{"id":355,"date":"2018-08-03T12:34:32","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T16:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/?p=355"},"modified":"2018-08-03T12:45:14","modified_gmt":"2018-08-03T16:45:14","slug":"the-player-piano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/the-player-piano\/","title":{"rendered":"The Player Piano"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nWhen you listen to a recording, you are hearing the artist performing in the past, in a format that will remain for many years to come, given proper archival treatment.\u00a0 Recently, I finished watching two seasons of HBO\u2019s Westworld, a fantastic rendition of the Michael Crichton story and remake of the original film starring Yul Brenner.\u00a0 There were many plot twists and liberties taken with the script, but I want to talk about the player piano.<\/p>\n

The piano itself is a central theme from the beginning, and appears in the introduction to each episode.\u00a0 It is worth noting that the robots who play them aren\u2019t necessarily playing at all, as the piano knows the program from the holes punched in the scroll.\u00a0 It is an early form of the \u201cmagic\u201d used by programmers to emulate life.<\/p>\n

In a scene that fans of the series will remember, there is an old Edison Cylinder player outside on a porch while people are dancing. \u00a0I was unable to determine the song, but most agreed that it was preceded by a piece called \u201cReverie\u201d by Debussy.\u00a0 I inherited a fairly large collection of Edison Cylinders a while back and so I was intrigued to find out whether I actually had the music they were playing.\u00a0 As it turns out, the piece in question does not appear in any blue Ambersol or other cylinder collection recorded for sale at the turn of the century through the twenties when this format first became popular and lasted until the phonograph made them obsolete.<\/p>\n

So I went on YouTube to search more for the music.\u00a0 What I found there struck a chord.\u00a0 Here was a video entitled \u201cDebussy plays the Sunken Cathedral.\u201d\u00a0 It is a beautiful, haunting piece of music.\u00a0 But, of course, it was not an original audio recording, it was a paper piano roll recorded from a player piano that Debussy had played.\u00a0 Even more eloquently than words, the touch of the keys were recorded with fidelity to match Debussy\u2019s every stroke, if not the forcefulness of his style.\u00a0 In this way, his performance, more than just the sheet music, still lives on.<\/p>\n

Late in the series, there is a library where people\u2019s lives have been recorded, their personalities more precisely.\u00a0 One character says that they discovered emulating a human being was a relatively short ten-thousand lines of code.\u00a0 And when the books in this library were opened to reveal the codes, there were no printed letters or numbers.\u00a0 They were all pages, punched like the rolls of a player piano, our performances of a lifetime, recorded with fidelity in a book for future reference.<\/p>\n

Here is where I depart from the story to observe that in a similar way, our lives are being recorded now to the Internet in a way that may one day read like the lines of the player piano, not simply reproducing what our interests and actions are, but who we are in a far deeper and more sacred way.\u00a0 The story of Westworld poses the general question of where automation ends and life begins.\u00a0 How do our daily routines, programmed or not, differ from those of the characters in a play or movie, scripted, repeating on demand, and preserved for posterity?<\/p>\n

You may have had the eerie experience of visiting a friend or relative\u2019s Facebook page or other social media page, after they have passed away.\u00a0 It is an unscripted chapter and verse of a person\u2019s selective interactions with their friends and community.\u00a0 These friends appear in our timelines, unbeckoned, sometimes jarringly because of the deep feelings they evoke, as memories, or as Debussy and the French would put it, as Reveries.\u00a0 The story of HBO\u2019s Westworld begins with the creator adding Reveries to the programmed \u201crobots\u201d that inhabit the world.\u00a0 For the first time, these beings experience memories, sometimes clouded and incomplete, from previous experiences, even previous lives where they had a different role to play.\u00a0 This \u201cdream\u201d element of their story, more than any other factor, ironically serves to wake these beings into consciousness in a way that is more human than automated.<\/p>\n

We may have other instances of the player piano where part of a person\u2019s life is recorded in a way that brings them back, momentarily, to our present, and we again long for their company.\u00a0 It is worth noting that as with the player piano, it is the hole in the paper and in our lives that brings the experience to life.\u00a0 Sometimes that which is missing defines us more than what we have kept or what we are allowed to keep.\u00a0 In remembering what we used to have and what we cherish, our present becomes more precious and real.
\n
\nHenry Lyons is the owner of\u00a0Finestkind Web Design<\/strong>\u00a0in Dresden, Maine. He can be reached at finestkindwd@gmail.com, or through his website www.fineskindwebdesign.com.<\/em>
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you listen to a recording, you are hearing the artist performing in the past, in a format that will remain for many years to come, given proper archival treatment.\u00a0 Recently, I finished watching two seasons of HBO\u2019s Westworld, a fantastic rendition of the Michael Crichton story and remake of the original film starring Yul … Continue reading “The Player Piano”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":359,"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355\/revisions\/359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/finestkindwebdesign.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}