Automata for the People: Machine Noise and Attention

David Ellison

doi:10.5130/csr.v18i3.2863

Abstract

This article examines the production and reception of incidental machine noise, specifically the variably registered sounds emanating from automata in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The argument proposed here is that the audience for automata performances demonstrated a capacity to screen out mechanical noise that may have otherwise interfered with the narrative theatricality of their display. In this regard the audience may be said to resemble auditors at musical performances who learned to suppress the various noises associated with the physical mechanics of performance, and the faculty of attention itself. For William James among others, attention demands selection among competing stimuli. As the incidental noise associated with automata disappears from sensibility over time, its capacity to signify in other contexts emerges. In the examples traced here, such noise is a means of distinguishing a specifically etherealised human-machine interaction. This is in sharp distinction from other more degrading forms of relationship such as the sound of bodies labouring at machines. In this regard, the barely detected sound of the automata in operation may be seen as a precursor to the white noise associated with modern, corporate productivity.

Highlights

Consider the iPod: a sleek, almost weightless object that creates a personalised sonic envelope within the experience of the surrounding environment
In the latest solid-‐state iterations of the device, there is no detectable operating noise at all; an extraordinary development that introduces the subject—the historic reception of such incidental and unavoidable noise—by way of its apparent resolution. Noise of this kind has always proved doggedly inseparable from the expression or transmission of musical signal, whether the squeak of an ISSN 1837-8692 unevenly rosined bow, the woodwind’s percussive valves, the ragged breath of the flagging soprano or the scratch of a needle on vinyl
In this article I trace the fortunes of incidental operating noise through a small sample of telling encounters between auditors and the inevitably noisy machines they have witnessed in demonstration

Summary

Introduction

Consider the iPod: a sleek, almost weightless object that creates a personalised sonic envelope within the experience of the surrounding environment. As Simon Schaffer has observed such untrammelled access to the insides of the machine was—and is—’at least as vital as the display of the marvellous performance itself’.9 As captured on the video, the incidental operating sound of the mechanism is continuous with the automaton’s movement and, as such, exceeds the careful demarcation of front from back; disrupting the sequence that presents the drawing in process, and the astonishing means by which such work is produced.

Results

Conclusion