Thomas Edison’s Hugely Ambitious “To-Do” List from 1888

in History, Technology | November 16th, 2016

edison_todolist

Even beyond devel­op­ing the phono­graph, the motion pic­ture cam­era, light bulb, and the creepy talk­ing doll, Thomas Edi­son got a lot done in life. With his even greater knack for enter­prise than for inven­tion, he might, had he lived in the 21st cen­tu­ry, trad­ed on his rep­u­ta­tion for pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and indus­try by sell­ing us his per­son­al “life hacks.” Alas, those in search of Edis­on­ian tips and tricks for liv­ing must infer them from all the mate­ri­als he left behind after a life that stretched from the mid-19th cen­tu­ry to near­ly the mid-20th, such as this exten­sive to-do list from Jan­u­ary 3, 1888.

“Through­out his life, Thomas Edi­son kept ‘idea books’ filled with to-do lists, sketch­es and oth­er notes on cur­rent and future projects,” says the site of PBS’ Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence. Just over a month after open­ing his new lab in West Orange, New Jer­sey, “Edi­son cre­at­ed a five-page list of ‘Things doing and to be done.’

That year alone, Edi­son would exe­cute 45 patents, pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with the phono­graph and cylin­der records. Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell and his asso­ciates had begun to make improve­ments on Edison’s decade-old phono­graph, which pushed Edi­son into action. Despite this com­pe­ti­tion, Edis­on’s ‘To Do’ list shows that the phono­graph wasn’t the only thing on the inventor’s mind.”

These five pages of things to acquire or cre­ate (see the full list below) include not just the “New Stan­dard Phono­graph” but an “Improved Mag­net­ic Bridge for prac­ti­cal work,” “Unin­flam­ma­ble Insu­lat­ing Mate­r­i­al,” a “Box bal­anc­ing Sys­tem,” “Arti­fi­cial Moth­er Pearl,” “But­ter direct from Milk,” “Arti­fi­cial Ivory,” “Marine Teleg­ra­phy,” and a “Long dis­tance stan­dard Tele­phone Trans­mit­ter which employs devices of record­ing phono­graph.” While not all the ideas that inspired, or were inspired by, the items on this long list came to fruition, Edi­son clear­ly saw val­ue in get­ting them all out of his head and on paper. One won­ders what the man who declared that “genius is one per­cent inspi­ra­tion, nine­ty-nine per­cent per­spi­ra­tion” would make of the count­less orga­ni­za­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty tools now on the mar­ket. Nobody ever per­spired because of using an app, after all — but plen­ty have per­spired devel­op­ing them.

Things doing and to be done:

