1). In this age of travel, automatons were described in tourist guides to Switzerland only as mechanical accomplishments. Automata functioned as lucrative popular attractions and collector’s items. Those that have survived today are enchanting models of ideals in motion: the studious boy, the emotive musician, and the charming woman.

These models, like ASIMO today, can be viewed as the public face of industrial activity. Unlike ASIMO, the eighteenth century androids did not represent any corporation or identifiable body. Instead, they were independent and unconscious representatives of the technological and philosophical backdrop of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Europeans had moved from predestination to self-determination through religious, scientific and global exploration. Their accompanying world-view transformation has been termed materialism or mechanism.

Mechanism is a reordering of the world and nature according to a machine metaphor. In the mechanistic view, “cosmos, society, and the human being [were] construed as ordered systems of mechanical parts subject to governance by law and to predictability through deductive reasoning” (Merchant 214). Mechanism and rationality were the means by which both progress and certainty could be achieved and measured. By the eighteenth century, the mechanistic worldview could be credited with much of the accomplishments of European industry.

Mechanism had drawn parallels between divine creation and human invention, introducing, in Carolyn Merchant’s view, a control paradigm in which humanity would manipulate nature as never before. This paradigm extended to the conscious control and manipulation of human beings as well. “For the mechanists, God became a clockmaker and an engineer constructing and directing the world from outside” (225).

Since all natural objects and functions were part of a divinely created machine, the human body must also be a machine. The boundaries between man and machine were blurred in materialist views. At its culmination, the controversial medical tract Man, A machine by Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, argued that even the soul was a physical object. The word “automaton” has a double meaning and automata figured in Enlightenment sciences as both “machines in the form of humans and as humans who perform like machines” (Schaffer, 126).

The metaphoric automaton became useful for industrial planning and military training. Frederick the Great trained his soldiers as if they were automatons . The automated silk loom changed professional weavers into machine operators. By working with machines, they became machine-like themselves (129). The quantification of human capacity for labour metaphorically divided human creators from robotic workers. Analysis of human work was made against the predictability of clockwork automata (127).

On the lower levels of society, however, automatons were simply entertainment objects. Simon Schaffer describes a European society enamoured of automatons at all levels. Small, simple automata were cheaply produced and available to consumers. Complex ones were toured around urban centers and royal court. The automaton became a part of the vocabulary of the masses, a vocabulary also steeped in mythology, fantasy, and superstition.

The arts reflected this contradictory nature of eighteenth century society. Mechanism rejected the chaos that perpetually threatened the balance of power. Representation dominated the visual and aural arts as a demonstration of the verifiable, mechanical nature of the created world. What was also represented, however, were the larger-than-life fantasies of a society on the brink of change: finely dressed humans and naked gods in idealized urban and natural environments. Everywhere, there were angels.

In music, representation of emotion had a mechanist function. The goal was to distill and classify human emotions. By inspiring affect within the audience, they could have an experience of unusually pure and theatrical feelings. Representation of extreme sentiments was both musical and physical: the performer was instructed to demonstrate affect for the audience. This demonstration would provide a guide for the listeners as to how they too should feel. Universality of effect was assumed, because at its foundation, this music was both scientific and spiritual. The Baroque or Classical listener takes pleasure in feeling first one emotion, then another, all the while held together by the anchor of rationality.

Baroque and Classical music was mechanist in form as well as intent. It has a complex mathematic and theoretic nature. Again we find contrast: there was space in this music for virtuosic performance and improvisation, just as there was space for enormous feelings, within the safe confines of form and structure.

Mark Bonds discusses idealism as the next perspective to effect musical literacy and experience in this period. Idealism saw individual experience as connecting to a Platonic ideal. Unlike materialism, which rejected mystery, idealism embraced it. It took listeners away from the strictly representational in art and towards an art that was imitative, not of the obvious in nature, but of the mysterious in the passions. Instead of a cause-and-effect manipulation of emotion, idealist art and music expected the active, imaginative engagement of audience to inspire some kind of transcendental experience. Universality would be subordinated to individualism.

