Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (30 page)

The control of musical instruments is diverging. Electronic musicians have come to doubt the power of standard musical keyboards for innovation in sound. Many composers use the computer keyboard that we will
be considering in the next chapter. Some of them are working with “microtonal” or “enharmonic” keyboards, which are capable of quarter tones and even finer divisions of the musical scale. John S. Allen, an MIT-trained electrical engineer, has developed a “general keyboard” that superficially looks like a Jankó model (though Allen was unfamiliar with Jankó’s patent and drew instead on earlier organ
keyboard proposals). But Allen’s keyboard can play up to thirty-one tones per octave rather than Jankó’s twelve. This and other advanced designs seem inherently limited to a small number of players and listeners with highly developed pitch. Others use variants of the sliding strings, bows, and body position technology we have encountered. The capacitance of the theremin was just a beginning; new
technology can translate the motions of a dancer, or eye movements, into sound. Donald Buchla has developed an instrument played with cordless wands. The independent instrument builders, academics, and performers who
develop new controllers do not expect to license their innovations to major manufacturers. It is unlikely that a single new instrument will be the subject of a chair in a major conservatory
as the Ondes Martenot has been. The innovators form small circles of professionals and hobbyists who give live performances and produce CDs.
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The second path of advanced technology is the electronic refinement of the standard keyboard, mainly for performing the existing repertory rather than for creating new music. Some of the best-known devices are advanced revivals of the player piano. In
1978 Marantz introduced the first electronic reproducing piano, using data encoded on cassette tapes. By 1988, the Japanese manufacturer Yamaha had produced its Disklavier, which could both record a pianist’s performance electronically and play it back from a computer diskette with more than one hundred levels of audible hammer velocity. A California musician and engineer, Wayne Stahnke, added his
own refinements for the Austrian firm Bösendorfer. He used a new generation of sensors to record not the depression of keys but the velocity of hammers alone, and new types of linear motors to duplicate the action of the hammers and pedals during playback without affecting the touch of the instrument when a pianist is using it. Today the Bösendorfer 290 SE and the Yamaha nine-foot Disklavier Grand
Pro are our generation’s counterparts of the greatest organs of late medieval and early modern Europe, using the virtually unchanged keyboard to produce a stunning range of sounds—the strings of acoustic pianos as well as sampled electronic sounds of as many as five hundred instruments. Fully featured electronic-acoustic concert grands sell for $300,000 or more.
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Are these hybrid pianos only
a way station toward fully electronic keyboard instruments that make sounds indistinguishable from those of acoustic pianos? Perhaps, but after over three hundred years, the keyboard and the acoustic piano are still revealing new complexities that cannot be duplicated by playing prerecorded samples of individual notes electronically. Strings respond to each other’s overtones. Some piano technicians
even deliberately leave the three strings that make up a single note slightly out of tune with each other to delay dissipation of the sound. We still have much to learn about soundboards, the loudspeakers of the acoustic piano, and their interaction with the vibrations of the strings. Acoustic piano dealers report that many of their buyers are young owners of electronic keyboards who grow tired
of the sound and hope to upgrade.
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The greatest challenge of all may be to contrive new versions of the standard keyboard for electronic instruments, especially electronic pianos.
Robert Moog has produced a “multiply-touch-sensitive” (MTS) keyboard controller with key overlays that transmit continuously the horizontal location of the player’s finger on the key (X and Y axes) and the vertical
motion of the key (Z axis). The output of these sensors is connected to a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) circuit. It is possible that this and similar systems will let keyboard players develop new techniques and create musical effects that were not possible with conventional pianos. The inventors’ purpose, in fact, is not simply to reproduce music more accurately, but to promote new
musical expression.
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From the electromechanical side, engineers have been doing their best to duplicate the force feedback of a traditional piano action for use in electronic pianos. Two different designs were announced in 1990. A French musical technology researcher, Claude Cadoz, and his group demonstrated a software-controlled keyboard with sixteen motorized keys; in the same year an American,
Richard Baker, patented an “active touch keyboard” in which keys are connected to small motors with keyboards and pulleys with an analog controller. A third inventor, Alisdair Riddell, completed a “meta action” for use with acoustic pianos; it put the hammer at the end of a solenoid responding to contact made by the keys.