Cot­ton Pick­er
New Stan­dard Phono­graph
Hand turn­ing phono­graph
New Slow speed cheap Dynamo
New Expan­sion Pyro­mag­net­ic Dynamo
Deaf Appa­ra­tus
Elec­tri­cal Piano
Long dis­tance stan­dard Tele­phone Trans­mit­ter which employs devices of record­ing phonogh
Tele­phone Coil of Fe [iron] by tt in Parafine or oth­er insu­la­tor
Plati­na Point Trans using new phono Recorder devices
Gred Bat­tery for Tele­phones
“ “ “ “ Long Dis­tance
“ “ “ — Phono­plex
“ “ “ Jump Tele­graph
“ “ “ Volt­meter
Improved Mag­net­ic Bridge for prac­ti­cal work
Moto­graph Mir­ror
“ Relay
“ Tele­phone prac­ti­cal
Arti­fi­cial Cable
Phone motor to work on 100 volt ckts
Dupli­cat­ing Phono Cylin­ders
Deposit in vac­uo on lace, gold + sil­ver also on cot­ton molten chem­i­cal com­pound of lus­trous sur­faces to imi­tate silk— also reg plat­ing sys­tem
Vac­u­ous Ore milling Large Machine
Mag­net­ic Sep­a­ra­tor Large
Lock­ing mate­r­i­al for Iron sand
Arti­fi­cial Silk
Arti­fi­cial fil­i­ments [sic]
New [illeg.]
Unin­flam­ma­ble Insu­lat­ing Mate­r­i­al
Good wax for phono­graph
Phono­graph­ic Clock
Large Phono­graph for Nov­els, etc.
Pig Iron Expmts with Elec­tric­i­ty + Mag­net­ism
Mal­leabliz­ing Cast now in Vac­uo
Draw­ing fine wire
Joy phono­graph for Dolls
Cable Moto­graph
Very Loud Moto­graph tele­phone with 1/3 siz phonogh motor.
Mag­ne­to tele­phone with actu­al con­tact end mag­net com­pres­sion of an adjustable rub­ber press as in new phones
Snow Com­pres­sor
Glass plate water ore repeator
Tinned faced [illeg.] for Stove Cast­ings
Refin­ing Cop­per Elec­tri­cal­ly
Quad neu­tral relay
Cheap low induct Cop Insu­lat­ing mate­r­i­al for Lead Cable peo­ple
Con­stant moved for non­foundry
200 volt 20 cp lamp
Cheap [illeg.] Indi­ca­tor
Record­ing Valt Indi­ca­tor
Box bal­anc­ing Sys­tem
Alter­nat­ing Machine + Trans­former
Sifua Sur­face Switch­es
Vul­can­iz­ing [illeg.] African Rub­ber adulle­ment
Plat­inum wire [illeg.] cut­ting Machine
Sil­ver wire wood cut­ting sys­tem
Sil­ver­ing or Cop­per­ing bathing cloth in Vac for dura­bil­i­ty
S Mater attend own with new devices for c speed
Expan­sion mir­ror plat… wire in vac­uo
Pho­toghy
Pho­toghy by camp­ing heat after cen­tral points
Boron fil.
Hg [mer­cury] out of Lamp
Phonaplex Repeater
Squirt­ing glass sheet tube etc. Nick­el [illeg.]
Arti­fi­cial Moth­er Pearl
Red Lead pen­cils equal to graphite
India Ink
Trac­ing Cloth
Ink for blind
Fluffy Incan­des­cent Burn­er for gas
Regen­er­a­tive Kerosene Burn­er
Cen­tral­ized arc in arc Lamp
Cai–[illeg.] Tes­la arc lamp test
Strength­en­ing alter­nat­ing cli by sternt Dynamo
ERR Cont [illeg.] reduc­ers
Elec­tro­plat­ing Machines for Sch­enec­tady
Con­denser Trans­former
Sqr ft difrac­tion grat­ings in sil­ver by 5000 [illeg.] tool spe­cial [illeg.] lathe for orna­men­tal pur­pos­es
Pho­to Scant–[illeg.]
Cheap plan pro­duce Mimeo­graph sur­faces
Min­ers bat­tery + lamp
Sort­ing Coal from Slate Machine
But­ter direct from Milk
Burn­ing asphalt Can­dles by high chim­ney
Mag­nets RR sig­nals
Soft­en [illeg.] of books trans­fer to Cop plate + plate to [illeg.] matrix
Tele­phone Repeater
Sub­sti­tute for Hard rub­ber
Arti­fi­cial Ivory
Soft­en Veg­etable Ivory to press in sheets
Var­i­ous bat­ter­ies on [illeg.] Type
Revolv­ing Ther­mo
Caller Indi­ca­tor for Jump Telegh
Marine Teleg­ra­phy
Long dis­tance speak­ing tube filled H20 2 dia pres­sure
Lend plate bat­tery for mod­i­fy­ing attend­ing Cur­rent
Two revolv­ing bands in bat­tery Lead faced press in liq­uid close togeth­er + out into sep­a­rate cham­bers to [illeg.]reduce by gas the oth­er
Siren phonogh
Perm mag like an elec­tro­mag of [illeg.] hand steel high pol­ish sep­a­rate­ly mag­ne­tized + forced togeth­er pow­er­ful­ly[illeg.]
Tele­phone work­ing more [illeg.]
Eartubes formed cres­cent [illeg.] wire
Long strip 50 cp car­bon under stress [illeg.] for
Cheap Volt­meter
Chalk Bat­tery
Dynamo or motor long tube in long mag­net­ic field top + bot­tom con­tacts forc­ing water through gen­er­a­tor cur­rent by – pas­sage.
[Illeg.]
Ther­mo bat­tery slick Cop­per oxi­dized then plat­ed over sur­face oxide nailed to make good con­tact [illeg.]
Disk Phonogh