There is a magnetic tension between mechanism and idealism that seems to be resolved within automata. They demonstrate technology and predictability, but they activate the ideal in the audience. Rather than remaining firm in one worldview, the experience of these automata triggers responses in the audience. James Gaines describes a “tantalizing”, “threatening” specter of replacement-by-machine, “astonishment” on the part of Johann Joachim Quantz, and “captivation” on the part of Frederick the Great. What an automaton might become is greater than what it is. The automata prove nothing but our own humanity: there is a chilling recognition of the fragility of our intangible yet unmistakable differences from these creations.

Adelheid Voskuhl is one of the few analysts who specifically discuss music-playing automata. Voskuhl analyzes media and cultural reports of lifelike machines to identify contemporary social issues. By comparing the performance information in instructional material by Quantz and CPE Bach with the movements of two female music-playing androids, she has found that the automaton musicians were designed to represent idealized performance styles (Voskuhl, Motions and Passions, 311).

Voskuhl identifies a blurred boundary between man and machine in the mechanical language used in CPE Bach and Quantz’ treatises. In teaching music, these pedagogues sought to instill mechanical accuracy and machine-like control that extended to on-and-off switching between emotions (309). Affective and expert music making, however, remained the realm of human being. Once again, the distance between an Enlightened creator and a mechanical performer/operator is highlighted.

Controlling the human passions for music is more than the philosophical suppression of them, it is about turning them on and off at whim. Musical form and engagement of audiences changed from passive reception to engagement over the course of the century.

It is important not to ignore one of the most musically important mechanical inventions of the late eighteenth century: the metronome. This invention did not have human pretensions: it was a machine that standardized tempo, improved performance, and homogenized musical timing. Based on a simple pendulum, the life of the metronome intersects with automata. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, a promoter and inventor of automata, also branded and sold metronomes. This is a trend we see often: those involved in automata were not the kind of spooky, childlike inventor we saw in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. These men applied their technical, analysis, and marketing skills to what would become crucial modern technologies.

Machine as Musician
Jacques de Vaucanson, born in Grenoble, France, is one of the most famous inventors of automata. Vaucanson was interested in creating working models of life and all its processes. He sought out new materials, like rubber, to make his automata appear as lifelike as possible. The son of a glove maker, Vaucanson had aspirations to become a clockmaker. Instead, his work in materialist biology and mechanics led to a varied career as a builder of automata and an inspector of silk looms.

His machines were intricately constructed. Four hundred parts comprised the duck’s wing alone. He covered his flute player with skin to ensure the mechanical hands would be able to close flute holes. The flute player’s lips could move in four directions and he was able to play twelve different songs by manipulating air, a mechanical tongue, fingers and lips.

Vaucanson dreamed of creating a fully functional model of a human being to be used in educating doctors. For realism, he used rubber tubes to create the intestines of the duck, and later to model the human circulatory system. Vaucanson’s machines were unique because they emulated internal and external life: the duck exhibited naturalistic behavior, the flute player really breathed air from his flexible mouth into the flute.

Biology and mechanics converged in Vaucanson’s creations. His skill enabled him also to remove life from action: he invented the first automatic loom (later to be perfected and marketed by J-M Jacquard). The loom used the same technology as the Flutor, ‘reading’ a programmed, rotating drum. Nowadays, Vaucanson is also credited with having invented the first working pedagogic medical simulator (Moran).

The eighteenth century equivalent to Silicon Valley was La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle, small Swiss towns wherein one third of the adult population were employed in the clock making trade. Clockmakers had highly specialized knowledge and artisanal skills, and in newly mechanized Europe their skills were transferable to a variety of industries and uses. For example, Beaumarchais, author of Le Mariage de Figaro, had his start in clock making. Like so many professionals in information technology today, talented clockmakers and inventors found their skills were needed in every corner of production.

The three Jaquet-Droz automata were built and programmed by a father-son clockmaker team in La Chaux-de-Fonds. These are some of the most exquisite surviving and still-operating automatons. Dressed in contemporary clothing, the little boy draughtsman and writer will carefully inscribe one of several images or phrases. The writer can even be programmed by exchanging the cams inside his back.

The lady musician sits with excellent posture, golden curls framing her face. When started, she breathes and begins to play one of five tunes on her organ. Her hands are small and realistic, covering complex articulated brass mechanisms which enable movement. Her blue eyes follow the motions of her hands and her breathing implies an emotional response to the music. When her performance is over, she turns her head to the audience and bows.

