[Saturday @ 1:45pm – 3:15pm, Room 9]
Steffen Just
“Machines that Make Time: Addressing the Technology of the Player Piano and Piano Rolls”
Abstract
The player piano was a highly popular instrument during the first three decades of the 20th century, but its historical impact on culture and society has yet to be fully grasped in music, sound, and media research. While cultural histories have shown that the player piano played a significant role in marketing new music genres such as ragtime, jazz, and tango (Dolan 2009, Suisman 2010, Ospina Romero 2019), a comprehensive understanding of the player piano as a sound technology is still missing (Gitelman 2004). This paper aims to discuss the technology of the player piano through a prism of sound, cultural, and media theory.
Unlike the phonograph, player pianos did not record soundwaves, but processed punch hole signals that were written into strips of paper. These piano rolls acted as the player piano’s “processing unit”. When the perforations were pulled over a tracker bar, they activated a pneumatic mechanism that pressed down the keys. This technological arrangement produced very distinct “time-critical” media effects (Volmar 2009): discrete time signals intersected with the continuous time of the paper roll. For the first time in history, this double-layering and interplay of digital and analog could be heard and put to aesthetic uses in a musical instrument. It had a massive impact on the conception of musical time.
I argue that the media-specific “timing” of player pianos can be connected to the rise of syncopation and micro-rhythm aesthetics at the turn of the 20th century. Historical sources suggest that ragtime and jazz pianists, arrangers, and listeners celebrated the player piano’s capacity to encode, process, and playback musical time in entirely new ways. On one hand they highlighted the player piano’s precision and accuracy, on the other they found pleasure in its unusual leaps, dislocations, and manipulations of time. The historical breakthrough of micro-rhythm and syncopation, a prominent feature of the musical cultures of the “Black Atlantic,” must be brought in touch with the history of the player piano. By making this concluding case on ragtime and jazz, I use the player piano to advance new theoretical perspectives on sound, music, and modernity.
Biography
Steffen Just is a research associate in the Department of Musicology and Sound studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. His research project “Syncopated Modernity” (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) aims at developing a cultural theory of modernity through the lens of sound and media: https://sonic-modernity.net. The project engages sound and media to decentralize common definitions of what counts as “modern” and to develop alternative perspectives and epistemologies. He completed his PhD at Humboldt-University of Berlin on the performativity of subjects in US-American popular music from 1890 to 1960. His research interests embrace the triangle of cultural studies, media studies, and sound studies. Having published on discourses and practices of subjectivation, the media and cultural history of popular music, performativity of gender, race, class and queerness, meaning and materiality of sound, he aims at connecting a range of sound and music related research perspectives.
Florian Walch
“The Record Player as Gateway to Future Extremes: Time Axis Manipulation as Creativity in Early Extreme Metal”
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that reducing creativity to time axis manipulation allowed extreme metal pioneers to disavow their creativity. Played faster or slower, existing metal records would begin to growl and detune or be catapulted into rapid fits of inhumane precision. Thus, the consumer tape and phonograph playback devices of the 1980s offered a blueprint to be emulated in future performances. Drawing on German media science and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I analyze how extreme metal’s original analog ecosystem didn’t just support constellated communities of tape traders—but was the infrastructure for a fantasy that allowed for de-personalized iteration and imagination of future sounds.
Bands such as Switzerland’s Hellhammer and Australia’s Sadistik Execution, center such time axis manipulation repeatedly in autobiographical narratives. Significantly, these musicians attribute creative agency to the record player as if it were commonsense—anticipating shared values in their scenic audience. This reveals the generic values and anxieties of extreme metal. Ideally, creativity is quantitative escalation, but a transgression discovered as an already-there, not one willed against tradition.
This fantastic staging allows subjects to disavow their creativity by transferring it to imagined technological props. By specifying how the re-imagination of technology mediates more extreme repetitions of metal music, I contribute to ongoing efforts to theorize genre in materialist-relational terms. Taking these narratives seriously furthers our understanding of metal’s ambivalence about innovation and subjectivity, as well as its current attachment to an analog past.
Unlike emerging turntablist genres, metal could not validate the manipulation of earlier recordings as new primary texts. Instead, they were a blueprint. Time axis manipulation provided a speciously objective yardstick for future metal production. At the time, these then-marginal musicians could match neither the growls of distended voices nor the dry precision of sped-up drum parts. But this unattainability is what pushed their desire.
This paper concludes that this technological transference allowed adolescent musicians to disavow their desire for more extreme music as their own. By transcending human (or, less universally: teenage, male, metal-affine) finitude, technological media staged extreme metal’s future as a sublime object untainted by the circumstances of those who desired its creation.
Biography
Florian Walch is a music theorist interested in history, more specifically: the ways in which theories of music try to avoid history, in popular and classical repertoires. His research interrogates the temporality of sound (changes in sensing, recording, and repeating sounds) and the tactics that theory (vernacular and academic) uses to insulate itself from this temporality. How do these maneuvers disclose historical commitments, forms, and values? His dissertation, titled “The Rescue of Inconvenience: Extreme Metal, Sub-Generic Fragmentation, and the Digital Afterlife,” proposes that extreme metal’s conflicted attachment to technology makes it an exemplary case for understanding how sub-genre, as a form of repetition, is marked by the memory of past media. A second, long-standing research focus is a critical reflection on tonal analysis and its relationship to its ostensible model case, the classical style.
Christopher Klauke and Valentin Ris
“Interfacing Micro-Time Machines 1900/2000: The cultural techniques of the tonometer and DAW”
Abstract
Time is fundamental to music (Chua & Rehding 2020). Based on this observation, we will show that musical time is also an effect of specific musical media and their use. More specifically, we are interested in cultural techniques of fabricating musical time—in particular, micro-timing. Micro-timing, such as “groove,” is often associated with music perception and performance. In contrast, we focus on cultural techniques that interconnect the micro-time of different music media (Ernst 2016) and the interfaces that make this level of time accessible to humans.
In our paper, we apply what has been called “German Media Theory” (Siegert 2015; Winthrop-Young 2013) to recent debates in the field of “new organology” (Tresch & Dolan 2013) and explore the intertwining of instruments, musical epistemologies, materials, media, and practices. Here, we highlight the power structures operating within musical media. We do so by means of two examples. The first is the tonometer, a micro-temporal interface for producing scientific knowledge in “comparative musicology” in the German-speaking world around 1900. Famously used in the Phonogramm-Archiv Berlin, this measuring instrument allowed scholars to determine single tones of non-Western musical instruments or phonographically recorded music as a micro-temporal process (i.e., frequency). Based on our scientific reenactment of this tonometric method and related archival documents, we will discuss the techniques of measuring music in light of the asymmetric power relations between the musicologist from the global North and the “world music” under study.
Our second example extends the argument to the present century. Digital audio workstations (DAW) have been the crucial infrastructure for music production since 2000, but their genesis goes back much farther in terms of material history. We look at “flattening” (Krämer 2017) as the cultural technique for programming note values, examining the process of flattening as the condition of possibility for inscribing micro-temporal events. In parallel, the materiality of piano-roll sequences reveals the deep historical trajectory of the DAW interface, which is embedded in the long history of mechanical instruments. We thus propose a media-archaeological analysis of the musical concepts inscribed in contemporary software.
Biographies
Valentin Ris is a PhD candidate at the University of Bonn working on a dissertation project on the media history of Digital Audio Workstations. He has been a member of the Structured DPhil programme of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn since fall 2021 and a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation since November 2022. Previously, he studied musicology and German studies in Bonn, Cologne (Germany) and Cardiff (UK) until 2020.
Christopher Klauke is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources: Historical Reciprocities” (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin). In his PhD project he explores the origins of music information retrieval techniques in ethnomusicological research between 1885 and 1970. He studied musicology and art history at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen for his BA and earned his MA in musicology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2022.