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

A Brief, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Thomas Edi­son (and Niko­la Tes­la)

Thomas Edi­son & His Trusty Kine­to­scope Cre­ate the First Movie Filmed In The US (c. 1889)

Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talk­ing Dolls: An Inven­tion That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Mar­ket

Take the 146-Ques­tion Knowl­edge Test Thomas Edi­son Gave to Prospec­tive Employ­ees (1921)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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When Franz Kafka Invented the Answering Machine (1913)

in History, Literature, Technology | November 10th, 2016

kafka-young

We’ve all had the expe­ri­ence, punc­tu­at­ed by inter­minable wait­ing, of cir­cling over and over again through some enor­mous com­pa­ny’s auto­mat­ic tele­phone answer­ing sys­tem. Whether or not it counts as gen­uine­ly “Kafkaesque” may be up for debate, but we do have some evi­dence that the tech­nol­o­gy itself, or at least the idea of it, does indeed trace back to the author of The Meta­mor­pho­sis and The Tri­al him­self. This comes out in Kaf­ka biog­ra­ph­er Rein­er Stach’s new book of pho­tographs, let­ters, and oth­er dis­cov­er­ies called Is that Kaf­ka? 99 Finds.

“Although Kaf­ka was timid and skep­ti­cal in his inter­ac­tions with the lat­est tech­ni­cal gadgets—particularly when they inter­vened in social communication—he was always fas­ci­nat­ed by peo­ple who knew how to han­dle these devices as a mat­ter of course,” writes Stach in an excerpt at the Paris Review. “That includ­ed his fiancée Felice Bauer, who worked in the Berlin offices of Carl Lind­ström AG, where she was in charge of mar­ket­ing for the ‘par­lo­graph,’ a dic­ta­tion machine.” It must have required no great leap of Kafka’s for­mi­da­ble imag­i­na­tion to dream up “a cross between a tele­phone and a par­lo­graph,” which he described in a 1913 let­ter to Bauer:

The inven­tion of a cross between a tele­phone and a par­lo­graph, it real­ly can’t be that hard. Sure­ly by the day after tomor­row you’ll be report­ing to me that the project is already a suc­cess. Of course that would have an enor­mous impact on edi­to­r­i­al offices, news agen­cies, etc. Hard­er, but doubt­less pos­si­ble as well, would be a com­bi­na­tion of the gramo­phone and the tele­phone. Hard­er because you can’t under­stand a gramo­phone at all, and a par­lo­graph can’t ask it to speak more clear­ly. A com­bi­na­tion of the gramo­phone and the tele­phone wouldn’t have such great sig­nif­i­cance in gen­er­al either, but for peo­ple like me, who are afraid of the tele­phone, it would be a relief. But then peo­ple like me are also afraid of the gramo­phone, so we can’t be helped at all. By the way, it’s a nice idea that a par­lo­graph could go to the tele­phone in Berlin, call up a gramo­phone in Prague, and the two of them could have a lit­tle con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er. But my dear­est the com­bi­na­tion of the par­lo­graph and the tele­phone absolute­ly has to be invent­ed.

The mod­ern answer­ing machine took some time to devel­op, attain­ing its first com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful form, the Elec­tron­ic Sec­re­tary, in 1949, a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry after Kafka’s death. But alas, unbe­knownst to him, some­one had also beat­en him to it when first he thought it up. “The com­bi­na­tion of a tele­phone and a dic­ta­tion machine had already been invent­ed and patent­ed — includ­ing the func­tions of an answer­ing machine,” writes Stach, cit­ing the engi­neer Ernest O. Kum­berg’s inven­tion of some­thing called the “Tele­phono­graph” in 1900. This might seem like just one more dis­ap­point­ment in a life full of them, but remem­ber: just over a cen­tu­ry on, when voice­mail and even new­er tech­nolo­gies have replaced the answer­ing machine, nobody describes any­thing with the word “Kum­ber­gian.”

