Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices

By Harley Byrne

Time-travelling ex-postman Harley Byrne's ongoing mission is to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.” In this newly rediscovered chapter from his lost memoirs, Byrne describes in full his mission to Manchester, 1952, to record the secret computer music of Alan Turing - war hero, mathematician, inventor of hands-free umbrella.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harley Byrne
• Release date: Dec 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301957095

Harley Byrne

Harley Byrne is a time-travelling recording engineer and former postman, lost somewhere in 2012. We at the Institute are presently engaged in the business of reconstructing Byrne's memoirs and the cine-serial adaptations thereof. A more complete biography of Byrne - detailing his downfall within the postal service, the rift with his degenerate brother Santiago, and his rise to fame as he attempted to track down and record "all the world's music, ever" - can be found here: http://zoomcitta.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/on-universal-ear.html

Book preview

Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices

Harley Byrne

Copyright 2012 L’Institute Zoom

Smashwords Edition

Illustrated by Elly Strigner

UNIVERSAL EAR

Harley Byrne works in Manchester, 2012 A.D. for the UNIVERSAL EAR DIGICORP, a record company for whom he has pledged to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever. This ongoing mission has seen him cross the length and breadth of the Earth, travelling through time with his shed-built Universal Ear recording device and frequently battling wits with his arch-enemy, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.

We have presently been able to pre-construct parts of his memoirs, from which the following chapter is an extract.

For more information on UNIVERSAL EAR visit alltheworldsmusicever.com.

Listlessness in Early Automated Composition Devices

(From Volume 6, Part 3: So-called Experts of the Mid-Twentieth Century)

But on my return to 2012 and the quiet familiarity of the club, my mind continued to race. Recording McLuhan’s musical doorbell should have been straightforward. Instead, I had allowed Being in disguise, and then the real McLuhan, to put me off, each of them procrastinating and equivocating until I lost all sense of my mission. McLuhan was an over-thinker, he talked all the joy out of his electronic tune. In retrospect, I found more truth in Being’s assertion that the medium, whatever the message, would need new batteries from time to time.

If McLuhan had been a windbag, though, at least he was thorough. I remembered now that Sunday morning alone in his Toronto home when, unwilling to mic up a doorbell I didn’t fully understand, I took the liberty of breaking into my host’s study and examining his papers. Discovering the handwritten manual