Musical Time Machines: Player Pianos and the Media-Technological Constitution of Bodies, 1900-1930

Abstract

This paper examines the player piano from a media-materialistic perspective, exploring how its technological features and functions (such as piano rolls and interfaces) interacted with discursive imaginations and cultural practices related to the body in the first three decades of the twentieth century. I reconstruct how the player piano responded to emerging concepts of machine time and visions of machine-like bodies that were circulating across various social domains, including the sciences, the Fordist sphere of labor, pedagogy and the arts. The era’s focus on standardizing, measuring, and recording time through machines and automation technologies sparked debates on how the human body could meaningfully co-exist within a world increasingly shaped by the rhythm and precision of machines. By looking at the production of piano rolls and practices of playing the player piano, I discuss how this mechanical instrument had significant implications for the relationship between human bodies and machines in music. The player piano not only reflected a world that became increasingly governed by machine logic. It also generated unique aesthetic effects, endowing machines with meanings that could not be found elsewhere.