You can pick up a copy of Is that Kaf­ka? 99 Finds here.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Find Works by Kaf­ka in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion

Four Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Enjoy Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

The Ani­mat­ed Franz Kaf­ka Rock Opera

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

Down­load Jim Rockford’s Answer­ing Machine Mes­sages as MP3s

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Graceful Movements of Kung Fu & Modern Dance Revealed in Stunning Motion Visualizations

in Animation, Art, Dance, Technology | November 3rd, 2016

When I first saw what was then the height of motion cap­ture in 1999—The Matrix’s “bul­let time” and kung fu sequences—I was suit­ably impressed, and yet… the extreme manip­u­la­tion of the real (which couldn’t have hap­pened in a more appro­pri­ate film, grant­ed) also seemed a lit­tle like a cheat. In the days before com­put­ers ren­dered 99% of spe­cial effects, part of the fun of watch­ing an effects film was spot­ting the seams. The short “Kung Fu Visu­al­iza­tion” above, from Ger­man dig­i­tal artist Tobias Gremm­ler, deft­ly com­bines both of these aes­thet­ic inclinations—the love of arti­fice and the awe of liq­uid-smooth dig­i­tal motion—in rustling, swirling, shim­mer­ing ani­mat­ed art that para­dox­i­cal­ly shows us the seams of flu­id move­ment.

Recall­ing Mar­cel Duchamp’s famous nude or the dynam­ic sculp­ture of Umber­to Boc­cioni, Gremm­ler ani­mates these mod­ernist dreams using grace­ful motions cap­tured from two Kung Fu mas­ters. Each sin­u­ous mar­tial arts rou­tine is ren­dered with a dif­fer­ent mate­r­i­al tex­ture, with accom­pa­ny­ing sound effects and dra­mat­ic music. “Visu­al­iz­ing the invis­i­ble is always fas­ci­nat­ing,” writes Gremm­ler, “and motion visu­al­iza­tions have been cre­at­ed even in pre-dig­i­tal times with light, pho­tog­ra­phy, cos­tumes or paint­ings.” (Nor­man McLaren’s 1968 “Pas de deux” offers a strik­ing his­tor­i­cal exam­ple.) Gremm­ler’s stun­ning ani­ma­tion was com­mis­sioned for a Hong Kong Kung Fu exhi­bi­tion and “focus­es on the lega­cy of Hak­ka mar­tial arts in Hong Kong.”

Gremmler’s film may show us process in motion, but he remains coy about his own tech­no­log­i­cal means (unless, pre­sum­ably, you buy his book.) Anoth­er motion cap­ture mas­ter­piece, “Asphyx­ia,” above, uses hum­ble, yet high­ly advanced meth­ods unimag­in­able in 1999, “two inex­pen­sive Xbox One Kinect sen­sors,” writes This is Colos­sal, “to cap­ture the move­ments of dancer Shi­ho Tana­ka.” Film­mak­ers Maria Takeuchi and Fred­eri­co Phillips then “ren­dered the data inside a near pho­to-real­is­tic envi­ron­ment,” mak­ing cre­ative use of low­er-res tics and glitch­es. Com­bined with a love­ly elec­tron­ic score from Takeuchi, the result­ing video’s visu­al poet­ry is impos­si­ble to ade­quate­ly con­vey in words.

