Luận án Tiến sĩ Âm nhạc và Sự sống Nhân tạo của Bradley M. Spiers tại Đại học Chicago

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MUSIC AND THE SPECTACLE OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC BY BRADLEY M. SPIERS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES. IV LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES .VIII INTRODUCTION Android Musicology. 3 Modernity And The Mind-Body Problem.

10 Artificial Life And Music. 25 Why Artificial Life?. 40 CHAPTER ONE Music, Mind, and the Moral Fantasy of Enlightenment Automata. 55 Music And The Organs Of Language.

66 Producing A Theater Of The Mind .76 The Musical Man-Machine. 90 CHAPTER TWO Revitalizing Vaucanson: The Romantic Afterlife of an Enlightened Machine……. 94 Automata After Vaucanson. 100 Revolutionizing Vaucanson: Miroir Des Evénements Actuels.

106 Reimagining Vaucanson: L'automate De Vaucanson. 115 Romanticizing Vaucanson: Gräfin Dolores (1). 128 Reifying Vaucanson: Gräfin Dolores (2). 148 ii CHAPTER THREE On the Musically Intelligent: Aesthetics, Analysis and the Hermeneutics of AI….

151 EMI And The Matters Of Mind. 166 Musical Mind Games. 186 EPILOGUE WORLD KNOWLEDGE. 205 iii LIST OF FIGURES 0.1 Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, L'Écrivain, (1774).2 Close-up of Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz, L'Écrivain 16 writing the phrase “Jaquet Droz Enchanted Journey à moi” 1.1 Jacques de Vaucanson, Le Jouer de Galoubet, Le Canard et Le 47 Jouer de Tambourin (1738).2 Jean Raoux, Pygmalion Amoureux de sa Statue (1717), Oil on 58 canvas 1.3 Charles-Antoine Coysevox, Berger jouant de la flûte (1640), 61 Marble 2.1 Four drawings by Jaquet-Droz’s le Dessinateur 102 2.2 Charles Vernier, Engraving from L’automate de Vaucanson 123 (1840), Lithograph.

iv LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES 2.1 Luigi Bordese and Adolphe de Leuven, “Marie, o douce Marie,” 126 mm. 27–36 from L’automate de Vaucanson (1840 2.2 Luigi Bordese and Adolphe de Leuven, “Marie, o douce Marie,” 127 mm. 114–23 from L’automate de Vaucanson (1840) 3.1 Experiments in Musical Intelligence and David Cope, Mazurka 154 Op. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No dissertation is a solitary effort.

Supporting every exhausted dissertator are countless advisors, readers, editors, interlocutors, fact-checkers, writing partners, and all-around cheerleaders. As I conclude this project amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, I appreciate more than ever the support of those who helped it—both physically before quarantine, and virtually during it. Sadly, there is not enough space to truly thank all of these amazing individuals. For every name that I have listed here, know that there are countless others who helped improve this dissertation.

I am forever grateful for the kindness and generosity these people have shown me. First and foremost, this dissertation would not have been possible without my two advisors, Patrick Jagoda and Berthold Hoeckner, who not only guided this project through each stage of the process but also edited and supported my work amid a cascade of political and epidemiological crises. Patrick and Berthold spent time that they didn’t have improving my work—a sacrifice that I will never be able to truly repay. Patrick challenged me to think interdisciplinarily about a topic that eludes simple categorization.

He grasped the stakes of this project immediately, and patiently helped me understand those stakes with time. Meanwhile, Berthold was not only an advisor for this project, but also my unfailing teacher, mentor, editor, and friend for the past six years. Across countless revisions and line edits, brainstorming and feedback, Berthold shaped me into not merely a more careful scholar, but a more compassionate one. This project exists because Berthold believed in my potential.

My committee members have shown great patience with and generosity toward my work. My sincere thanks to Jennifer Iverson, Robert Kendrick, and Lawrence Zbikowski for attentively reading drafts and guiding this process from its infancy to these final stages. As a team and as individuals, all three were ready with clarifying questions and important sources, lending me their expertise. This dissertation was made better by their insight.

In Chicago, I am grateful to the members of my reading group—Dan Wang, Elizabeth Alvarado, Lindsay Wright, Zachary Loeffler, Patrick Fitzgibbon, Chaz Lee, Tien-Tien Jong, Andrei Pohorelsky, Amy Skjerseth, and Berthold Hoeckner—for not only reading my work, but also creating an open intellectual space in which to experiment and share ideas. I thank the Scott Landvatter at Regenstein Library for procuring many of the important primary sources in this dissertation, and my fellow colleagues at the Franke Institute for the Humanities, which funded and supported my final year of dissertation writing. I am vi grateful for the encouragement, friendship, and expertise of my UChicago colleagues, including Joseph Maurer, Ailsa Lipscombe, Nathan Buerkle, Krithika Mohan, and Graham Fetterman. I would like to especially single out John Lawrence not only for being a constant friend (and vicious chess opponent) but also for offering invaluable advice and expertise at critical junctures of this project.

Although the earliest stages of this dissertation unfolded at the University of Chicago, my home institution, I had the pleasure and privilege of writing and researching in a variety of locations—Madison, Toronto, Metuchen, Paris, London. The bulk of this dissertation was written in a carrel in the back of the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am indebted to the staff and librarians at Mills, especially Tom Caw and Jeanette Casey, for their countless acts of generosity, resourcefulness, and expertise. Moreover, my heartfelt gratitude goes to the students, faculty, and staff at the Mead Witter School of Music at the UW, who helped transform what could have been an unbearable time of isolation into one of the most intellectually fulfilling periods of my life.

