New Soundworlds on Canals & Computers

11/16/21 • 38 min

The machines that make the biggest difference are the ones that make things move and bring people together. This week, our postcards take us to critical moments in the history of technology: the completion of the Erie Canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie across northern New York state, and the development of the first civilian computers just after the Second World War. In both stories there is a surprising amount at stake for music history.

Just clearing a path for and then digging the Erie Canal (mile by mile, by hand) required an immense and dangerous effort. There were not enough workers available, so migrants, many from Britain and Ireland, but also free and enslaved people of color, were brought in to do the job. When the work was done the canal accelerated travel and communication, connecting the metropolis of New York to an immense hinterland to the west. The canal gave the new nation a vastly different sense of its borders and identity. Those who had given their labor (and in some cases their lives) to make it forged soundworlds for this new space. In the evenings and on rare days off they sang and danced together, making new kinds of music. What they did–a kind of synthesis travelling back and forth on the wonder they had built--would go on to underpin what we recognize as “American music” today.

After 1945 Alan Turing, who had spent the war working in secret developing the electronic computers that helped break “unbreakable” German codes, helped set up a civilian computer lab at the University of Manchester. Turing was by all accounts not a particularly musical man, but there were good ears on his team. One night, for fun (!), one of Turing’s junior colleagues, Christopher Strachey, used an alarm signal already built into a prototype computer to make a basic synthesizer, with hilarious-sounding but in the long run profound results. Thanks to recently discovered archival recordings we can hear its honky efforts, and the sleep-deprived giggles of Turing’s young colleagues when they heard what they had done. The members of Turing’s lab might not have known it, but what they did eventually opened up a wholly new chapter in the datafication of music. Like the workers on the Erie Canal two centuries ago, we suddenly find that our musical borders have shifted dramatically. Unlike them we ask ourselves where music “is” if it now only lives in digital code.

Key Points

The construction of the Erie canal brought labor and technology together to make new kinds of music, and the connections it made forged a new sense of American identity, also in sound.
Alan Turing was involved in efforts to develop the first civilian computers in Britain after World War Two. Although they didn’t set out to do so, members of his team found that they could synthesize musical sound, inadvertently setting the stage for the cultures of digital music we now live in.

Resources

Chris Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sydney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy explores how working people came together before the Civil War to make a new kind of “American” culture.
In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music Kyle Devine explores the idea that digital music is just as material music on other media (such as shellac, vinyl, and plastic), and just as bad for the environment.
The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electronics Engineers) website has a detailed and engaging description of early computing and music-making in Alan Turing’s postwar Manchester lab.
You can read more about Alan Turing in B. Jack Copeland, Alan Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age.

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!

Key Points

The construction of the Erie canal brought labor and technology together to make new kinds of music, and the connections it made forged a new sense of American identity, also in sound.
Alan Turing was involved in efforts to develop the first civilian computers in Britain after World War Two. Although they didn’t set out to do so, members of his team found that they could synthesize musical sound, inadvertently setting the stage for the cultures of digital music we now live in.

Resources

Chris Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sydney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy explores how working people came together before the Civil War to make a new kind of “American” culture.
In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music Kyle Devine explores the idea that digital music is just as material music on other media (such as shellac, vinyl, and plastic), and just as bad for the environment.
The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electronics Engineers) website has a detailed and engaging description of early computing and music-making in Alan Turing’s postwar Manchester lab.
You can read more about Alan Turing in B. Jack Copeland, Alan Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age.

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!

Previous Episode

Caribbean Dance, London Symphonies & The Triangular Trade

Colonialism reconfigured the world economy around the extraction of natural resources and the exploitation of humans to provide the labor for that extraction. A by-product was profound change to how people made, heard, and paid for music.

In this episode we talk about what sound has to do with the Anthropocene, explore how profits from the slave trade had a direct impact on European musical life in the eighteenth century, and immerse ourselves in the soundscape, full of colliding cultural experiences, of a Jamaican dance hall at the turn of the 19th century.

We begin by grappling with the Anthropocene, the era of human-caused climate change. There are solid arguments that it was sparked by European colonialism. Together we explain how empire, as early as 1600 CE, contributed to a “Little Ice Age,” before industrialization--and the intensive use of fossil fuels such as peat, wood, coal, steam, and petrochemicals--set temperatures rising again.

Individual people paid the price. To find out more we look at the origins of the “triangular trade” of wind-borne commerce between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. We then turn to some pretty famous names from the history of Western Art Music, to discover the impact of the lucrative profits of this commerce, in particular the trafficking of enslaved people from Africa, had on their careers.

Hearing the names of Handel, Mozart, and Haydn in association with the murderous trade in enslaved people may come as a shock, so we take some time to understand music-makers and consumers as actors in music history, unpacking connections between high art and the global economy of the early Anthropocene. Or to put it more bluntly, between “then and them,” and “now and us.”

