“No, I have not shorted out or fallen in love with a cyborg,” insisted Robert Christgau in his review of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album Trans-Europe Express, which he credited with “a simple-minded air of mock-serious fascination with melody and repetition” and textures that “sound like parodies by some cosmic schoolboy of every lush synthesizer surge that’s ever stuck in your gullet — yet also work the way those surges are supposed to work.” To electronic music fans, Kraftwerk now have a status even beyond that of the grand old men of the tradition, but continue to tour the world enthusiastically (with their own detached, biomechanical interpretation of enthusiasm), performing the deliberately technological, sometimes startlingly jagged, sometimes startlingly rhythmic music they invented.
The world got their first taste of it, in an early experimental form, a few short years before successful and relatively mainstream Kraftwerk records like Trans-Europe Expressor Autobahncame along. The group debuted onstage in their native Germany (in the town of Soest, to be precise) in the 1970 concert captured on video. Watch the gig above, or find it on YouTube. Together, the footage captures with unexpected clarity the avant-gardism of both Kraftwerk’s performative sensibility and technological setup as well as the reaction of the crowd, on the whole more pleased than bewildered. Now, in an age where performers playing from laptops onstage have become commonplace — even Kraftwerk themselves have joined that rather introverted party — it doesn’t seem as striking as all that.
But the genre of “kraut rock” (which All Music Guide describes as made by “legions of German bands of the early ’70s that expanded the sonic possibilities of art and progressive rock,” going in “mechanical and electronic” directions by “working with early synthesizers and splicing together seemingly unconnected reels of tape”) began in a different reality — in an era when Christgau could still, reviewing a later Kraftwerk album in 1981, write that every time he hears their lyric “ ‘I program my home computer/Bring myself into the future,’ I want to make a tape for all those zealots who claim a word processor will change my life.”
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I’ve long wondered what it would feel like to have synesthesia, the neurological phenomenon — this straight from Wikipedia — “in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” A synesthete, in other words, might “see” certain colors when they read certain words, or “hear” certain sounds when they see certain colors. Non-synesthetes such as myself have trouble accurately imagining such an experience, but we can get one step closer with the work of Greek artist-musician-physicist Yiannis Kranidiotis, who, in his “Ichographs” series, turns the colors of famous paintings into sound.
“Examining the relationship between color and sound frequencies,” writes Hyperallergic’s Claire Voon, “Kranidiotis has recently composed a soundscape for Raphael’s ‘Madonna del Prato’ (1505), or ‘Madonna of the Meadow.’ His resulting video work, ‘Ichographs MdelP,’ visualizes the breaking up of the painting into 10,000 cubic particles that correspond to various sounds, honing in on specific parts of the canvas to explore the different tones of different colors.” You can view that video at the top of the post, and see even more at Kranidiotis’ Vimeo channel.
Voon quotes Kranidiotis as explaining the basic idea behind the project: “Each color of a painting can be an audio frequency. Each particle, like a pixel in our computer screen, carries a color and at the same time an audio frequency (sinusoidal wave).” He chose a Renaissance painting “to generate a high contrast between the classical aesthetics and the digital transformations that occur,” as well as to make use of its “blue and red colors that help to create a complex and interesting audio result.”
The artist has more to say at The Creators Project, explaining that “there are areas of sound and color (light) that humans can perceive with their eyes and ears (hearing and visible range) and areas where we need special equipment (like infrasound—ultrasound and infrared—ultraviolet ranges). As a physicist, I was always fascinated by these common properties and I was investigating ways to highlight and juxtapose them.”
You can enjoy more Ichographic experiences in the other two videos embedded here, the first an overview of the process as applied to a variety of paintings from a variety of eras, and then a piece focused on transforming into sound the colors of Claude Monet’s 1894 “Rouen Cathedral, West Facade.” While Kranidiotis’ process doesn’t draw from these works of visual art anything you’d call music, per se, the sonic textures do make for an intriguingly incongruous ambient accompaniment to these well-known canvases. If the Louvre offered his “compositions” loaded onto those little audio-tour devices, maybe I’d actually use one.
