Richard Harding - Experiences of Surprise

7/31/2019 Richard Harding - Experiences of Surprise

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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 ofthe 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


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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


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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


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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 pre-

existent, 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


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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 itsa 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.


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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.


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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 alsojokes 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.


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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


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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 mechanicalin a sense; it was so over-stylised that it was mechanical. It was dat-dat-dat-

dat 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


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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


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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.


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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


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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 per-

cent 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 OrchestrakiI 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


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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


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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 musicalthinking 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 non-

deterministic things just by completely improvising them, which seemed an obvious idea to me; now


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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

ofrandom 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 20

th

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?


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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 culturally-

transmitted 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


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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 non-

intelligibility 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.


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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 ofinsentient 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 ofImpressions

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, Musicfor 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 musically-

ambivalent consciousness. Ultimately, according to Bastien, all of these disparate methods are

concerned with finding different ways of producing sounds without human playing. Probably [it]


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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


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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 createdit, I discoveredit. 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 complexthan what I had expected and something much more musicalthan

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


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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

possibilitywhich 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


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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.


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Notes

1Oxford Music Online. 2007-2010. Entry forMechanical Instrument. By Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume

[Online] (Updated 2010) Available at: http://0-

www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wam.city.ac.uk/subscriber/article/grove/music/18229 [Accessed 26January 2010].

2Oxford Music Online. 2007-2010. Entry forMechanical Instrument. ByArthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume

[Online] (Updated 2010) Available at: http://0-

www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wam.city.ac.uk/subscriber/article/grove/music/18229 [Accessed 26

January 2010].

3Oxford Music Online. 2007-2010. Entry forBallet Mcanique [Online] (Updated 2010) Available at:

http://0-

www.oxfordmusiconline.com.wam.city.ac.uk/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e559?q=ballet+mecanique&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit [Accessed 26 January 2010].

4Relay. 2009. Play Scissors Play by Pierre Bastien[Online] (Updated March 2009) Available at:

http://www.modelart.ie/relay/pierrebastien.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].5Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 2007. Homepage [Online] (Updated October 2007) Available

at: http://iaaa.nl/home.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].6Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 2006. Huge Harry[Online] (Updated June 2006) Available at:

http://iaaa.nl/hh/cv.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].7Institute of Artificial Art Amsterdam. 1980. The Machines[Online] (Updated August 2009) Available

at: http://iaaa.nl/music/machpictpages/artzienpict.html [Accessed 26 January 2010].8Institute 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].9Cited 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.

11James, Jamie. The Music of the Spheres (London: Abacus, 1993), p. 67.

12Institute 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].


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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


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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.


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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


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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


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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.


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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.


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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 ofautomata 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?


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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?


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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.


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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.


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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.


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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


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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 OrchestrakiI 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


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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 inaudiblefrequencies 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?


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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 endof 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...


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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?


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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...


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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

Richard Harding - Experiences of Surprise

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