-- July 20, 2021 --

We Are No Longer the Music Makers

In most respects, there's nothing new to music being made by machines. I mean, it goes back a thousand years, with the first-known being made in Baghdad, Iraq. During the 9th Century, a familial trio of Persian inventors, called the Banu Musa brothers, created a mechanical musical instrument using a hydropowered organ that played interchangeable cylinders automatically. Being authors as well, they described it in their tome, The Book of Ingenious Devices. Sometime in the 13th Century, and unknown Belgian bell-maker creates a cylinder with pins that strike bells. Taking that idea, the music box is just a few centuries away when the Flemish clockmaker, Nicholas Vallin, builds a wall-mounted clock with a similar cylinder in 1598. In 1796, a Swiss clockmaker, Antoine Favre-Salomon, replaces the bells with a metal comb that has different sized teeth which produce several notes, creating the music box as we know it now. Today, one can see one of the first boxes created by AFS at the Shanghai Gallery of Antique Music Boxes and Automata in Pudong, China's Oriental Art Center. In 1870, an unknown German inventor creates a music box with a disc plate that helped produce greater sounds, and this spurred American inventors to create the self-playing piano just a few years later. Sadly, much of the progress halted when, not long after 1877, folks decided to stop innovating these devices since Thomas Edison began to mass-produce the phonograph.
Though your Average Joe would just go out, and buy a record, the rich (who could strangely enough afford orchestras) thought it cool to show off the latest orchestral gadgetry, such as the Phonoliszt-Violina (1900 - 1930), an automatic music machine containing piano, violin and banjo; Engelhardt Banjorchestra, a 1915 coin-operated mechanical orchestra made by Engelhardt Piano Company; and the J. W. Whitlock Automatic Harp (1900 - 1910), popularized by the Wurlitzer Company. The early 1900s were a time when musical robots seemed an idea not too far off, but, alas, they failed to materialize, and the automatic music-makers died out. By the the 1950s, interest in them reignited when avant-garde musicians began tinkering with electronics.
Though mathematics whiz Alan Turing, and schoolteacher Christopher Strachey, got a Ferranti Mark 1 Electronic Computer to play the world's first computer generated music in 1951, not much came of this medium, especially after Harry Olson, and Herbert Belar, helped Radio Corporation of America (aka RCA) build the first synthesizer the very next year. Once synthesizers were all the rage, many people thought all forms of acoustic music would follow the way of the coin-operated orchestra, but it was not to come. The late 60s exploded with hard rock, and though synths made a huge musical dent in the early 80s, heavy metal, punk, and everything else those two spawned, kept musicians working overtime (though they weren't paid like it). Though some bands decided to play with an electronic drummer, such as Cocteau Twins and Godflesh, almost every band in existence kept things human. That is, until around the late-90s, when the future came a'knocking.
In 1996, Jay Vance was tired of playing in shitty ska bands with other humans, so he (with the help of some friends) began to build robots that could play metal music. The "band" used to consists of Drumbot 0110, which played a two-piece kit, The Ape Which Hath No Name on tambourine, Son of the Ape Which Hath No Name on cymbals, Automoton, which played three toms, Guitarbot 666 on guitar and bass, and Jay on guitar and keyboards. He called it Captured! By Robots, and released their first self-titled LP in 1996. By 2010, I guess they got sick of how fast they had to play, and switched up to covering classic rock songs, but a few years ago JV cut down the lineup, and sped up the pace again, releasing an album of pure grindcore in 2017, titled Endless Circle of Bullshit, and another in 2019, Broken As Fuck.

In 2007, during an interview with Nardwuar, Vance said that there would be a "robot in every home," but he missed the mark - unless you count Roombas, and Alexa.
The Trons are possibly the first all non-human band, consisting of four robots. In interviews, New Zealand musician, creator, and manager, Greg Locke, says he came up with the idea in the 1990s, but there's no evidence of recordings, or video. Sometime around 2005, he got a grant from the Hamilton Community Arts Council, and began building his robots: "Ham" on rhythm guitar, and vocals (via tape loop), "Wiggy" on one-string lead guitar, "Swamp" on the drums, and "Fifi" who was originally the bassist, but now plays the keyboard. The outfit's foray to stardom came in 2008, when Locke uploaded their first video to YouTube, which has racked up over a million views to date.

