Posted for Manu Prasad

Music Box

I’ve been thinking about the history of this piece of technology that has a sustained popularity. Initially I thought of the story you get told when you’re a kid of a shell having the sound of the ocean in it when you put it to your ear, but then if you give a person getting on for a hundred an iphone if they can they’ll likely shake it, it’s a box. If you give a child the same device, if they don’t already have one, they will likely have seen one or will quickly pick it up. The ghost in the machine, that is the intelligent one, has primacy for a lot of people born this century. Formats: the wind-on thumb piano, rolled player piano, dents in a wire, reel to reel, jukebox (all local), records through mp3 (portable), radio to stream (remote), all of the above existed in the 20^th century.  Looking at all these devices operate you get that thing Baudrillard said about watching the tv play to an empty motel room, it’s so easy to imagine it carrying on after we’re all gone, humans. It seems to be channeling some other part of the universe. That thing Russolo said about noise overall a fantastic world superimposed on the real one.

Its not always fixed…what’s in there… but what comes out? Even if you picked it, clicked on it, loaded it, bought the machine, you don’t understand really how it comes out - the difference from material vibrating to music is not simple or comprehensive by any means f if everyone can see it.

“real”, “live” mark our century but not in the flesh because it will go through at least two screens to get to you. When you watch the harder formats at work, all the local ones, the portable up until mp3, and CDs were normally obscured so maybe only up to records are you watching a material and principally visual translation of the music, which kind of helps you wrap your head around it. The digi/cyber/virtual ones are amazing but in their inexplicability, make us wall-eyed, the hard formats, in their automation are like a spinning top, all motion to momentum explaining a perpetual song and dance, why isn’t everything else moving?