The realism applied to these androids was also applied by the Jaquet-Droz’ in their other business: prosthetics. The same mechanisms enabling movement of the lady musician’s hands were transferred to the creation of realistic prosthetic hands. The Jaquet-Droz family bridged the man-machine gap, creating a mechanical interface where a human one had been. They were not removing the human being from the world of production as much as using available technology to replace missing organic parts.

Another surviving musical automaton was built by watchmaker Pierre Kinzing and cabinetmaker (and Hernnhut Pietist) David Roentgen in 1785 for Marie Antoinette. This 18” doll, called La Joueuse de Tympanon, is set on a cabinet that conceals her clockwork and supports her instrument, a one metre-long dulcimer. With her tiny hammers, the finely dressed blonde plays eight songs.

Before she begins, she pauses over the strings as if imagining what to play. In this moment where movement is absent, she appears utterly lifelike. There is something about the pause, as if it has been designed to match the amount of time a skilled performer takes to make a decision. Although this doll does not breathe or bow, her head moves as if she is paying attention both to her instrument and to the audience. Charm exudes from its action in both the timbre of the instrument and the beauty of the machine.

There is a striking difference between the Lady Musician and La Joueuse. Although the Lady Musician is more life-like in scale and movement, the music she plays is less enjoyable. Her organ’s tones are shrill and piercing and the music is executed with unrelenting speed. She plays compositions by Henri Jaquet-Droz, who had studied music but clearly had more of a talent for clockworks. The miracle in watching her is how oddly alive she appears, while demonstrating a truly “robotic” performance.

La Joueuse, on the other hand, plays music that is actually pleasant to listen to. One of the pieces she plays is the “Armide” by Gluck. Her instrument has a pretty, ringing sound, and there are pauses between the notes that imply musicality. Wonderment at the technology gives way to delight. La Joueuse is truly a gift for a decadent queen, while the Lady Musician is the demonstration of technical ability first, and musical ability last.

By the second half of the nineteenth century the character of automata had changed significantly. While eighteenth century automatons were duplicating real activities human beings can do, the nineteenth century automata were superficial. They imitated human actions as in a pantomime. The nineteenth century largely produced music boxes with automata operating on top. There were mechanical imitations of singers (that didn’t really sing), of guitar players (whose fingers didn’t touch the strings), and writers (who had no ink in their pens) (Riskin, ). The location of illusion had changed, from an eighteenth century illusion of living things, to a nineteenth century illustration of behaviour.

Musical Machines
The organ, a precursor to digital synthesizers, is intended to simulate sounds and tones of other instruments. By resembling more than just its own sound, the church organ eventually replaced the church band. In the past few decades, the advent of “virtual orchestras” has opened options for large-scale simulated instrumentation. This is not a hallmark of the postmodern age: the eighteenth century had Orchestrions, machines that mimicked the sounds of entire orchestras.

Genevan inventor Louis Favre perfected music boxes in the early eighteenth century. For the most part, they used the familiar pin-and-cylinder construction, in which pins placed in precise locations trigger action as the cylinder rotates. Music boxes were programmable with any number of tunes and were the closest to recorded music available on a small scale.

On a larger scale, barrel organs were another kind of automatic music generator, used in some 16th and 17th century English churches to generate hymns for services. In the eighteenth century they grew in popularity. Some organs were hand-cranked and small enough for household use, and others were large enough for the congregation and powered by water. They came with a variety of music: hymns, dances, selections from arias. The largest barrels were five feet long and presented especial challenges when you wanted to insert a new barrel, until 1810 when a self-changing barrel organ was invented.

The “dumb organist’ was a mechanical attachment which converted a regular church organ to a mechanical organ on those occasions when a trained organist was unavailable. Dumb Organists did not attempt to appear human. Like the thoughtless but efficient worker in a factory, the human operator of the Dumb Organist turned the crank at a regular pace to produce preprogrammed musical tones.

Automated music was also combined with clockworks in the form of flute clocks. Triggered by the hour hand hitting a particular number, the musical clock would emit a tune in chimes, piano actions, or pipes. Flute clocks were very popular and were played in Viennese restaurants and guesthouses for entertainment.

