NCDM · Nineteenth-Century Digital Music: Sociopolitical and Proto-Digital Implications of the Street Crank Organ in Europe

Nineteenth-Century Digital Music: Sociopolitical and Proto-Digital Implications of the Street Crank Organ in Europe

'Nineteenth Century Digital Music’ (NCDM, grant number 897393) aimed to look at mechanical music in a few different ways: · as a pre-digital form that is comparable to digital media in terms of its potential to increase some kinds of accessibility, as well as (in some cases) a kind of devaluation - for example, the idea that it’s ‘too easy’; · as a cultural form that is often associated with Europe and whiteness, but which has its roots in Arabic-Islamic engineering; which was long sustained in the global north by the success of Black musics and popular repertoire inspired by Black music; and which has in many ways and since its beginning exceeded the quite narrow cultural and aesthetic frame within which it is typically re-presented; · as legitimate performance media (not only as a self-playing technology); · and as a significant historical performance tradition led by real and often marginalised people (including many women), whose stories have not been widely told. The project concluded that the potentials of mechanical music to be reinterpreted outside the narrow frames of global northern contexts, white/European inventors, male players and ‘robotic’ performances are significant. During this project I researched ideas about connections between mechanical music programmes and digital technology, drawing on ideas in Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Stiegler’s Technics and Time to explore the significance of long-standing European philosophical convictions about the ‘natural’ qualities of speech and the ‘dead/artificial’ qualities of writing in order to cast light on attitudes towards automated/programmed music. Another important subject was the non-European roots of, and later contributions to, mechanical music – I collected information about the musical-technological contributions of the 9th-century Banu Musa and 13th-century Al-Jazari; of Miguel Boom - a Haitian engineer who had the earliest patent for a disc-playing musical box but is rarely granted more than a sentence in published histories and usually considered secondary to the German inventor who arrived at a patent 2-4 years later; and more examples which begin to push back against the highly Eurocentric bent of many important sources on mechanical music. This collected data has been and will continue to be used in my position as a curator at Museum Speelklok, to try to shift the current narrative towards a more global story. For one of the areas of primary-source research, I collected social-historical data in the form of stories about womens’ lives in and around organ grinder communities from 19th-century British newspapers. Geographical data was drawn from the same sources to create maps illustrating some of the paths travelled by organ grinders across Britain and Ireland. A more empirical side of the project involved recording mechanical instrument (music box) performances and measuring fluctuations in beat length across different players/performances using Sonic Visualiser and Self Organising Maps, to arrive at a provisional answer to the question of whether mechanical instruments can be played ‘expressively’.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз