Three True Tales About Music and Technology

By Robert Barry and Amanda de Frumerie

Have you heard the story about the android that took to the operatic stage of eighteenth century London? Of the inventor who used musical chords to power an engine and fire a canon? What about the composer who helped the most beautiful woman in the world build a missile guidance system? Three True Tales About Music and Technology re-imagines these episodes from the sometimes tumultuous history of interactions between the sonic arts and technoscience as a series of folk tales and fairy stories—that just so happen to be true.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rough Trade Books
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781912722556

Robert Barry

ROBERT BARRY is a writer and composer based in London. His music has appeared in feature films, dance productions, pop charts, and DJ mixes. He is currently editor for books, film, and visual art at The Quietus and a faculty member at London’s Institute for Contemporary Music Performance. As a freelance writer, his byline has appeared in Frieze, The Guardian, Wired, Art Review, Mousse, The Atlantic, and The Wire. Previous publications include a book of prose scores, Music in Text, and a history of speculative music, The Music of the Future.

Book preview

1.

An Android at the Opera

1.1

Deep inside your ear, between the outer parts you can see and the inner parts that you can’t, there is a thin cone of flesh called the tympanum—or ear drum. Its job is to convert the vibrations of sound waves passing through the air into mechanical vibrations that your brain can understand.

For over a hundred years, whenever people built machines to listen for us—like telephones, walkie talkies, or hi-fi equipment— they based the working of those machines on the tympanum. Today, still, all technologies for capturing and reproducing sound are based upon the working of the ear.

Three hundred years ago, when no-one was very much interested in the ear and even ear doctors were dismissed by their colleagues as mere aurists, the model for sound technologies was not the ear, but the mouth.

To reproduce