Before we assume that compositions for mechanical technologies may have been below the remembered and revered musicians of the eighteenth century, we should examine their engagement with automated instruments. Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart all composed pieces for flute clock, mechanical organ, or music box. The artifacts that have survived are “musical time-machines” that enable us to hear music as it was intended to be played without the imposition of new interpretation (Ord-Hume, 169). In this era of virtuosic performance, composing for machine “afforded the composer a greater degree of control over the interpretation of his music” (168). It also enabled composers to draft music almost unplayable by a human being, as Mozart did in KV 608.

Mozart’s “fantasias” for mechanical organ, KV 595 and 608, were intended for the unusual setting of a Vienna wax museum. This wax museum featured collected objects and wax sculptures with real hair and clothes, carved by Count Deym. The museum featured no less than nine mechanical clocks providing mood music and timekeeping for various tableaux such as “the bedroom of the graces” and a pastoral scene with the Greek god Pan.

It was particularly challenging for him to write for this instrument, considering he disliked the timbre of the mechanical organ and the job itself. However, in KV 595 he seems to transcend the technology to bring a deeply emotive presence and offers in the second Adagio a compelling, modern-sounding finish. This music was composed for an audience that would contemplate a macabre wax tableau featuring an effigy of Field-Marshal Laudon, interred in a glass coffin and surrounded by mourners. In this surreal exposition, the music would facilitate a participatory experience for the audience. They would be transformed from spectators to vicarious mourners.

For the same tableau, Mozart composed KV 608, designed with the capabilities of the mechanical organ and not a human player in mind. More powerfully complex than KV 595, this Fantasie is machine music that produces “endless astonishment” in the mind of the listener (Richards, 287). Contemporary audiences found the combined effect of the mausoleum and the disembodied music to be transcendental. In this awe-inspiring experience of the mathematical sublime triggered by mechanical music, the audience connected personally to the cycles of life and death (388). If there was any gap between the human and the mechanic, it was bridged through art.

Father Primitivus Niemecz, librarian of the Esterhazy court, programmed some of the wax museum’s mechanical organs. He was one of the leaders in mechanical instrumentation. His ability and accuracy in designing pin-and-cylinder music programming was unparalleled. Niemecz worked with Franz Joseph Haydn on the programmes for no less than three Flotenuhren. One of the surviving ones contains 12 compositions for the instrument. As an aural historical object and the result of collaboration between a technician and a composer, this Flotenuhr enables the modern listener to hear Haydn’s music exactly at his contemporaries heard it.

Count Deym not only hired Mozart to compose for his museum; he hired Beethoven to as well. Beethoven enjoyed listening to flute clock and composed several charming pieces for the museum. Beethoven also composed a symphony to be played on a newly invented mechanical organ called a Panharmonikon, this time for automaton builder/promoter J.N. Maelzel .

If all the barrels of mechanical organs, flute-clocks, and music boxes had survived, they would form a fascinating sound archive of the eighteenth century. Tastes changed and the barrels were stripped of their pins and reprogrammed to play the newest style. Thus, a barrel organ dating back to 1507 was stripped of chorales by Glanner and replaced with music by Hofhaimer, Eberlin, and Leopold Mozart. Then again, the pins were removed and replaced with new programming, to include W.A. Mozart and Joseph Haydn among others (Ord-Hume).

Mechanical music was also enjoyed in the home. From mass-produced sheet music for home performance to chamber-size hand crank barrel organs, a somewhat homogenous private music culture was growing. Musical technologies facilitated music creation and production in urban households. Individuals with little or no compositional knowledge could create or perform music. The only skills they needed were operational: the ability to turn a crank, or the ability to roll dice.

Just as computer programs like GarageBand are packaged with computers to enable 21st century users to create their own songs and mixes, dice games were mass-produced to enable users with little skill to “compose” their own symphonies. Modular composition in interchangeable 8-bar sequences could be combined at random to produce new creations. Mozart employed this kind of algorithmic composition in his dice games to the amusement of participants. This style of composition has been referenced as the first “computer” music.

In his survey of eighteenth century mechanical instruments, Ord-Hume makes the important point that self-acting instruments were not marginalized novelties. Musical technology was integrated, much as it is today, in the everyday lives of cultural participants. As entertainment media, automated instruments existed side by side with other musical instruments (171). As the sole method of preserving sound of that era, they are the closest things we have to archival recordings. The various kinds of mechanical music also served as a democratizing and standardizing cultural force in the eighteenth century.

