Hark! Music boxes and Silicone Chips! I am Thine Noble Machinist!
I am not a cyborg my friends. I haven't got wires dangling to and fro, the lenses from which I peer at the world through are indigenous to my own eyes, my hips are of bone, not ceramic, I can't give birth. I am flesh and blood, a pink bag of meat.
Close your eyes friends, Shh, can you hear it? Listen, very closely, the music, listen! Alas no, for the music is in my head, you cannot hear the music, because the music only exists in me, and it is totally natural. The music has not been disrupted by the mediation of soundwaves, has not been misheard by inept ears, it is immaculate. I would like to hear it, for I never have, really. But to do so, I no longer can be the musician, the creator, but only the controller. It is me operating a plethora of sound machines, who will then make the music.
Awesome. Really though, when you think about all the favourite tunes you play on the old juke box, you're listening to machines making sounds. The artist 'performing' the piece is really long past. Michael Jackson on the radio? He isn't singing that, he's dead. What we're hearing is the beautiful noise of mechanical reproduction. The musician, other than being the intellectual property holder, is just the machinist who made it happen.
I harness my instrument, and begin converting my thoughts to vibrations, to electromagnetic signal. Off it goes through a cable to meet new devices.The signal is modulated to a signal that will be later amplified. I adjust the many dials and knobs, trying to match the mechanized noise to what I've imagined in the beginning. My voice too becomes a signal, picked up by electromagnetic plates and sent to another instrument panel.
I twist more knobs, slide faders, needing to create this mechanized version of me. I don't hear me, I don't hear my music, I hear a result, an aftershock. This bulk of electric signal is sent to the computer. See that, I'm on the computer. That's the sound visually represented by amplitude and time. The greyed-out wave form closest to the bottom is what remains of my voice. 'Sound exists only when it is going out of existence', Walter Ong has mentioned, and the sound from my vocal chords has long left, all that remains is the distortion it once made to electric current,= that could be captured and saved. This is a distortion of my thoughts, my voice. I've dialed-in, distorted and manipulated what once was it really is just a distortion. Speak into a microphone. That isn't you being amplified, it is the reaction circuitry has made to the disruption your voice has caused it.I am not a cyborg, but I am an actor. I am the machinist in this relationship, the instruments, boxes, panels, computers and speakers are my musicians. I began a sort of chain reaction that led to what we classify as music (I hope at least, or I'm doing it really wrong!). Go to a social gathering and await that beautiful statement: "hey put the ipod on". It doesn't matter that that instant who should be making the music, who was the 'machinist' behind the work, but that the device which plays the music should be put to work to make music.
Did the song I made every really exist anyways before going out of existence? It was assembled in parts.