Words cannot properly express my appreciation for the friendship and insight of Stephen Kovaciny, Matt Ambrosio, Ilana Schroeder, Rebecca Moorman, Henry Thompson, Nadia Chana, Deanna Clement, and Lesley Hughes. This dissertation could not have existed without the unfailing support of my family, who not only encouraged the curiosity and inquisitiveness that drive my research, but constantly modelled those values for themselves. I especially thank my parents, Stephen and Paula Spiers; my grandparents, Robert and Norine Spencer; and my father-in-law, Mitch Grossman for their unflagging patience and generosity. Finally, this dissertation could never have been written without my wife, Jenna Grossman Spiers.

Jenna made space (both literally and figuratively) for me to research and write this dissertation, , offering love, patience, and unfailing optimism. Amid Jenna’s encouragement and distraction, support and inspiration, I dedicate this dissertation to her. vii ABSTRACT “Music and the Spectacle of Artificial Life” examines how mechanical experiments since the Enlightenment have used music to explain, affirm, and challenge the relationship between the material body and immaterial mind. Since Descartes, natural philosophers and scientists have imagined the human body and mind in mechanical terms, creating machines that attempted to simulate, and thereby reveal, a material origin for human life.

These experiments were often conceived in musical terms, leading to automata, androids, toys, computers, artificial intelligences and neural networks that reproduced the actions of musical subjects. I analyze the reception of these machines to show how many philosophers, engineers, and critics heard mechanical music not only prove a machine’s capacity mimic the bodily affordances enabling music (the fingers of the instrumentalist, the voice of the singer, and even the brain of the composer) but simulate the mind’s embodied experience of interpreting, performing and feeling music. The spectacle of music enacted a spectacle of cognition. In case studies dealing with inventions by Jacques de Vaucanson and David Cope, I show how materialist models of cognition and consciousness were contingent on the aesthetic actions of machines, presenting mechanical minds that listeners could hear and evaluate musically.

Chapter One investigates the spectacle of Vaucanson’s automaton flutist (1737), a machine that provoked philosophers like Denis Diderot, Julien Offray de la Mettrie, and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac to imagine a mechanical model for the origin of language—a prelapsarian utterance that these thinkers associated with the first viii emergence of human intelligence. Chapter Two follows Vaucanson’s machine into the nineteenth century when the automaton’s then-outdated technologies—which represented unerring reproducibility, internal self-regulation, and even uncanny action— were heard as potent tools for reimagining both human subjects and their subjectivity in post-Revolutionary Europe. Finally, Chapter Three examines the “musical intelligence” of Cope’s AI-powered composition software, Experiments in Musical Intelligence (“EMI”). Though many commentators considered EMI a radical break from Romantic subjectivity, I argue that it showcased the continuities between nineteenth-century idealism and twentieth-century computational materialism.

By listening to the intersection of music and artificial life, this dissertation complicates a conception of Enlightenment ideology that celebrates the unwavering progress made by the sciences towards perfect materialist understanding. Instead, by taking the musical spectacles of artificial life seriously, I illuminate a history of cognitive science that was often unscientific, rife with contradictory claims from audiences who observed one thing and heard another. By embracing these aesthetic contradictions rather than dismissing them, this dissertation functions less as a scientific history of music and more as a musical history of science—a history that accepts listening itself as a viable site for understanding body and mind together. ix INTRODUCTION ANDROID MUSICOLOGY Introduction Olympia played the harpsichord with great dexterity, and sang a virtuoso piece, with a voice like the sound of a glass bell, clear and almost piercing.

Nathaniel was quite enraptured…he saw with what a longing glance she gazed towards him, and how every note of her song plainly sprang from that loving glance, whose fire penetrated his inmost soul. Hoffmann, “The Sandman” (1816) In a famous scene from E. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1816), the automaton Olympia stages a seeming conflict between automatic action and sensuous perception when she uses her brilliant keyboard and singing skills to seduce a man, Nathaniel. On the one hand, Hoffmann’s machine reflects the goals of eighteenth-century automata design.

Its musical actions were conceived as complements to the biological sciences, enabling a physiology that was thought to explain the mechanisms of human music-making. Simulation, in this context, constituted a form of knowing, making the Enlightenment automaton part of a utopian quest to recreate, and thus understand, the human. On the other hand, Hoffmann presents Olympia’s musical simulations as a 1 E. Hoffmann, “The Sandman,” in Selected Writings of E.

Kent and Elizabeth C. 1 transgression of what can and cannot be reproduced by a machine. Nathaniel does not disinterestedly observe the music performed by Olympia’s harpsichord-playing fingers or aria-singing voice, but is “enraptured” by it, perceiving “in every note” a song sprung from “that loving glance, whose fire penetrated his inmost soul.” Music enables Nathaniel to imagine a mind that went beyond the automaton’s physical body. From these mechanical melodies, Nathaniel believes that he senses a soul capable of autonomously thinking, acting, and reciprocating his love.

Hoffmann’s fantasy reminds us that music has long been a potent tool for explaining, affirming, and complicating relationships between matter and spirit—what contemporary philosophers call the “mind-body problem.” The mind-body problem arises from a crisis of observation: What is the relationship between the unobservable mind and observable body? How are seemingly immaterial thoughts, beliefs, ideas, intelligence, and consciousness enabled by and enacted through bodily processes? Is there a connection between the subjective experiences we feel ourselves and the embodied actions we observe in others? Can the immortal soul or immaterial mind be materialized? “The Sandman” addresses these problems of mind and body through mechanically-made music. To Nathaniel, Olympia’s melodies are not merely beautiful but personal. The automaton enacts a sentimentality and soulfulness that seemed inseparable from its interiority, a “sonic self,” says Naomi Cumming, that seamlessly connects embodied actions to mindful intentions.2 Yet, as Cumming notes, the sonic self is also a 2 Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).