University of California, Berkeley
How Do Keyboards Network?
According to “digital dissenter” Jaron Lanier, “the whole of the human auditory experience has become filled with discrete notes that fit a grid” thanks to MIDI – that communications protocol that sends “note-on” and “note-off” messages between keyboard interfaces and sound generators. At the very same time that MIDI became ubiquitous in digital instruments, however, others saw the death of the musical note: samplers, according to these thinkers, rendered that unit of musical thought obsolete. In the words of the inventor of the 80’s favorite drum machine, Roger Linn, “the note is on its way out.”
This talk will pursue the conditions of possibility for these coexisting yet contradictory views on how new technologies changed music around the turn of the twenty-first century. Both views proceed from the premise that the key historical shift is from written notes, to music-compositional units built into music technologies. Yet a historical view that takes into account the in-built capacities of musical instruments, the cultural protocols around written notes, and alternative means of inscribing music (such as pinned barrels and player piano rolls), exposes the fault lines in these parables of increasing or decreasing musical freedom. What these contradictory stories instead reveal is a structural tension between notes and sounds throughout modern musical history – a tension mediated, above all, by keyboards. By foregrounding this long-standing tension, rather than limiting music history to a literate tradition, we stand better equipped both to critique and embrace the full diversity of musical practices.
* * * * *
Deirdre Loughridge is a Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Since receiving her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011, Loughridge has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research inquires into the material cultures of music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the long history of music and technology ("from bone flute to auto-tune," as her undergraduate course and current book project on the topic are called). Loughridge’s publications include articles in the Journal of Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music and Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and her first book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press (July 2016). On the web, Loughridge is co-author of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments which features both delightful and disturbing keyboard instruments.