The Sound Machine in the Body

Abstract

What happens when music, which is historically understood to be an inherently human activity, joins with cybernetics, which claims to fold the human into the machine? I explore this question through a case study of the theremin, focusing on both the instrument’s initial cultural reception circa 1930 and its reappearance two decades later in Hollywood’s “Golden Age of Science Fiction” films, a period in which the theremin’s warbling soprano came to signify otherworldly presence. The theremin’s coupling of embodied performance and electronic manifestation of sound encapsulates the cybernetic relationship between matter and information. Like the phonograph and the radio that preceded it, the theremin conjured music and sound from an inanimate object, but in this case a human performer was directly involved. While the instrument appeared invisible to audiences, descriptions of it collapsed the machine into the body of the performer herself. Audiences understood that the resulting sound corresponded to the performer’s movements, which implied a translation from human movement to electronic sound. In this article, I will first explore the ways in which the theremin posed problems for humanistic assumptions around music. I will then explore how the theremin came into contact with cybernetic ideas in post-World War II American popular culture, through its role in science fiction films.