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None of these duplicated the full cycle of a conventional keyboard from
initial finger contact to liftoff. This force feedback helps the pianist produce what we have seen is a theoretically amazing variety of timbres with an instrument that cuts off contact between the finger and the string once the key is depressed. A grand piano action can be modeled as the response of sets of coupled springs and other damping and stiffening parts. These complex interactions are
modeled and translated into software that can easily be modified. A virtual keyboard can, for example, be adjusted to feel like any historical or innovative piano keyboard, or like a harpsichord keyboard. If other sensors are included, it should even be possible to achieve effects impossible with acoustic pianos, such as swelling a note. In his doctoral dissertation, Brent Gillespie was able to achieve
a good fit between the outputs of his system and the measured responses of acoustic piano actions. He is now developing his system, called the Touchback Keyboard.
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Gillespie’s work helps illustrate the flexibility of a technology half a millennium years old. The musical keyboard was probably a fortunate by-product of other mechanical innovations. It could control music that could fill a cathedral
or a domestic parlor. Its most successful adaptation, the pianoforte, had a surprisingly small initial effect on the musical world.
And the changes that made it the most successful instrument of the nineteenth century did not come, at first, from the manufacturers but from the great composer-performers. It was their new techniques of playing that pushed piano builders to a century of glorious
technological achievement. Because composition and performance diverged as careers in the twentieth century, there was no comparable force for change. Composers including John Cage and George Crumb have “prepared” pianos by prescribing temporary modification of strings with small objects like bolts, screws, and rubber bands—but the spirit of hacking has been easier to extend to $2,500 personal computers
than to $25,000 Steinway grands. For all the excitement of innovative instruments, new technology has on balance strengthened rather than weakened our attachment to the venerable twelve-tone keyboard. Technique sometimes transforms, but it conserves equally.

I
T IS SURPRISING
that the music-making keyboard should have preceded the text-imprinting keyboard by at least five centuries. Even counting upper and lower cases, there are no more characters on a contemporary computer keyboard than there are keys on a grand piano. A medieval organ was at least as complex as a mechanical typewriter. By the eighteenth
century artisans were building superb mechanisms ranging from marine chronometers to anthropomorphic automata that drew figures and wrote texts. Yet there was no commercially successful writing machine until the 1870s.

It is equally surprising how the text keyboard has spread as a physical interface in less than 125 years. Within a few decades, the typewriter was replacing pens and pencils not
only in commerce and government but in academia and literature, despite initially high prices. Nor were keyboards limited to typewriters. They took over typesetting, data entry, and a large part of telegraphy. Equally impressive has been their global reach beyond the lands of Roman and Cyrillic alphabets, especially in the twenty years since the introduction of the microcomputer. And despite massive
campaigns for alternatives like speech and handwriting processors, the text keyboard, like its musical predecessor, seems to be increasing its domain. For hundreds of millions, if not billions, of the world’s people, keyboarding has become a body technique more natural and intuitive than writing by hand, which in the West at least is increasingly an onerous challenge rather than a graceful art.
And while low platforms could make typewriters and computer keyboards perfectly usable in squatting positions, in practice modern equipment around the world is nearly always operated by
people sitting in chairs—as, indeed, pianos are built to be played from stools and benches, and as many non-Western instruments are designed for performance by musicians seated or kneeling on mats and cushions.
The keyboard is part of a relentlessly expanding set of body technologies and techniques. Yet there was nothing inevitable about it.

There are few things more necessary, or difficult, for a growing child than writing. In many ways it is more troublesome than computation. Mental shortcuts make it possible to teach children and adults surprisingly fast and accurate arithmetic
through paperless techniques developed in Asia, Europe, and North America. Market and securities traders, real estate negotiators, and even fences of stolen goods have developed exceptionally fast and accurate systems. But writing knows no shortcuts, and shorthand is the hardest form of all. In Japan, learning to make the kanji properly can be a lifelong effort. Even in the West, with only
twenty-six letters, combining speed, accuracy, and legibility has never been easy.

