Ballet Stochastique, 2025 -
Modular synthesis, digital signal processing, analogue computingThe paradox of automated music is that while automation was once coded as the peak of musical liberty from the labour of playing, its evolution now takes the turn towards stripping the musician of the liberty of listening that comes before the playing. Ballet Stochastique traces the legacy of automated music, taking George Antheil's player piano compositions as its point of departure and following the perforated logic of those compositions across its entangled history with early computation, displaced labour, wartime cryptography and large language models.
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Ballet Stochastique is a joint research project with Ruth Clemens
Dr. Clemens’ project ‘Posthuman Music Machines’ studies literature and culture from the age of the player piano (1896-1929) in order to understand how literary engagements with this new media technology shaped and were shaped by the wider cultural attitudes to automated music.
Research activity: Transmission test_01 @OperatorRadio
A man storms out of George Antheil's 1927 Carnegie Hall concert and slips through a fold in the century. He drifts through a keypunch room in Detroit, an operations room in Santiago, a ghost-work farm in Nairobi and a data center in Amsterdam. Transmission test_01 is a broadcast from the rooms he keeps spawning in.
Dr. Clemens’ project ‘Posthuman Music Machines’ studies literature and culture from the age of the player piano (1896-1929) in order to understand how literary engagements with this new media technology shaped and were shaped by the wider cultural attitudes to automated music.
Research activity: Transmission test_01 @OperatorRadio
A man storms out of George Antheil's 1927 Carnegie Hall concert and slips through a fold in the century. He drifts through a keypunch room in Detroit, an operations room in Santiago, a ghost-work farm in Nairobi and a data center in Amsterdam. Transmission test_01 is a broadcast from the rooms he keeps spawning in.
Impresion
Ballet Stochastique, 2025
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Ballet Stochastique, 2025
Impression
Ballet Stochastique, 2025
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Ballet Stochastique, 2025
Impression
Ballet Stochastique, 2025
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Ballet Stochastique, 2025