Organics and Mechanics
The border between humanity and technology is constantly being negotiated. Enemies in one age, we are allies the next. Historically humans have hovered between enthusiasm and mistrust of our own inventions. The eighteenth century for the most part was a period of excitement and integration of a technocentric worldview.

Musical automata invited reflection on the nature of art, the source of human genius, and the possibility of replacement by machine. In 1754, Leipzig theologian Johann Michael Schmidt invoked J.S. Bach’s music as proof of the irreplaceability of human composers. Only the human soul could interpret the beauties of Bach’s music. Indeed, Schmidt went so far as to say that Bach’s music alone was enough to topple over all of materialism’s apparent achievements (Richards, 383).

Bach’s music was designed with precision according to complex rules of harmony and form, and in many ways is as encoded as the pins controlling the movements of the Flutor. The structure and rule associated with Bach’s music connects it strongly to mechanism/materialism. But the expression of myriad passions amongst contrapuntal harmony, hidden Lutheran hymns, and his coded symbolic-harmonic semaphore is fundamentally human. Bach’s compositions articulate the soul’s relationship with God.

Automatophonic music, in contrast, celebrates humanity’s relationship with machines and with its own ability. It suggests the possibility that one day, we may have god-like status to create human beings, or at very least things that look and act like human beings. Artificial life is about creating lifelike behaviour. At a certain point, lifelike behaviour triggers response as if the object is indeed alive. When the eyes of la Joueuse de Tympanon turn in your direction, for a moment you feel that “she” is “looking” at you.

The physical automaton of the Enlightenment did not inspire the kind of ethical debates that human replication (mechanical or otherwise) inspire today. Likely, the lack of philosophical concern about replacement of human beings can be attributed to the unique and artisanal nature of realistic androids (Voskuhl, Producing objects, 1). These objects, despite their suggestion of futuristic possibilities, are firmly pre-industrial and individual.

The metaphoric automaton, on the other hand, was an objectified human participant in industrialization and mass production. The clockwork, impassive, and operational human being would have a role subordinate to the machine in the factory environment. Anywhere other than in industry, the automatic/mechanical human was unacceptable.

For example, in La Bruyere’s seventeenth century moral text Les Caracteres, values such as agency and probity are absent from damning moral descriptions of both the courtier and the fool (Liu, 7). These very different social types share a superficiality of behaviour and lack of inherent quality (such as reason and moral fortitude) and have greater similitude to clockwork machines than to the ideal Enlightenment human.

Jean Paul, satirical playwright in the 1780s, wrote several plays concerning machine men and artificial humans. His satire “Humans are Machines of the Angels,” is a text that in both style and content obfuscates the difference between human beings and machines. In a story more akin to a late-20th century movie plot, it is revealed that human beings are themselves automata, built by angels to serve their needs. Paul uses musician automata as satiric objects to highlight the confusion caused by a society that appears to have idealized mechanical, operations-based humans (Voskuhl, Motions and Passions, 303).

In Dangerous Liaisons, the Marquise de Merteuil is a self-created being. Her description of self-actualization in letter 81 is a tragic display of the success of scientific methodology. When operational reason is unchecked by sentiment, the result is an arch-villain such as the Marquise de Merteuil. Only a force of nature, smallpox, is able to check her amoral successes. Catherine Liu’s analysis of de Merteuil suggests that this character functions as a subtle critique of the created or designed self (Liu, 173).

Despite the satires and criticisms of robotic humanity, for the average Baroque or classical audience member, there was little threat attached to the replacement of the human being. There may even have been an attraction to blurring the boundaries between man and machine, taking the best of both parts and creating a new futuristic self. Some of this may have been embodied in W.A. Mozart himself. Annette Richards compares the child prodigy Mozart to Vaucanson’s automata: a unique novelty put on show for the paying public. The boy’s mysteriously accurate on-demand musical demonstrations had more in common with a created machine than with the theories of education and development prevalent at the time (Richards, 381).

The child prodigy suggests a world where intrinsic ability transcends traditional ideas of education and experience. Automaton creators like Vaucanson and the Jaquet-Droz family created an imaginal world where machines could accomplish everything that we consider innately human – and that humans require training to achieve. Vaucanson also worked actively in industrializing and mechanizing weaving manufacture, putting the ideas proposed by his android automata into practice.