Medieval scribes faced many physical challenges. Parchment was dear, and paper became widely available only in the fifteenth century. Into the nineteenth century, writers had to sharpen their own quill pens, up to sixty times a day for a scribe. (Oboists still have to make their own reeds.) Parchment also had to
be ruled. The surprise was how efficient writing could be given medieval conditions, especially in the late Middle Ages when private scriptoria flourished. Scribes worked with a pen in one hand and a knife in the other for steadying the parchment, sharpening quills, and erasing errors. Their technique of holding a writing instrument was different from ours: the light quill could be held almost effortlessly
between the tips of the first two fingers and the thumb and moved by the whole forearm rather than the wrist, with the hand hardly touching the page. The text of a Book of Hours could be completed in a week, and— what will amaze anyone who has ever admired them in an exhibition— two or three of the miniatures could be finished in only a day. One reason for this speed was the ergonomic
innovations of the Middle Ages. We have already seen that the Greeks and Romans had no desks or writing tables. Medieval scribes used slanted lecterns, still recommended for reading and writing, and especially convenient for keeping the pen at the optimal right angle to the paper. Their desks often had additional stands for propping open copy, a convenience lacking in many computer workstations today.
It
should not be surprising that some scriptoria were initially able to compete with early printers, at least in short-run production of high-priced books.
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Of course, any attempt to build a writing machine even after Gutenberg would probably have been wildly expensive and produced crude results. But the manuscript was not just a reproduction of an author’s text. As the historian Henri-Jean Martin
has observed, copying a manuscript gave the scribe “an almost kinetic memory” of its arguments and “an almost physical familiarity” with the writer’s argumentation. Bodily engagement produced a mental identification with the author. Errors could be corrected, or introduced. The scribe was an intellectual artisan, a collaborator. Professional copyists offered a variety of styles according to
the purpose and formality of the text; a surviving document gives specimens of twelve. Each copyist’s hand was so distinctive that today’s experts on medieval manuscripts do not consider forgery a serious problem.
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Medieval writing had achieved such effectiveness that the rise of printing produced only gradual changes in the appearance of books. Paradoxically, print led not to experiments in
the mechanical production of writing but to a new flowering of handwriting, just as railroads (as we have seen in Chapter Four) popularized walking, and motoring and aviation in turn stimulated the railroads to new peaks of technology and service in the mid-twentieth century. The proliferation of printed matter actually increased rather than reduced the need for writing as governmental, religious,
and economic activity grew. Printed books still had to begin with manuscripts, and publishers found a ready market for writing guides after technical problems of engraving were overcome. Beginning in the 1520s, Italian writing masters like Ludovico Arrighi, Giovanantonio Tagliente, and Giovanbattista Palatino prepared manuals that went through as many as thirty editions. They spread the hand used
by the papal bureaucracy, called Chancery and (in northern countries) Italic, throughout educated circles of Europe. Until the nineteenth century, this hand, based on the everyday writing of medieval people, remained a standard script. It was an intuitive ergonomic solution, like the musical keyboard of the same period.
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The writing masters did not stop with Chancery. They were influential in
developing Roman typefaces for printing, a number of which are still widely used. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they also brought the art of calligraphy to new technical heights, but their very artistry helped create a gap between the handwriting of formal documents
and the script that people used in everyday correspondence. Among their achievements were the continuous cursive “round
hands” that are the foundation of much formal Western handwriting to this day: elegant in expert use but difficult for others to learn properly Graphic technology also affected formal writing styles: the copperplate engravings that preceded nineteenth-century woodblock needed hand-incised captions. The pen began to imitate the engraver’s cutting tool, the burin. With the expansion of commerce
in the eighteenth century came new prestige for round and copperplate styles in account books, bills of exchange, insurance contracts, and other commercial documents. Just as today’s office employee must be proficient with the complex formatting options of word processors and desktop publishing packages, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clerk had to master textual presentation.
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By the
early industrial age there was so much business to transact, and so many children were enrolled in the developing school systems of Europe and North America, that a market existed for an inexpensive pen that would not need sharpening. Metallic pens had been known for hundreds of years, but they had been luxuries. By the 1830s Birmingham, England, enjoyed access to the metallurgy, markets, and machine-building
skills that made metal nibs among the best-selling products of the early Victorian world. Jealously guarded equipment pressed Sheffield steel and split nibs. From a ton of steel, 1.5 million nibs could be made. At the beginning of the 1840s, a single Birmingham manufacturer, Joseph Gillott, was shipping more than 62 million a year. In 1874 the factories of the other leading pioneer, Sir
Josiah Mason, were turning out 32,000 gross each week.