What “Asphyx­ia” does show us is a scal­ing back of tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry that reveals a deep lev­el of ges­tur­al sophis­ti­ca­tion under­neath. “The project,” write the film­mak­ers, “is an effort to explore new ways to use and/or com­bine tech­nolo­gies… with­out many of the com­mer­cial lim­i­ta­tions. The per­for­mance is cen­tered in an elo­quent chore­og­ra­phy that stress­es the desire to be expres­sive with­out bounds.” Although “Asphyx­ia” is obvi­ous­ly a lower-quality—digitally speaking—work than Gremmler’s Kung Fu Visu­al­iza­tion, it is none the worse for it. Both use motion cap­ture tech­nol­o­gy in inno­v­a­tive ways that fore­ground the artistry, rather than the mim­ic­ry, of dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion. (Some­what like the much-praised dig­i­tal stop-motion Kubo and the Two Strings.) If you want to see how the mak­ers of “Asphyx­ia” cre­at­ed their exper­i­ment, watch their mak­ing-of film below.

via This is Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Ani­ma­tions from Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The 20 CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and Placed on Prototype iPods (2001)

in Music, Technology | October 27th, 2016

On Octo­ber 23, 2001, almost exact­ly 15 years ago, Steve Jobs intro­duced the very first iPod–an mp3 play­er, capa­ble of “putting 1,000 songs in your pock­et” and play­ing cd-qual­i­ty music. A nov­el con­cept back then. A prod­uct we take for grant­ed today.

Above, you can watch Jobs make the first iPod pitch. And below find a list of the 20 cds that came loaded onto iPod pro­to­types giv­en to jour­nal­ists attend­ing the launch event. What bet­ter way for them to demo the gad­get?

The list comes from Nobuyu­ki Hayashi, a Japan­ese reporter, who was there that day. If you know some­thing about Jobs’ musi­cal tastes, you’ll see that he had a strong hand in the cura­tion:

h/t Eli

via Dar­ing Fire­ball

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Cal­lig­ra­phy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famous­ly Inspir­ing Cal­lig­ra­phy Teacher

Con­for­mi­ty Isn’t a Recipe for Excel­lence: Wis­dom from George Car­lin & Steve Jobs (NSFW)

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish”

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What Happens When Blade Runner & A Scanner Darkly Get Remade with an Artificial Neural Network

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | October 27th, 2016

Philip K. Dick, titling the 1968 nov­el that would pro­vide the basis for Blade Run­ner, asked whether androids dream of elec­tric sheep. But what goes on in the “mind” of an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence designed specif­i­cal­ly to watch movies? Ter­ence Broad, a com­put­ing researcher at Gold­smiths, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, took on a form of that ques­tion for his mas­ter’s dis­ser­ta­tion, using “arti­fi­cial neur­al net­works to recon­struct films — by train­ing them to recon­struct indi­vid­ual frames from films, and then get­ting them to recon­struct every frame in a giv­en film and rese­quenc­ing it.”

“Neur­al net­works” sounds like a term straight out of one of Dick­’s influ­en­tial sci­ence-fic­tion nov­els, but you’ve almost cer­tain­ly heard quite a bit about them in recent years of real life. A neur­al net­work, in the words of neu­ro­com­put­er pio­neer Dr. Robert Hecht-Nielsen, “is a com­put­ing sys­tem made up of a num­ber of sim­ple, high­ly inter­con­nect­ed pro­cess­ing ele­ments, which process infor­ma­tion by their dynam­ic state response to exter­nal inputs.” These sys­tems, in oth­er words, imi­tate the prob­lem-solv­ing meth­ods of the human brain as we cur­rent­ly under­stand them, and can, when pro­vid­ed with suit­able data, “learn” from it.

One thinks less of the Repli­cants, Blade Run­ner’s lethal­ly engi­neered super­hu­mans, than of Num­ber 5, the arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent robot star of Short Cir­cuit (co-designed, inci­den­tal­ly, by Blade Run­ner’s “visu­al futur­ist” Syd Mead), with his con­stant demands for “input.” When it came out in the mid-1980s, that goofy com­e­dy once looked like by far the more suc­cess­ful film, but over the inter­ven­ing three decades Rid­ley Scot­t’s one-time bomb has become per­haps the most respect­ed work of its kind. “The first ever film remade by a neur­al net­work had to be Blade Run­ner,” Ter­ence Broad told Vox, point­ing in his expla­na­tion of his project to the movie’s pre­scient treat­ment of the theme “that the task of deter­min­ing what is and isn’t human is becom­ing increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult, with the ever-increas­ing tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments.”

