Name: Falling Pieces by Alex White (aka The Countermeasures)
Duration: 4 min 13 s
Description: A pair of cyberpunk songs to make your day

A Death in the Family (Guitar and Voice Demo)

A pair of cyberpunk songs to make your day

Falling Pieces

Tick Tock Tick No Kick

Gz Band - Hayoola

From the live premiere performance on November 21, 2015, at the Longy School of Music in Boston. Performed by Boston Musica Viva, under the baton of Richard Pittman.
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PROGRAM NOTE:
Machine Language for Beginners began, as so many things do nowadays, with an interaction with a smartphone. It was just over a year ago, and the weather was changing, and I wasn’t sure if I needed to wear a coat before heading into the city on the Commuter Rail. I asked Siri; “she” gently suggested I wear one. 

As I sat on the train, I was nagged by this persistent thought: somewhere along the way, I’d stopped thinking of my iPhone as a machine and started perceiving it as an extension of myself.

Even stranger: when I wasn’t really thinking about it, I sort of felt like it was another person entirely.

There’s been a tremendous amount of talk lately about artificial intelligence. Drone warfare, self-driving cars, machine-learning algorithms, “connected” homes; we’re rapidly entrusting machines with things we’re slowly realizing we’ve never done particularly well.

Though the pace of AI development has certainly accelerated over the past two decades, we’ve been talking about this shift for thousands of years. Machine Language for Beginners takes this history of AI-allegorizing as its narrative thread.

The first movement, “Automata,” is about Hephaestus’ “golden tripods.” Their appearance in Homer’s Iliad is one of the first mentions of self-operated “robots” in literature. The movement is, loosely, a palindrome: the robots march steadily up – and then down – Mount Olympus. The musical material is designed to emulate some techniques of electronic (“robot”) music as well: the shifting colors of a low-frequency oscillator and an analog delay.

“Talos,” the second movement, is about a colossal bronze security robot created to protect Europa on the island of Crete. The movement begins with the giant stirring to life; as he accelerates, the tempo increases but individual musical events occur farther apart from one another, lending the material a certain weightiness. After performing his security check around the island’s perimeter, Talos slows down and the movement ends as murkily as it began.

The third movement is based on W.S. Gilbert’s retelling of the classic Pygmalion myth. After some brief scene-setting, the first theme – Pygmalion’s – emerges. Then, once his statue (Galatea) comes to life, we hear her theme: wispy, ethereal material derived partly from a spectral analysis of the cello line in Pygmalion’s music. Their interplay continues to the end of the movement, when Pygmalion, having fallen hopelessly in love, is subsumed by his own creation.

Finally, “HAL 9000” takes the form of a reverse theme-and-variations. HAL, the murderous computer at the center of 2001: A Space Odyssey, use heuristic problem-solving (i.e. the fastest, not necessarily the most elegant) to manage the Discovery One spacecraft. As he’s being shut down (just before completing his goal of killing all onboard the ship), he regurgitates his programming history in reverse order, eventually making his way back to the first thing he was ever “taught” – a simple tune from 1892 about a romantic bicycle ride (“Daisy Bell”). HAL’s heuristic approach is applied to the reverse theme-and-variations format: each variation “corrects” some layers of abstraction from the previous one, gradually bringing the theme more clearly into focus.

Machine Language for Beginners is dedicated, with tremendous appreciation and admiration, to Richard Pittman. 


NB: This is a live recording for academic/non-commercial use. 

IV. HAL 9000

III. Galatea

II. Talos

I. Automata

These are some songs I wrote for my book, Every Mountain Made Low, released October 25th, 2016, by Solaris.

Falling Pieces

Alex White (aka The Countermeasures)

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