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Like other Victorian technology, this industrial product soon captured the romantic imagination. George Pratt (1832–1875), Yale class of 1857, wrote:

Actually, the early steel pen was, as the melancholy conclusion
of Pratt’s verse acknowledges, easily “corroded day by day” by the inks of the nineteenth century, and the twentieth-century calligrapher and historian
Donald M. Anderson called the meeting of steel pen and bond paper “[as] icy cold and mechanical as the greeting of an iron lawn dog.” But despite these drawbacks and a tendency to splatter the indelible ink of the day the steel pen did for education
what its distant metallic cousin the cast-iron-frame piano with steel strings was doing for music. It provided an instrument of impressive flexibility for the Victorian mass public. Nibs and pianos, kindred iron and steel technologies of the hand and arms, were among the great international metallurgical successes of the nineteenth century—along, as we have seen, with steel-sprung parlor furniture.
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Just as the diffusion of the piano produced a wave of pedagogical methods and mechanical aids, so the steel pen helped make possible mass instruction in writing, which would otherwise have exhausted teachers as it tormented geese. Writing became an instrument not just for communication but for physical and mental discipline and character training. As Bernard Cerquiglini, director of the National
Institute of the French Language, has remarked, “The blue ink spot on the finger is a badge of French education. It is the mark of the French flag on the body of the French student.” Into the twentieth century, little yellow Waterman ink trucks circulated in Paris, replenishing the reservoirs of pupils’ steel pens. Yet—especially in France—rigorously drilled youth somehow, or thereby became individualist
adults: in 1885 a single French firm, Blanzy-Pour, offered five hundred different nibs, at prices ranging from 0.23 to 7.80 francs per gross, according to quality.
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(The graphite pencil was also prominent in the international rise of mass education in the nineteenth century. America’s more forgiving, free-form contribution to writing was the mini-eraser attached by a metal ferrule, introduced
a year after George Pratt was graduated from Yale. Many European teachers still cling to the prejudice that attached erasers encourage errors, overlooking the big stand-alone chunks of rubber their pupils use instead. And what is wrong with making and correcting mistakes?)
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France retained a distinctive cursive script that probably originated in the late seventeenth century; it is still visible
on some restaurant menus. Germany developed its own angular script counterpart of its black-letter Fraktur type. But it was the United States that turned handwriting into a form of drill that was only a short step from the actual mechanization of writing. While the early master Platt Rogers Spencer (whose style survives in the logotypes of Coca-Cola and the Ford Motor Company) was inspired in his
flowing script by the curves of nature, instruction was no aesthetic
reverie. Writing masters claimed to develop habits of manly self-discipline from which women were excluded—however feminine the graceful letter-forms of Spencer and his competitors appeared.
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In the last two decades of the nineteenth century a new technique, still influential today was developed for the steel pen: the Palmer
method. Impatient with Spencerian curlicues, the master penman A. N. Palmer dominated American handwriting instruction with his call for no-nonsense efficiency. Where Spencer had extolled aesthetic contemplation, Palmer taught what we know today as muscular memory: drill and repetition of motions that would make possible rapid and unconscious production of correct letterforms. Perhaps because women
were a rapidly growing proportion of the white-collar workforce, Palmer taught writing as a virile, assertive command of the whole forearm rather than the wrist and fingers. In place of meticulous copybook exercises, Palmer’s disciples invoked industrial efficiency. In 1904 one manual described the body as “a machine on which writing is done.”
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The history of script suggests that typewriting
was not just the miraculous unfolding of a mechanical marvel but the logical outcome of a social drive to discipline the body. Cultural historians from Michel Foucault onward have seen the rationalization of labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as baleful, exploitive manipulation. They have often oversimplified, but it is true that to generations of schoolchildren, writing exercises could
be physically painful. The steel pen also produced some of the first cases of what are now called cumulative trauma disorders: a report on “scrivener’s palsy” by a Dr. Samuel Solly appeared as early as 1862, and “writer’s cramp” had been more casually observed even earlier.
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