I once read a book by Larry King called How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere. Slavoj Zizek might well consider writing a book of his own called How to Make Intellectual Pronouncements About Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. From Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to political correctness to the Criterion Collection to Starbucks (and those just among the topics we’ve featured here on Open Culture) the Slovenian philosopher-provocateur has for decades demonstrated a willingness to expound on the widest possible variety of subjects, to the point where his career has begun to look like one continuous, free-associative analytical monologue, which in the Big Think video above reaches the inevitable subject: your love life.
Perhaps you’ve tried online dating — a practice that, given the increasingly thorough integration of the internet and daily life, we’ll probably soon just call “dating.” Perhaps you’ve had positive experiences with it, perhaps you’ve had negative ones, and most probably you’ve had a mixture of both, but how often can you take your mind off the awkward fact that you have to first “meet” the other person through an electronic medium, creating a version of yourself to suit that medium? Zizek calls this online dating’s problematic “aspect of self-commodification or self-manipulation.”
“When you date online,” he says, “you have to present yourself there in a certain way, putting forward certain qualities. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions, even at the very simple level. I think the English term is ‘endearing foibles’ — an elementary ingredient in love. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element, and it is only through noticing this element that you say, ‘But in spite of that imperfection, I love him or her.’ ”
Fair enough. But what to do about it? Zizek thinks that the way forward for romantic technologies lies not in a less technological approach, but a more technological approach — or at least a stranger technological approach. He imagines a world of “ideal sexual attraction” where “I meet a lady; we are attracted to each other; we say all the usual stuff — your place, my place, whatever, we meet there. What happens then? She comes with her plastic penis, electric dildo. I come with some horrible thing — I saw it, it’s called something like stimulating training unit — it’s basically a plastic vagina, a hole.”
Dare we examine where this scenario goes? The outcome may surprise you. They simply insert her electric dildo into his stimulating training unit, and voilà, “the machines are doing it for us, buzzing in the background, and I’m free to do whatever I want, and she.” With full tribute paid to the superego by their vulgar devices, “we have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. I talk with a lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea, or she to me, quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today.”
left: Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid. right: Arthur Coulet, d’après Johannes Vermeer
It has been suggested plausibly that Vermeer’s kitchen maid is making bread porridge, which puts stale bread—there is an unusual amount of bread on the table—to good use by combining it with milk and a few other ingredients to make a filling mash or meal.
It’s a matter for conjecture. Perhaps Vermeer wanted to title his painting The Bread Porridge Maid, but caved to market research suggesting that Milkmaid would better appeal to what Liedtke calls “male viewer’s amorous musings.”
Recently, graphic artist Arthur Coulet made bread a focal point in Vermeer’s Milkmaid and other iconic works, ironically by Photoshopping it out.
By contrast, the picnickers in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe probably don’t even notice the omission.
See more, including work by Jean-François Millet, Vincent van Gogh, Caravaggio, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and Jeff Koons in Coulet’s Gluten Free Museum.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is playing in New York City through November 20. Follow her @AyunHalliday
In the late 50s, a fearful, racist backlash against rock and roll, coupled with money-grubbing corporate payola, pushed out the blues and R&B that drove rock’s sound. In its place came easy listening orchestration more palatable to conservative white audiences. As sexy electric guitars gave way to string and horn sections, the comparatively aggressive sound of rock and roll seemed so much a passing fad that Decca’s senior A&R man rejected the Beatles’ demo in 1962, telling Brian Epstein, “guitar groups are on their way out.”
But it wasn’t only the blues, R&B, and doo wop revivalism of British Invasion bands that saved the American art form. It was also the often unintentional influence of audio engineers who—with their incessant tinkering and a number of happy accidents—created new sounds that defined the countercultural rock and roll of the 60s and 70s. Ironically, the two technical developments that most characterized those decades’ rock guitar sounds—the wah-wah and fuzz pedals—were originally marketed as ways to imitate strings, horns, and other non-rock and roll instruments.
