[ISEA2010] Paper: Elisabeth Schimana – Forgotten Future #1. Magical Sound Machines

Abstract

“One day the Emperor received a large package labeled The Nightingale. But it was not a book. In the box was a work of art, an artificial nightingale most like the real one. Thirty-three times it sang the selfsame song without tiring”.  _Hans C. Andersen, The Nightingale, 1849

Recorders – Transmitters – Generators
Long before the advent of electrification, people began developing automatic mechanical recording devices for their musical pleasure, and the many constructions that have been built since then continue to enchant us: music boxes, barrel organs, cylinders, records, optical tapes, paper tapes, magnetic tapes and disks, and with them the accessory perforating, punching, cutting, blackening, drawing apparatuses as well as those for reading and playing back the stored data.

  • Elisabeth Schimana (AT) is a composer, performer and radio arstist. Studies in electroacoustic music, musicology and cultural studies, founder of IMA Institut für Medienarchäologie..

Full text (PDF) p.  96-97