Our next stop is early nineteenth-century Jamaica. We take a look (and a listen) to that island’s fraught colonial history, by “entering” Abraham James’s painting, “A Grand Jamaica Ball,” moving from its two dimensions to an imaginary sonic three.

Pictures don’t make noise, it’s true, but if you take time with them, they can reveal a lot about the human experience of sound. We’ll be doing this frequently in the podcast: looking across times and places for unexpected sonic clues about how people lived their lives. Especially in the pre-electrical era paintings, sculpture, prose, and other objects are key materials in our sonic-historic workshop.

Key Points

Global history took a new turn around 1500 with the beginning of Western colonial expansion and the rise of a new global economy based on resource extraction and long-distance trade.
This new turn had a direct and measurable impact on Earth’s environment: many historians now place the beginning of the Anthropocene (the era of human-made climate change) around 1600.
One fundamental impact of Western expansion and empire included the large-scale eradication of Indigenous people through disease and violence. Another was the enslavement of Africans and their transport to the Americas, a process marked by unspeakable mass violence. Both catastrophes changed global soundworlds in many ways.
Historical honesty compels us to recognize that heroes of Western Art Music such as Haydn, Handel and Mozart were all connected to the new global economy. None of them could have had the careers they did without money from patrons whose money came from trade in resources like sugar, which in turn depended on enslavement and the exploitation of human suffering.

Resources

Gary Tomlinson’s ground-breaking work on the deep history of music includes A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity.
Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin’s exploration of the long history of human impacts on climate, which includes their take on the “Orbis spike”: The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene
David Hunter’s discussion of evidence of Handel’s investments in the slave economy, on Will Robin’s Sound Expertise Podcast
For cutting-edge musicological work on sound, music history, and the Anthropocene, check out @prof_ajchung on Twitter

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!

Next Episode

Sounding Stone and Cetacean Energy

This episode is about what happens when sounds and people meet and mix. A lot of what we talk about takes place away from North America and Europe, but we end up circling back to a primary question in this season of the podcast: how did Westerners use the sounds of others to perceive the world, “The West,” and themselves?

Our first example is one of those historical stories that is so, well, weird you have to wonder if it is actually fiction. In the early years of the seventeenth century Chinese officials discovered a thousand year-old stone pillar (or “steele”) near the city of Xi’an in Western China, along the old east-west trade route known as “the Silk Road.” It was inscribed both in Chinese and Syriac, a form of Aramiac in which many early Christian texts are transmitted. Recently arrived Jesuit missionaries were quick to pick up on this find, because it supported their claim that Christianity had a long history in China. They also transmitted the news back to Rome.

Then the fun starts. The great Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, famous among other things for his collection of interesting objects and texts from around the world, used what he read about the stone to speculate about the intonation of the Chinese language (and China’s relationship to ancient Egypt!). A few decades later a minor German clergyman in then very provincial Berlin read Kircher’s account and proposed the idea that in China people sang all the time (as if they were in an opera) instead of speaking. Our point is that conclusions about far-away places don’t have to be true to be interesting.

Our second postcard was inspired by a TikTok meme. At the time we recorded the show, sea shanties were everywhere on the internet, thanks mainly to the music-video sharing app ability to amplify strange (we would say interesting!) sound objects: the app can act as a kind of digital version of Kircher’s collection of curiosities. This got us thinking about where sea shanties, and other seafaring songs come from.

And so we found ourselves talking about whaling ships. As Chris points out, whalers, which were really floating factories, were a kind of Silk Road on the water, thanks to their global routes and diverse crews. They also remind us that music history, economic history, exploration, and extraction often run along the same tracks. The sea shanty meme was good fun (for most listeners!). But sea shanties, and other songs from the riches of maritime history, are more than just curiosities. They offer vital sonic clues about big processes, fascinating moments, and human experience in global history.

Key Takeaways

Historical misunderstandings can be interesting in their own right: take the story of how the discovery of an ancient monument in China led one European to speculate that Chinese people sang all the time as if they were in an opera. Behind this odd idea is a story of someone struggling to make sense of new historical evidence.
Whaling ships and other workhorses of the maritime trade were both “floating factories” and fascinating soundscapes. The music passed down from them (including the recent TikTok sea shanty craze) offer clues about these soundscapes, and the ways that music history and the histories of economics (especially the history of working people) travel on the same tracks.

Resources

Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding’s Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth got us thinking about how it can be illuminating to speculate about how other people--OK, they’re talking about space aliens--make sense of sound.
Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is a must read on the entanglements of ecology and economy. The author is a former dog-sled musher.
We’re very inspired by Peter Linbaugh and Markus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which profoundly shapes our thinking about labor and maritime trade.
Check out the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs for thought-provoking stories about science, exploration, and “life at the extreme” presented by the historian Michael Robinson.

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!