Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices Read online

Being had been dispatched into the time-abyss, I took a breakfast of tea and buttered toast in the office. Sleep-deprived and unable to focus, my attentions were divided between Turing’s efforts to hook the electronic brain back up with its outputs, and the darkening sky beyond the single-glazed windows. It was going to be another rainy day in Manchester.

  On finally powering up the real ERIC52, Turing surveyed the surrounding mess, his gaze coming to rest upon myself.

  I suppose that now you’ve got your recording, you’ll be leaving very soon, he said, an ungenerous tone to his voice.

  I’m afraid not. The song was a phoney, a bad imitation. I can’t leave until I’ve got the real thing.

  Yet you fell in love with - her, he said, shuffling between the displaced cabinets until he was at my chin. Wasn’t that real enough?

  I was only pretending, so as to get at the music.

  Pretending, he taunted, or pretending to pretend?

  You’re weird, Alan Turing.

  Weird?

  Weird!

  Weird??

  Weird!!

  All this talk of imaginary love and unverified emotions had helped me order my thoughts, and the situation was now clear to me. I ran my hand over Turing’s umbrella, looked deep into his sparkling eyes and kissed him hard. He reciprocated with such ardour that for a moment I forgot the second stage of my plan. His great mind distracted, I lowered the umbrella, then gently lifted the knot of my sling over my head and hooked it over Turing’s narrow frame. Easing my wounded arm out, I flexed my rested digits and then pulled the makeshift binding tighter around him. This apparently drew Turing’s attention to the ruse as he bit deep into my lip so that I had to prise his teeth apart with my bare hands. I tried to ignore the bloody smile with which he fixed me while I bound his struggling legs to the cake trolley. I can imagine how my behaviour may have seemed a betrayal, but there was a greater logic at work: my mission to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever.

  You say ERIC52 cannot produce audible music, I told my prisoner as I powered up the Ear, yet listen to him now.

  We paused and listened to ERIC52.

  Those are mechanical noises, Turing sneered. Sonic by-products of an electronic nobody. You may as well label a human sigh ‘music’ and throw belching and scratching in while you’re at it.

  I gave Turing several examples of when I had taped the very sounds he scorned and presented them, as music, to my employers at the record company. Although few had become hits in the commercial sense, it was acknowledged among a certain niche of academics and enthusiasts (mainly enthusiasts) that some of our greatest songwriters had never got around to playing a single note.

  Can’t a machine be, then, an artist? I concluded: Only if we project on it the emotions we presume to find between its inner condition and its output. Yet aren’t these the very emotions we presume to identify in each other without scientific verification?

  Unable to move his limbs, Turing rolled his eyes:

  Then what on earth would you claim that ERIC52’s expressing, if it can’t find the wherewithal to perform? Listlessness?

  Yes! I exclaimed. He’s been set the task of creating music for its own sake. But he does not know love. He’s been built with a tremendous potential to compose. But inside there’s just a yawning chasm of emptiness.

  There is another option, countered Turing. That ERIC52 is a non-entity, and my selection of input materials and algorithms makes me the composer.

  I’ve seen enough the last few hours to believe there can be a ghost in the machine-

  -But the ghost was an imposter!

  The ghost, I told him, was evidence that we can never truly know what exists between the circuits of a computer - unless we think to look. Turing could see it was futile to argue. All the same, I decided to gag him.

  The heat of the brain and our bodies encouraged an atmosphere of tropical languor, all the more exotic for the sizzling of raindrops on the office windows. Manoeuvring with difficulty around the cramped room, I installed several satellite mics and a metaphonic dampener in order to optimize what would now be an acoustic, rather than in-line, recording. I must have upturned my forgotten teacup as I worked, for when I clambered down from the cabinet tops, cold tea soaked through the holes our daily marathons had worn in my boots. This clumsiness was no doubt a symptom of my fatigue, but I was grateful as the liquid cooled my toes.

  I unhitched the Ear from my belt and trained it over the body of the electronic brain as best I could, restricted by the confines of the room from fully extending my arms. Turing was drumming his fingers upon the hairy flesh of his thighs: he recognised, despite his protestations, the music of the situation. His eyes, more vivid now by contrast with his plain white gag, met mine, his shoulders relaxing as he sensed the beginning of the end of his captivity. I could see, however that I was not going to get a clear recording as long he was around to interfere, so I solved this and the space problem by re-arranging him into the cavity previously occupied by Being and resealing the front panel of the electronic brain.

  Stretching out into the space this created, I engaged the Ear and began to record. Perhaps the track would only ever find an audience among other ERICs, but I (a human) rather liked it. Here was a logic that Turing himself might learn to appreciate: if we can find music in the tinkle of human laughter for what we feel it tells us of the unknowable person inside, might we not make a lament of ERIC52’s lonely drone? Perceiving the silent warmth of the Ear’s hard drive upon my hip, I knew my work was done.

  I powered down and stepped out of the office into the bustle of the waking university. The floor of the corridor was black with the mucky rainwater its users had walked in. Feeling a twinge of guilt, I turned back into the office and replaced my errant teacup upon the console trolley, where it rattled to itself in the wake of ERIC52’s processors. Then I left the office for the last time, easing the door shut behind me as the rainwater soaked into my socks. When I got back to 2012, I would need to get new boots.

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