As you’ll learn in the documentary above, Cry Baby: The Pedal that Rocks the World, the wah-wah pedal, with its “waka-waka” sound so familiar from “Shaft” and 70s porn soundtracks, officially came into being in 1967, when the Thomas Organ company released the first incarnation of the effect. But before it acquired the brand name “Cry Baby” (still the name of the wah-wah pedal manufactured by Jim Dunlop), it went by the name “Clyde McCoy,” a backward-looking bit of branding that attempted to market the effect through nostalgia for pre-rock and roll music. Clyde McCoy was a jazz trumpet player known for his “wah-wah” muting technique on songs like “Sugar Blues” in the 20s, and the pedal was thought to mimic McCoy’s jazz-age effects. (McCoy himself had nothing to do with the marketing.)
Nonetheless the development of the wah-wah pedal came right out of the most current sixties’ technology made for the most current of acts, the Beatles. Increasingly drowned out by screaming crowds in larger and larger venues, the band required louder and louder amplifiers, and British amp company Vox obliged, creating the 100-watt “Super Beatle” amp in 1964 for their first U.S. tour. As Priceonomics details, when Thomas Organ scored a contract to manufacture the amps stateside, a young engineer named Brad Plunkett was given the task of learning how to make them for less. While experimenting with the smooth dial of a rotary potentiometer in place of an expensive switch, he discovered the wah-wah effect, then had the bright idea to combine the dial—which swept a resonant peak across the upper mid-range frequency—with the foot pedal of an organ.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history—a fascinating history at that, one that leads from Elvis Presley studio guitarist Del Casher, to Frank Zappa, Clapton and Hendrix, and to dozens of 70s funk guitarists and beyond.
Art Thompson, editor of Guitar Player Magazine, notes in the star-studded Cry Baby documentary that prior to the invention of the wah-wah pedal, guitarists had a limited range of effects—tape delay, tremolo, spring reverb, and fuzz. Only one of these effects, however, was then available in pedal form, and that pedal, Gibson’s Maestro Fuzz-Tone, would also revolutionize the sound of sixties rock. But as you can hear in the short 1962 demonstration record above for the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, the fuzz effect was also marketed as a way of simulating other instruments: “Organ-like tones, mellow woodwinds, and whispering reeds,” says the announcer, “booming brass, and bell-clear horns.”
In fact, Keith Richards, in the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—the song credited with introducing the Maestro’s sound to rock and roll in 1965—originally recorded his fuzzed-out guitar part as a placeholder for a horn section. “But we didn’t have any horns,” he wrote in his autobiography, Life; “the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s attention.”
The assertion isn’t strictly true. While “Satisfaction” brought fuzz to the forefront, the effect first appeared, by accident, in 1961, with “a faulty connection in a mixing board,” writes William Weir in a history of fuzz for The Atlantic. Fuzz, “a term of art… came to define the sound of rock guitar,” but it first appeared in “the bass solo of country singer Marty Robbins on ‘Don’t Worry,’” an “otherwise sweet and mostly acoustic tune.” At the time, engineers argued over whether to leave the mistaken distortion in the mix. Luckily, they opted to keep it, and listeners loved it. When Nancy Sinatra asked engineer Glen Snoddy to replicate the sound, he recreated it in the form of the Maestro.
Guitarists had experimented deliberately with similar distortion effects since the very beginnings of rock and roll, cutting through their amp’s speakers—like Link Wray in his menacing classic instrumental “Rumble”—or pushing small, tube-powered amplifiers past their limits. But none of these experiments, nor the pedals that later emulated them, sound like the fuzz pedal, which achieves its buzzing effect by severely clipping the guitar’s signal. Later iterations from other manufacturers—the Tone Bender, Big Muff, and Fuzz Face—have acquired their own cache, in large part because of Jimi Hendrix’s heavy use of various fuzz pedals throughout his career. “Like the shop talk of wine enthusiasts,” writes Weir, “discussions among distortion cognoscenti on nuances of tone can baffle outsiders.”