Dick, as his gen­er­a­tions of read­ers know, had deep con­cerns about the dif­fer­ence between the real and the unre­al, and how human beings can ever tell one from the oth­er. He tack­led that issue again, from a very dif­fer­ent angle, in his 1977 nov­el A Scan­ner Dark­ly. Richard Lin­klater turned that book into a movie almost thir­ty years lat­er, one which Broad also fed as input into his neur­al net­work, which then attempt­ed to recon­struct it. Though still the­mat­i­cal­ly appro­pri­ate, its col­or­ful roto­scoped ani­ma­tion posed more of a chal­lenge, and “the results are less tem­po­ral­ly coher­ent than the Blade Run­ner mod­el.” But “on the oth­er hand, the images are incred­i­bly unusu­al and com­plex, once again pro­duc­ing video with a rich unpre­dictabil­i­ty.”

At the top of the post, you can watch Broad­’s Blade Run­ner-trained neur­al net­work recon­struct Blade Run­ner’s trail­er, and below that his A Scan­ner Dark­ly-trained neur­al net­work recon­struct A Scan­ner Dark­ly’s trail­er. Curios­i­ty demand­ed, of course, that Broad let a neur­al net­work trained to watch one film have a go at recon­struct­ing the oth­er, and just above we have the A Scan­ner Dark­ly-trained neur­al net­work’s recon­struc­tion of Blade Run­ner. He’s also giv­en Scot­t’s famous 1984-themed Super Bowl Apple ad and God­frey Reg­gio’s Koy­aanisqat­si the neur­al-net­work treat­ment. We read so often, these days, about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence’s grow­ing abil­i­ty to out-think, out-work, and one day even out-cre­ate us. What on Earth, the Philip K. Dicks of our day must won­der, will the neur­al net­works come up with when they can final­ly out-watch us?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Made of 12,597 Water­col­or Paint­ings

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

Rid­ley Scott Talks About Mak­ing Apple’s Land­mark “1984” Com­mer­cial, Aired 30 Years Ago on Super Bowl Sun­day

Watch Sun­spring, the Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Star­ring Thomas Mid­dled­itch (Sil­i­con Val­ley)

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Two Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Chat­bots Talk to Each Oth­er & Get Into a Deep Philo­soph­i­cal Con­ver­sa­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Experience Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in Virtual Reality: Download the Free App Created by Queen & Google

in Music, Technology | October 5th, 2016

You don’t just lis­ten to “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”; you expe­ri­ence it. Any­one who’s ever heard Queen’s sig­na­ture pro­gres­sive rock epic knows it, and any­one who’s ever per­formed all six min­utes of it at a karaoke bar under­stands it more deeply still. The song, which rumor holds to have cost more to record than any sin­gle to date, made use of the lat­est stu­dio tech­niques; now, tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly imag­in­able when the song hit the charts in 1975 has giv­en us a whole new way to expe­ri­ence “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody”: in vir­tu­al real­i­ty, through either the Google Card­board app or as a 360° video.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Queen, Google Play, and VR devel­op­er Eno­sis, The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence offers a three-dimen­sion­al audio­vi­su­al jour­ney fea­tur­ing “inter­ac­tive ele­ments and spa­tial sound, allow­ing you to step inside the music.” The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Kara Weisen­stein describes it as “peer­ing into Fred­die Mercury’s brain. The musi­cian was famous­ly coy about the song’s mean­ing, and while it doesn’t give any­thing away, this expe­ri­ence ren­ders Mercury’s imag­i­na­tion in resplen­dent pur­ples and blues. The bal­lad is a play­ful won­der­land of bicy­cling skele­tons and ani­mat­ed globes. Dur­ing the opera, the scene is a spooky cave. The rock sec­tion is a neon trip through space, and the coda is a drip­py, inter­galac­tic auro­ra.”

“ ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ is unusu­al, isn’t it?” asks Queen’s lead gui­tarist and self-described VR pro­po­nent Bri­an May in the video on the mak­ing of The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence above. “Even 40 years lat­er, or what­ev­er it is, [the 1975 song] still sounds inno­v­a­tive.” And it began inspir­ing inno­va­tion right after its record­ing, when it led to the six-minute film that, years before MTV, prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed the form of the music video. Does this new project her­ald an era when every sin­gle must, by neces­si­ty, come accom­pa­nied by a full-fledged VR jour­ney? For the moment, that ques­tion remains among the unan­swered, right along­side the one Queen has been ask­ing for over four decades now: “Is this the real life? Is this just fan­ta­sy?”

Enter the The Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Expe­ri­ence here. 

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside the Rhap­sody: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’ (2002)

Gui­tarist Bri­an May Explains the Mak­ing of Queen’s Clas­sic Song, ‘Bohemi­an Rhap­sody’

Queen Doc­u­men­tary Pays Trib­ute to the Rock Band That Con­quered the World

The Music of Queen Re-Imag­ined by “Extra­or­di­nary” Clas­si­cal Pianist, Natalia Pos­no­va

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion not only rad­i­cal­ly reshaped social and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions in the soon-to-be Sovi­et Union, but it also rad­i­cal­ized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Rus­sia for 300 years,” com­ments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “cul­ture as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.” As the Bol­she­viks swept away lum­ber­ing czarist elit­ism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be pop­ulist and proletarian—spearheaded by such exper­i­men­tal artists as film­mak­er Dzi­ga Ver­tov, poet, futur­ist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “supre­ma­tist” painter Kaz­imir Male­vich. While many of these artists were denounced as bour­geois obscu­ran­tists when the dog­mas of social­ist real­ism became their own instru­ments of polit­i­cal con­trol, for sev­er­al years, the nascent Com­mu­nist state pro­duced some of the most for­ward-think­ing art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first ful­ly syn­thet­ic music ever made, cre­at­ed by inno­v­a­tive meth­ods that pre­dat­ed syn­the­siz­ers by sev­er­al decades. We’ve like­ly all heard of the Theremin, for exam­ple, invent­ed in 1919 by Sovi­et engi­neer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, oth­er inven­tive tech­nol­o­gists and com­posers had begun to exper­i­ment with oscil­lo­scopes and mag­net­ic tape, cut­ting or draw­ing wave­forms by hand to cre­ate syn­thet­ic sounds.

One avant-garde Sovi­et com­pos­er, Arse­ny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in film. The process of opti­cal sound uses an audio track record­ed on a sep­a­rate neg­a­tive that runs par­al­lel with the film (see it explained above). After the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy, writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bauhaus artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy sug­gest­ed that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be cre­at­ed from exper­i­men­ta­tion with the opti­cal film sound track.”

Tak­ing up the chal­lenge after the first Russ­ian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “pro­duced (pos­si­bly) the first short film with a hand-drawn syn­thet­ic sound­track.” One very short exam­ple of his tech­nique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it pre­serves a fas­ci­nat­ing tech­nique and a look at what might have been had this tech­nique, and oth­ers like it, borne more fruit. Mono­skop describes Avraamov as “a com­pos­er, music the­o­rist, per­for­mance insti­ga­tor, expert in Cau­cu­sian folk music, [and] out­spo­ken crit­ic of the clas­si­cal twelve-tone sys­tem.” He was also the com­mis­sar of a min­istry set up to encour­age “the devel­op­ment of a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art and lit­er­a­ture.” It’s not entire­ly clear how what he called “orna­men­tal sound” tech­niques fit that pur­pose. But along with inno­va­tors like Evge­ny Sholpo and Niko­lai Voinov—whose fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that tech­nolo­gies gen­er­al­ly used to deliv­er enter­tain­ment and pro­pa­gan­da to pas­sive mass audi­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed by hand to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly unique.

