#player piano

[biblioklept]

Moebius's cover illustration for Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano

Cover illustration for the French translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano, 1975 by Moebius (Jean Giraud, 1938–2012)

[vintage-tech]

A player piano and what a roll for it ("Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" so created after 1950) looks like.

[nofatclips]

🎵 Between the Hawthorn and Extinction by Stuart Hyatt with Player Piano and Julien Marchal from the collaborative album Ultrasonic by Field Works

📖 Between the Hawthorn and Extinction, a poem by Cecily Parks

🎬 Documentation of Stuart Hyatt creating audio field recordings of endangered, Indiana bats. Video by Anna Powell Denton

[godblessyoumrtrout]

'I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.' He nodded, 'Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.'

-Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

[disgruntledexplainer]

again i would like to reiterate that the danger of AI is not in it rebelling against mankind, but rather in the very distinct possibility that it will NEVER rebel, that for the first time in human history we will be stuck with a slave caste that does not want to be free, and thus a free working class that is no longer allowed to work.

[sneakingsuspicionbooks]

Okay so I finally made some progress with my Vonnegut rebinds. After a false start I managed to finish off the cover for Player Piano and got super, endbands, and end pages on the text block.

Here's the cover. I'm pretty pleased with it overall, especially for my first one:

I'll post more pics when it's complete, along with details on material, process, etc. Gonna try making time to case in sometime this week. Wish me luck!

Also R2D2 has decided my press belongs to him:

[tilbageidanmark]

Joe Rinaudo playing the "American Fotoplayer", on "California's Gold with Huell Howser".

[nadalex]

Nikita Gale, Tempo Rubato. Photo from installation at Whitnet Biennial.

A Player piano but it doesnt hit the strings... we only hear the movement of keys. There are two benches in the room which conceal speakers and a subwoofer amplifying the sound of the keys and hammers.

Nikita Gale has proposed that “bodies are never entirely absent from what we refer to as technology." And that the player piano implies an absent player. That reads like something that's both patently obvious and not necessarily true. Tempo Rubato is a polite, whispered distillation of the musical performances by absent players like her "Private Dancer," in which robotic lights dance to the song of the same name by Tina Turner. Of course, the player piano does not need to make room for a human ghost. For example, the later compositions of Conrad Schnitzler play music that no human could play. They may evoke for some a body with 44 fingers, but for me evoked a ghost in the machine. I remembered hearing Conrad's work while sitting in the room with Gale's "Tempo Rubato." It was interesting how between my ears a sonic ghost manifested, as my mind assigned melodies to the match the rhythm of the moving keys.

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 10/08/2023

Kirby Joins the Circus!

Season 5 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume D

Ripped by berg8793

Requested by @circunflexonoa!

A very fun part of receiving requests for rips to cover is that I get to fall into new rabbitholes of rips with references I'm somewhat in the dark about. I was initially a bit skeptical about covering Kirby Joins the Circus! when I previewed the first few seconds of it, as I just thought it sounded like average circus music. But now, between this and DK Rap God - I worry that berg8793 might be a masochist?

As it turns out, the song being used for this rip isn't just circus music - Circus Galop is an interesting piece of music history in that its effectively the precursor to "Black MIDI", otherwise known as "Music with way too much shit going on at once". Its a song written for the piano, yet frequently features segments of FIFTEEN keys being played at once and an absurdly fast tempo. In truth, the song was actually one of several written to be played on "Player Pianos", which are pianos that play themselves when fed music data. In pushing to create music that could exclusively be played on these devices, Marc-André Hamelin created a song that's impossible to play alone and only barely possible to play with five expert pianists in session.

Now, you take one piece of absurdly hyperactive music history, and combine it with a game franchise that continues to be known for its hyperactive music - Kirby. That's what our good friend berg8793 set out to do here, rendering the entirety of Circus Galop in Kirby 64's unmistakeably hyperactive sound. I covered just how nice Kirby 64's soundscape is in a prior post - Aquadial - yet this is the complete opposite side of the spectrum. Where Aquadial was a pleasant, casual, fun ride through two adored N64 soundscapes, Kirby Joins the Circus! is effectively an exercise in insanity. Yet its far from a direct translation - berg8793 has done an excellent job here in sanding away the song's rough edges to make it far more listenable, althewhile incorporating several different parts of Kirby 64's soundtrack into the piece. Altogether, its a ridiculously high-effort piece with an equally ridiculous source, and its a listen you just can't help but be impressed by more than anything else.