Indeed. Those early experiments with effects pedals now fetch upwards of several thousand dollars on the vintage market. And a recent boom in boutique pedals has sent prices for handcrafted replicas of those original models—along with several innovative new designs—into the hundreds of dollars for a single pedal. (One handmade overdrive, the Klon Centaur, has become the most imitated of modern pedals; originals can go for up to two thousand dollars.) The specialization of effects pedal technology, and the hefty pricing for vintage and contemporary effects alike, can be daunting for beginning guitarists who want to sound like their favorite players. But what early players and engineers figured out still holds true—musical innovation is all about creating original sounds by experimenting with whatever you have at hand.
Physicist Stephen Hawking may trump them all, though his famously recognizable voice is not organic. The one we all associate with him has been computer generated since worsening Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease, led to a tracheotomy in 1985.
Without the use of his hands, Hawking controls the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit software with a sensor attached to one of his cheek muscles.
Recently, Intel has made the software and its user guide available for free download on the code sharing site, Github. It requires a computer running Windows XP or above to use, and also a webcam that will track the visual cues of the user’s facial expressions.
The multi-user program allows users to type in MS Word and browse the Internet, in addition to assisting them to “speak” aloud in English.
The software release is intended to help researchers aiding sufferers of motor neuron diseases, not pranksters seeking to borrow the famed physicist’s voice for their doorbells and cookie jar lids. To that end, the free version comes with a default voice, not Professor Hawking’s.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is currently playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday
It shouldn’t be especially controversial to point out that we live in a pivotal time in human history—that the actions we collectively take (or that plutocrats and technocrats take) will determine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the coming centuries. The threats posed by climate change and war are exacerbated and accelerated by rapidly worsening economic inequality. Exponential advances in technology threaten to eclipse our ability to control machines rather than be controlled, or stamped out, by them.
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Where Kurzweil has seen this event through an optimistic, New Age lens, Hawking’s view seems more in line with dystopian sci-fi visions of robot apocalypse. “Success in AI would be the biggest event in human history,” he wrote in The Independent last year, “Unfortunately it might also be the last.” Given the design of autonomous weapons systems and, as he told the BBC, the fact that “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded,” the prospect looks chilling, but it isn’t inevitable.
Our tech isn’t actively out to get us. “The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence,” Hawking clarified, in a fascinating Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session last month. Due to the physicist’s physical limitations, readers posted questions and voted on their favorites. From these, Hawking elected the “ones he feels he can give answers to.” In response to a top-rated question about the so-called “Terminator Conversation,” he wrote, “A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.”
This problem of misaligned goals is not of course limited to our relationship with machines. Our precarious economic relationships with each other pose a separate threat, especially in the face of massive job loss due to future automation. We’d like to imagine a future where technology frees us of toil and want, the kind of society Buckminster Fuller sought to create. But the truth is that wealth and income inequality, at their highest levels in the U.S. since at least the Gilded Age, may determine a very different path—one we might think of in terms of “The ElysiumConversation.” Asked in the same AMA Reddit session, “Do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done?,” Hawking elaborated,
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
For decades after the Cold War, capitalism had the status of an unquestionably sacred doctrine—the end of history and the best of all possible worlds. Now, not only has Hawking identified its excesses as drivers of human decline, but so have other decidedly non-Marxist figures like Bill Gates, who in a recent Atlantic interview described the private sector as “in general inept” and unable to address the climate crisis because of its focus on short-term gains and maximal profits. “There’s no fortune to be made,” he said, from dealing with some of the biggest threats to our survival. But if we don’t deal with them, the losses are incalculable.
In the past, we’ve brought you the creative work of R. Sikoryak. An illustrator who teaches at the Parsons School of Design in NYC, Sikoryak has a penchant for creating comic book adaptations of literary classics. Take for example Dostoyevsky Comics where Batman stars in a comic book version of Crime & Punishment. Or Waiting to Go, which marries Waiting for Godot with Beavis and Butt-Head.
In his latest project, Sikoryak veers sharply away from literature toward language that is much more technical. Now, on his tumblr, you can findiTunes Terms & Conditions: The Graphic Novel.
Adding a new page every day, Sikoryak is creating an illustrated version of the “complete, unabridged legal agreement.” You can currently view the first 49 pages. Click here. Go to the bottom of the page. Then start scrolling up as you read.
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