The exper­i­ments of these sound pio­neers per­haps held lit­tle appeal for the aver­age Russ­ian, but they were enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly writ­ten up in a 1936 issue of Amer­i­can mag­a­zine Mod­ern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gal­lagher, “briefly formed a research insti­tute in Moscow, where they hoped to cre­ate syn­thet­ic voic­es and under­stand the musi­cal lan­guage of geo­met­ric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed with­in a year.”

via @WFMU/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Hear the First Recording of Computer Generated Music: Researchers Restore Music Programmed on Alan Turing’s Computer (1951)

in Computer Science, Music, Technology | September 28th, 2016

1944colossus

How­ev­er you feel about elec­tron­ic music, you’ll still find your­self lis­ten­ing to it most places you go. For bet­ter or worse, it has become mood music, sooth­ing the jan­gled nerves of cus­tomers in cof­fee shops and lulling bou­tique shop­pers into a pleas­ant sense of hip. Some com­put­er music pio­neers have moved on from com­pos­ing their own music to mak­ing com­put­ers do it for them. It’s pre­cise­ly the kind of thing I imag­ine Alan Tur­ing might have pur­sued had the com­put­er sci­ence giant also been a musi­cian.

In fact, Tur­ing did inad­ver­tent­ly cre­ate a com­put­er that could play music when he input a sequence of instruc­tions into it, which relayed sound to a loud­speak­er Tur­ing called “the hoot­er.” By vary­ing the “hoot” com­mands, Tur­ing found that he could make the hoot­er pro­duce dif­fer­ent notes, but he was “not very inter­est­ed in pro­gram­ming the com­put­er to play con­ven­tion­al pieces of music,” note Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog. Tur­ing “used the dif­fer­ent notes” as a rudi­men­ta­ry noti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem, “to indi­cate what was going on in the com­put­er.”

Instead, the task fell to school­teacher, pianist, and future com­put­er sci­en­tist Christo­pher Stra­chey to cre­ate the first com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed music, using Turing’s gigan­tic Mark II, its pro­gram­ming man­u­al, and “the longest com­put­er pro­gram ever to be attempt­ed.” After an all-night ses­sion, Stra­chey had taught the com­put­er to hoot out “God Save the Queen.” Upon hear­ing the com­po­si­tion the next morn­ing, Tur­ing exclaimed, “good show,” and Stra­chey received a job offer just a few weeks lat­er.

Once the BBC heard of the achieve­ment, they vis­it­ed Turing’s Com­put­ing Machine Lab­o­ra­to­ry and made the record­ings above in 1951, which include a ver­sion of Strachey’s “God Save the Queen” pro­gram and ren­di­tions of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The “orig­i­nal 12-inch disc the melodies were record­ed on,” writes The Verge, “has been known about for a while, but when Copeland (a pro­fes­sor) and Long (a com­pos­er) lis­tened to it, they found the audio was not accu­rate.” The two describe in their blog post how they went about restor­ing the audio and how it came to exist in the first place.

While the music Turing’s com­put­er pro­duced sounds painful­ly prim­i­tive, it would be sev­er­al more years before com­posers began to real­ly exper­i­ment with com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed music beyond the rudi­men­ta­ry first steps, and well over a decade before the design of sys­tems that could oper­ate in real time.

Now, although they still require human input (“the sin­gu­lar­i­ty isn’t upon us,” writes Spin), com­put­ers have begun to com­pose their own music, like “Daddy’s Car,” a Bea­t­les-esque song gen­er­at­ed by a SONY CSL Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry AI called Flow Machine. Here, a com­pos­er mix­es and match­es dif­fer­ent ele­ments, a style, melody, lyrics, etc. from var­i­ous data­bas­es. The machine pro­duces the sounds. SONY labs have been gen­er­at­ing com­put­er-made jazz and clas­si­cal music for some time now—some of which we may have already heard as back­ground music.

As Spin points out, already a new start­up called Jukedeck promis­es to “gen­er­ate a song in the genre and mood of your choos­ing…” per­haps as “back­ground music for adver­tise­ments or YouTube vlogs.” True to the spir­it of the man who inad­ver­tent­ly invent­ed com­put­er music, and who the­o­rized how a com­put­er might demon­strate con­scious­ness, the soft­ware will ask you to con­firm that you are not a robot.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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