The distinction Rex Lawson made in the previous post between Pianolas and Recording Pianos is an interesting one, in terms of how they fit (or don’t fit) into the project which been hinting at recently.

This project is provisionally organised along a division between what I am characterising as hand-crafted or hands-on and hands-off material. I’ve been explaining it as follows:

Hands-on: those people producing material using primarily hands-on methods. I’m thinking here of things like live-coding, circuit-bending, etc.

Hands-off: those producing material with self-running systems with only minimal human intervention beyond the initial setting up of the system.

I see this as the work being split into two types, one for “knob twiddlers,” and the other for the more minimally-inclined worker. In both cases a particular focus could be generative software like Supercollider, which allows for both types of activity.

Hands-on/hands-off is obviously something of an artificial distinction – people don’t really restrict themselves to one or the other, but this event is designed to investigate the various options around these different types of work, and to see what kind of productive exchanges you can get when you focus on and contrast these particular aspects of production.

I’m also trying to avoid any forcing of the material into categories like music, noise, sound, visual art, architecture, etc. The principles being dealt with here cross over many disciplines and forms, so I want to leave this as open as possible and let the artists create the distinction with their work.

Returning to the Player Pianos, and Rex’s distinction that the rolls for Pianolas are edited versions of the original musical scores, while rolls for Recording Pianos are created by a machine translating the key presses of a particular pianist into slots on the paper. So, in former case, you have this abstraction which is the musical score, being translated into a new medium of the roll, but essentially they are unchanged in their content. From thence the Pianolist (the player of the Pianola) interprets the playing of the roll using the various means available on the Pianola (speed, tone, strength, etc.). In the latter case, you have the reality of the player’s movements being the players’ realisation of the abstraction of the score, translated into slots on the roll, the idea being that these rolls are then played as-is, without intervention on the part of a Pianolist. In this case at the time of performance you have what aims to be a reproduction, whereas in the former you have an entirely original performance.

In terms of my project, I want to pay attention to this interesting slippage through the roll of the human hand in the process, and more importantly at what stage in the process the hand enters and leaves. For the hands-on work the hand is ever-present to a greater extent, by definition; for the hands-off work, the hand has done it’s work beforehand (as it were) in the preparation, which then almost has a life of its own once it is performed (or performs itself, you could say I suppose).