AI Snips
Chapters
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Player Piano As Proto-Computer
- The player piano showed how automation could reproduce human performance and prefigured programming and punch cards.
- Raymond Scott absorbed this model, shaping his lifelong goal of making machines that could generate music reliably.
Band Built To Be Machine-Perfect
- Scott formed a tightly controlled band that rehearsed to play exactly the same every time, preferring machine-like precision over jazz improvisation.
- Musicians complained he bullied them, and he insisted on compositions that rarely changed once fixed.
Perfection Versus Human Soul
- Automation sparked a cultural fear that machines would erase human expression and jobs, embodied in critiques like John Philip Sousa's.
- Scott embraced machine perfection as both aesthetic aim and solution to human error in music.