The song “Daisy Bell” has a special place in computer history. Max Mathews, who had by the late 50s pioneered digital synthesis using IBM 704 mainframe, arranged the tune in 1961 for vocoder-derived vocal synthesis technology on technology developed by John Larry Kelly, Jr.. Kelly himself is better known for applying number theory to investing in the markets — an unfortunate achievement in the wake of a financial collapse brought down by misuse of mathematical theory.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke happened to hear the 704 singing the Mathews/Kelly “Daisy Bell,” and the rest is (fictional) history – the HAL computer in the book and movie sings the song as he is being disconnected, as though the computer had learned this song as a “child.”

Here’s Max himself (namesake for Max, the patching language), overseeing a rendition of his arrangement:

Today, basic vocal synthesis has become part of the fabric of taken-for-granted tech, and the legendary rendition by a singing robotic voice part of our culture. These things are no longer futuristic or strange. Apple this week even launched a music player that announces its own tracks in the form of the new iPod shuffle.

But what happens when those same human beings imitate the computer? That’s the question asked by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, crowdsourcing human input by inviting thousands of participants to contribute their voice using custom recording software built in Processing. The basic technique is something Koblin has used before: his Sheep Market massed an Internet labor market, paid two cents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to draw walls full of thousands of sheep. Those sheep proved at once massive in quantity and unique in individual quality, and, if you squinted at them, presented a critique of global labor practice.

Koblin has also done various seminal pieces with the Processing coding language that change our perception of data and technology, like his now oft-cited “Flight Patterns,” tracing the paths of overhead planes.

This time, the computer/human relationship is truly inverted. Each singer participant imitates a sound component from the robot singing. The humans are then combined to synthesize the robot sound instead of the other way around. The result: organic technology combined into a cyborg, online chorus. No one singer knows what it is they’re singing in whole. It’s perhaps the first mass-human synthesis of sound, and the results are truly unusual.

And strange synthesis seems to be what Koblin’s work is fundamentally about. Perhaps it’s not Mathews’ sound experiments, but Kelly’s ideas about quantifying global markets that are most relevant. (For an extra dose of irony, Google HAL – you’ll get stock ticker HAL, for Haliburton, one of the few stocks that has grown in this economy.) In our reality, the University of Illinois didn’t create a super-smart, spaceship-controlling robotic brain – but they did create the Web browser.

And after all, all of us are now living in the aftermath of many crowds of people behaving collectively without genuine larger knowledge of what they were doing. Robots were envisioned at the beginning of the 20th Century as out-of-control automatons, crushing civilization, and were often then appropriated as metaphors for fascist government. Now, the vision can be equally apocalyptic, but the meaning is inverted. It’s human beings acting as automatons – without contact with human scale – that threaten to crush the Earth. And this time, they’re capitalists.

On the other hand, the beauty of art is its ability to mean many things at once. Koblin’s sheep and now his singers never cease to be whimsical. And in their beauty, they suggest that perhaps even massed crowds of Internet-connected people can sing in harmony.

For the future of humanity, I hope so. But then, if we fail, we’ll always have the robots.

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

Bicycle Built for 2000: Info

Pop quiz: what instrument by pioneering “father of digital audio” (or, if you’d rather, “great-grandfather of Techno”) Max Mathews was featured on the cover of Playboy Magazine?

If you guessed the IBM 704 mainframe, the computer on which Mathews generated the first computer music the world ever heard, you’d be — wrong! Would that we were so lucky. I’m sure you hard-core geeks can imagine your favorite woman or man sprawled over those . . . crisp lines . . . cold, slab surfaces . . . humming away . . . see the 704 photos here and here.

The correct answer is, as shown, Mathews’ Electronic Violin, from the April 1998 Playboy. The player is a serious violinist named Linda Brava who, apparently, has an affinity for posing for soft-core violinist porn. Then again, if I were a blonde bombshell Finnish violinist, my publicity shots would probably involve me in lace-up boots, too. Brava has a hard-core violinist resume, but she really does play digital violins — not just for photo shoots.

But, in all seriousness, I don’t enjoy looking at Finnish violinist nearly as much as looking at IBM mainframes, especially as operated by serious-looking businesspeople in suits. So, for posterity, check out the real first digital musical instrument after the break (hit ‘read more’). Oh, sure, it was too slow for real-time digital audio and IBM discontinued it in 1960, but that hardly matters. 704 forever. Rock and roll!

My kind of porn below: never trust a computer you can lift.

The Princeton, NJ chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is celebrating 50 years of the RCA Synthesizer on Thursday, April 14. (PDF info)

Automatic lounge music: The RCA Mark I
wasn't exactly what we'd think of as a synthesizer. Developed by RCA
engineers Harry Olsen and Hebert Belar, its original intention was to
pump out artificially-generated mood and lounge music for the honchos
at RCA Victor Records. (RCA must have been a little disappointed when
the device both failed to generate music on its own and was later
appropriated by academic serial composers — unless there's something I
don't know and Milton Babbit's gone platinum.)

How about a nice Hawaiian punch? The RCA wasn't real-time,
either. Instead, you programmed sounds via a punch-paper roll with
settings for filters, envelopes, modulators, and resonators, and heard
the results on 12 vacuum tube oscillators. The RCA did have built-in
"CD burning" of sorts: you could record sounds to a built-in laquer
disk cutter. Strangely enough, RCA Victor didn't see the commercial
application and instead of being used as a lounge music generator, the
Mark II model (upgraded to tape output) wound up in the joint
electronic music center of Columbia and Princeton Universities.

The rest is — you know. The RCA failed to revolutionize mood
music, but serial composers like Milton Babbit, Charles Wuorinen, and
others had a field day with the new synth, the first to really provide
composers with musical control. The RCA ultimately influenced the
real-time synths that would follow; if it didn't directly influence
Moog or Buchla, it certainly fired up the composers who hung around them. The RCA was also the spiritual predecessor to innovations like Max Mathews' computer-based system, which in turn led to the modern Csound.

Happy birthday: Well, a bit late, but well-deserved
nonetheless. (The Mark I was shown to the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers in New York on January 31.) The assembled folks in
Princeton will be host to Pulitzer- and MacArthur-winning composer and
Princeton Prof. Emeritus Milton Babbit, as well as some experts on the
RCA's history and operation, with music included. Anyone in Princeton out there? Check the PDF from the invite and let me know if you go!

And where'd that RCA go? Last I heard, the three-ton Mark II was lying in pieces around the Columbia Computer Music Center, unmaintained. Say it ain't so. I mean, it's great you have a gyro mouse in your lab, but this is a piece of history. (Anyone know for sure?)