Automata as musical android, silk loom, or calculating machine, redefined the relationship of humans and machines. The possibility of a machine doing human work –in humanoid or machine form- was proof of the validity of the materialist-mechanist understanding. Programmed machines could complete the same functions as learning humans, thus removing the requirement for operators to develop skills. Some occupations became more human, depending on what machines could do (Riskin, Defecating Duck, 621). The ability of machines had come to define humanity.

The successes of the mechanist perspective, notwithstanding the Marquise de Merteuil, had been achieved by the turn of the nineteenth century. And it was at this time the threat of replacement by machine entered the pervasive nightmare of the modern age. The 1817 E.T.A. Hoffmann horror story “The Sandman”, later became a ballet called “Coppelia”, features a beautiful feminine automaton so beautiful she cannot be distinguished from a real woman. Of course Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein features the tragic results of unfettered science. Still, the idea that a created being could in turn create life would remain a goal of modernity.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the transformation from artisan to operator had almost completed. Another transformation was the progression away from performer-composers towards conductors, who did not perform music professionally but instead, realized it for audiences. By the 20th century, many times the composer is invisible to audiences, in essence replaced by the virtual machine of orchestras and the recording industry. For the average post-modern music consumer, the music itself has been extracted from the compositional process, composers replaced by producers and musicians replaced (by degrees in different genres) by machines. Music in the 21st century has in many respects gone from being an event (in time) to a product (in space). The dimensionality of musical experience has, in effect, transformed. Except in certain elite circles, we no longer notice the absence of the organic.

Mechanization increased the philosophical and real distances between people, things and nature. Replacement of an organic intervenor, such as the musician, by a machine creates distance by causing a temporary noticeable absence. The first generation to experience the absence may notice it keenly, but subsequent generations will consider this as the status quo. Experiments in mechanizing music has at times replaced the musician or composer, or collapsed the musician and instrument into one machine.

The human stars of the eighteenth century were the musicians: virtuosic singers, keyboardists, and violinists. It is only logical, then, that the mechanical stars of the same century would also be musicians. Music formed an integral part of the culture and definition of humanity. In Church, it marked the passage of time and subject of meditation. In court, it highlighted the glory of the ruler. In homes and concert halls, it provided a frame and structure for social activity. And in the development of artificial life, it demonstrated the possibility of art made by machine.

Despite this possibility, our human biases argue for the supremacy of flesh and blood in art. In response to the Flutor, Quantz said “It could never move you.” In the March 25, 2007, New York Times article, “The Theatre is Alive with the Sound of Laptops”, composer Michael John La Chiusa says, “Do the machines provide the human touch of a live musician? Not to my ear…. It’s a question of aesthetics.” Annette Richards, opening her article on Mozart’s automated music, cites this aesthetic issue as one of the primary reasons Mozart’s Fantasias for mechanical clock are largely ignored by musicologists.

It is significant the Vaucanson did not make a defecating man. What an animal does is modeled in analogue by an animal automaton, but the androids make a multi-layered statement about human achievements: writing, drawing, and above all, music. This is the demonstration of all labour mankind commits to raise himself above the state of animal. That music would be one of the activities chosen to re-produce in this context shows how important music was during the eighteenth century.

Automata were silent observers at the intersection of technology and humanity. They occupy an unusual place in history, as a passive yet present thread that connected the men who transformed the modern world. They did not mimic human activity: they mimicked humanity at a time when its world was changing. They completed our most human actions, the markers of our civilization and our accomplishments. During the eighteenth century, the musician automatons and their non-musical relatives captured the dreams and desires of technologists, artists, and audiences.

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—- “Motions and Passions: Music-playing Women Automata and Cultural Commentary in Late 18th-Century Germany.” In Jessica Riskin, ed. Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007, 293-320.

Online Sources (all accessed July 2008 )

Automates-Anciennes.com http://www.automates-anciens.com/english_version/automatons-music-boxes/history-automatons-androids.php

Lady musician: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OcB25IXPYY

La joueus de Tympanon: www.youtube.com/watch?v=75CXFwgslsY

ASIMO Robot: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRUyVCfFh1U