I find it strange that it took another three years for non-human bands to become a thing, as the next wave didn't start up until around 2011, when Floppotron hit the scene. Created by Polish engineer Pawel Zadrozniak, the first version of the "band" was two floppy drives, and an ATMega microcontroller. Pawel uploaded a snippet of it playing of the Star Wars Imperial March, and the video quickly garnered him several million views. By 2016, Floppotron was expanded to sixty-four floppy drives, eight hard drives, and two flatbed scanners. The machine became viral when a video went around of it playing some Kraftwerk tunes a few years ago.

A little bit after the debut of Floppotron, robot bands became quite popular, starting with Compressorhead. Created by German artist Frank Barnes from 2007 to 2012, and it currently consists of six animatronic "performers" made from recycled parts, all playing real instruments, and controlled through a MIDI sequencer. Compressorhead debuted in March of 2012, on the Bülent Ceylan Show on the German RTL television channel. Originally an instrumental act, they are now fronted by Mega-Wattson (voiced by original samples from John Wright of NoMeansNo). Barnes released a Compressorhead LP, Party Machine, in 2017.

Surprisingly late to the game is Japan, with Z-Machines. Constructed in 2013 by Yuri Suzuki Design Studio for Kenjiro Matsuo (with backing by the Japanese company Hakuhodo, as well as the U.S. alcohol beverage Zima), the outfit comprises of March, a guitarist with seventy-eight fingers; Ashura, a twenty-two armed drummer; and a keyboardist called Cosmo, that triggers notes with lasers. After playing with a number of local conductors, Matsuo reached out to Squarepusher's Tom Jenkinson, and they teamed up to produce the EP, Music for Robots, released on Warped Records in 2014.

Then there's one of the lesser-known robot bands, One Love Machine Band, which actually started out as a comedy act. Berlin-based artist and sculptor, Kolja Kugler, built his first robot, Sir Elton Junk, as a sidekick in 2013 for a two-minute comedy performance called Showbot. Sometime the following year, Kugler began making SEJ play music, and while the robot is currently considered the band's manager, other members include Rubble Eindhoven (the drummer), Roots Afreakin (on bass), and a flock of metallic whistling birds called the Flute Flock.

However, even before non-human bands became a thing, computer nerds were working on programs that did away with the whole "performer" thing entirely, and had computers writing, and playing music completely on their own. In 2002, Andranik Tangian developed an algorithm that determined time event structures for rhythmic fugues and canons. Admittedly, those were worked out by humans into the compositions "Eine kleine Mathmusik I" and "Eine kleine Mathmusik II", and were then performed by computer. Later that same year, the first implementation of statistical style modeling was the "LZ-ify method" in Open Music, developed by François Pachet at Sony CSL Paris, using the Continuator system, which implemented interactive machine improvisation, interpreting LZ incremental parsing in Markov models. Kooky, I know.
In 2016, that same Sony branch in France, using their Flow Machines project at the company's Computer Science Laboratory, screwed with algorithmic compositions, and artificial intelligence, to produce the world's first AI-generated pop song. Yep, the track "Daddy's Car" is completely written, and performed, without any human input, and it sure doesn't sound like it. In fact, it sounds like The Beatles.

Since then, there have been literally thousands of AI-produced tracks, from artificial songs by Jimi Hendrix, Jay-Z, and Nirvana, to companies like AVIA, which use AI to compose personal soundtrack music for everyday people. While most of this isn't terrible, I still love the human elements of anger, sadness, and joy in my music. That's why I love punk, black metal, funk, and shoegaze. Computers, robots, and algorithms can't really replicate that. Well, at least not yet, anyway.

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