“428 Millions of Quadrilles for 5s. 6d.”: John Clinton's Combinatorial Music Machine

Quadrilles were a popular genre of group dancing in the nineteenth century. Existing melodies were normally used to accompany the dancing sessions, but the monotony of their repetition and the cost of a professional piano player capable of improvising were an issue. Thus, the idea of a “machine” that would be able to endlessly produce quadrille music at no cost was suggesting itself. The Quadrille Melodist, a paper-based system for the generation of piano pieces, was published in nineteenth-century Victorian London by John Clinton, a “professor in the Royal Academy of Music.” Already in 1650, Athanasius Kircher proposed in his Musurgia Universalis a device consisting of stripes with short snippets of music that could be used to create combinatorial pieces and variations. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a whole genre of quasi-algorithmic compositions was emerging, spurred by the popularity of such works as the Musikalisches Würfelspiel, a piece attributed to Mozart. In this article, I analyze the Quadrille Melodist against the background of the history of combinatorial music. I contrast its unique features with other predigital, as well as later digital, music systems and discuss its design with respect to the phenomenon of predictability in dance music. Additionally, I discuss reasons for the circumstance that the historically advertised number of possible quadrilles, 428 million, is much smaller than the real number of combinations

An (An)Archive of Communication: Interactive Toys as Interlocutors

In this article, I analyze the Speak & Spell electronic toy (Texas Instruments, 1978) from the perspective of the communication that it enables. I argue that such interactive devices can be seen as archives of future communication. As a media archaeologist working with electronic toys I often find the conceptualizations of these devices as mere tools for playing unsatisfactory. They seem to share more characteristics with archives than with instruments. Like archives, interactive toys hold in themselves a predefined choice of informations and interactions, thus enabling certain modes of inquiry and discouraging others. Especially the electronic toys that draw on algorithms and data to present the user with an imitation of human communication are able to offer branching paths of interlocution within their domain or topic. In the first part of this article I offer an explanation of the toy\u27s technical structures that store speech and spelling data and enforce certain patterns of input and output between the device and its user. Then, I propose the use of the notion of the archive, or, alternatively, anarchive to describe the space of possibilities that defines this process of communication. In the last part I argue that the study of such algorithmic archives of possible communication needs to be based on interactive experimentation and can not be grounded in static recordings or descriptions alone

The activated torsion oscillation magnetometer

The activated torsion oscillation magnetometer exploits the mechanical resonance of a cantilever beam, driven by the torque exerted on the sample by an ac field applied perpendicularly to the film plane. We describe a model for the cantilever dynamics which leads to the calculation of the cantilever dynamic profile and allows the mechanical sensitivity of the instrument to be expressed in terms of the minimum electronically detectable displacement. We have developed a capacitance detector of small oscillations which is able to detect displacements of the order of 0.1 nm. We show that sensitivities of the order of 0.5(10-11 Am2 can be in principle achieved. We will subsequently describe the main features of the ATOM prototype which we have built and tested, with particular attention to the design solutions which have been adopted in order to reduce the effects of parasitic vibrations due either to acoustic noise, originating from the ac field coil, or to eddy currents in the capacitor electrodes. The instrument is mounted in a continuous flow cryostat and can work in the 4.2-300 K temperature range. Finally, we will show that our experimental set-up has a second mode of operation, named Torsion Induction Magnetometer (TIM).Comment: Invited Talk at the Moscow International Symposium on Magnetism, 2002 to appear in the J. Mag. Mag. Mat Revised versio

Mesure de Petites Forces Dans les Expériences Physiques

149 tr. ; 20 cm