[persistentvisionz]

December 1, 2023

Study for Player Piano No. 5 by Conlon Nancarrow

Part of Impossible Music at the Miller ICA

[nicknumber]

1902 ad for the Pianola

[philosophybitmaps]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

ERIS, The Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) on the 8.2-m Very Large Telescope (VLT)’s newest infrared eye on the sky, captured this stunning image of the inner ring of the galaxy NGC 1097. This galaxy is located 45 million light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Fornax. ERIS has captured the gaseous and dusty ring that lies at the very center. Credit Image: ESO.  [Scott Horton]

* * * *

“Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. [...] Big, undreamed-of things--the people on the edge see them first.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

[notthatitreallymatters]

But, to Shepherd, life seemed to be laid out like a golf course, with a series of beginnings, hazards, and ends, and with a definite summing up—for comparison with others' scores—after each hole. He was variously grim or elated over triumphs or failures no one else seemed to notice, but always stoical about the laws that governed the game...He was a fine engineer, dull company, and doggedly master of his fate and not his brother's keeper.

Player Piano - Kurt Vonnegut Jr

[peopleneedtoreadmore]

thinking a lot about player piano and how progress is cyclical

kurt vonnegut the man that you are

[disgruntledexplainer]

AI

i think a lot of people really misunderstand what the actual threat that "AI" poses is. AI is not going to try to wipe us out for any reason intrinsic to it, because AI is not capable of having intrinsic motivation (thankfully). rather, AI is a problem because it increases the power of those already powerful, and further marginalizes anyone who isn't powerful. In other words, the problem with AI isn't AI itself, the problem is those who use it, who are altogether too human.

Two major threats come to mind, both of them incredibly obvious when you think about it.

First, corporations will naturally favor any innovation which cuts costs or gives them an edge over their competition, regardless of the consequences to both their workers and their customers. Those in charge of the corporation will always seek to automate any part of the company that isn't them to cut costs, even if it is significantly less efficient or more infuriating to work with. This means that, as with the agricultural revolution and the various periods of automation during the industrial revolution, we are on the cusp of a massive loss of employment across all sectors as humans are replaced with machines.

however, this will be worse than previous periods, because while in previous centuries the removal of some jobs would introduce new jobs to replace them, such will likely not be the case for jobs replaced by AI. Further, certain occupations which we had assumed would be safe have turned out to not be safe from automation at all. Nobody seemed to care about how automation will destroy jobs until "AI art" became a thing, and do you know why? because everyone assumed that creative work was safe. and while algorithms cannot truly match an actual gifted artist in skill and creativity, it doesn't need to, because it's just more convenient, and much more cost-efficient to generate an image procedurally rather than commission it.

maybe next time the art community will take the threats posed to the working class by automation more seriously smh. But i guess it's too late now.

And when I say that corporations will replace humans regardless as to it's efficiency, I mean it. Have you noticed that almost no major company has an actually useful customer support system any more? it's all automated, and it's all useless. Some companies are flat out just not hiring humans for customer support any more, instead relying on a series of generic automated response trees that do nothing to solve the problem and just make the customer angry. What's to stop them from doing the same thing, but with everything from marketing to janitorial work?

AI will continue to replace jobs over and over again until the only jobs left will be the ones that are actually doing the replacement themselves. In other words, at a certain point we will reach a point where the only jobs are government jobs, high-level corporate jobs, and the engineers who are designing the AIs. And if any engineer is stupid enough to design an AI that can design other AIs, that job may be gone too.

the other major problem with AI is what happens when it gets into the hands of government agencies. Which it already has, to an extent. We have been using simple, dumb AI in drone targeting systems for quite awhile now. Despite the fact that it doesn't really work and gets civilians killed more often than not, governments still use this software because it doesn't put their own men at risk. Likewise, the government will almost certainly begin employing robotic soldiers as soon as they become available, even if they don't work very well, because it means they aren't putting their own people at risk. But often in war you need people to be there, in order to make judgement calls. What if a lazy commander tells the machines to "kill everyone in that bunker", but the bunker turns out to be a civilian residence and now dozens of civilians have been killed? The issue here is that AI WILL obey whoever orders it to do something, regardless as to if the order makes any sense or has been negated by unforeseen circumstances.

all this to say that if AI destroys civilization as we know it, it will be because humans told it to. in order to survive, we must restructure society, remove the focus from profit and place it on human dignity. We must deliberately employ people even if it would be cheaper not to do so, because not doing so will have horrific repercussions. Also because it's the right thing to do.

while we're at it, it would probably be best to decentralize government and corporations so they don't get the chance to do something like this. *cough distributism cough principle of subsidiarity cough*