Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices

The Institute has published a free-to-download ebook as part of our ongoing UNIVERSAL EAR project.

Time-travelling ex-postman Harley Byrne's ongoing mission is to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.”

In this newly rediscovered chapter from his lost memoirs, Byrne describes in full his mission to Manchester, 1952, to record the secret computer music of Alan Turing - war hero, mathematician, inventor of hands-free umbrella.

"At midnight, we carried the spinster’s sleeping body back up the lane to her cottage. Acknowledging the lateness of the hour, Turing consented to my staying with him but, pretending not to shiver, announced his intention to sleep out on the open lawn. Plainly, I had not yet won his trust, so as we brushed our teeth, I decided to seduce him. I just had one thing to check: his nimble movement, his wiry physique: could my arch-enemy, Being, mistress of disguise, have followed me here to interfere with my mission? I tugged at Turing’s awkwardly-fitting hair, but it held true: he gave me what novelists describe as a matter-of-fact look, and I let him go. For once, it seemed, I had given my nemesis the slip. But when I reached for Turing’s underpants, he rapped my knuckles hard with his toothbrush and I knew that I must sleep alone."

With new illustrations by Elly Strigner, Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices was launched at the end of Alan Turing Year (2012) as part of the celebration of his centenary and can be downloaded for free in many of the popular ebook formats.

Harley Byrne vs. Success

“Whichever way I turned, nothing appeared but danger and difficulty… I had no alternative, but to lie down and perish…

I reflected that no human prudence or foresight could possibly have averted my present sufferings.” 

(1795)

"I shall set sail for the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. Though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I were myself half dead, I would still persevere, and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger." 

(1805)

- Mungo Park, adventurer, idiot.

Harley Byrne makes his screen debut in A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear at this weekend’s Abandon Normal Devices festival – where the festival theme is ‘Success’. Given that Byrne’s seemingly impossible mission is to record and make available for download all the world’s music ever, and given that across countless episodes of the UNIVERSAL EAR time travel adventure serial he always gets his track, we at the Institute have put together an 8 point guide to success, Harley-style. A shorts-wearing, trans-dimensional loner he may be, but many of these rules are adaptable to our own lives here, and now, whenever that may be:

1. Never learn. Byrne’s career can be defined in terms of what Debord referred to as ‘cyclical time’ – but what we might think of as ‘sitcom time’. Every episode of UNIVERSAL EAR is a reboot. We have no idea what order the episodes are supposed to be in because there is zero character development. Byrne is good at his job because he does the same thing again and again without getting any big ideas. His unwavering self-confidence is rooted not in a superiority complex, but in his faith in himself as the right cog in the right machine. Envy the man who doesn’t even know how stupid he is. He doesn’t know what he is missing, or that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know what he’s missing.

2. Never doubt. Life is such a varied and wonderful thing that it is easy to find examples to prove whatever argument you started out with at the beginning. Byrne has an infinite number of cultures to visit before he can complete his mission: if he doubted for a moment the validity of his own perspective, what ‘self’ could he truly expect to represent in the social sphere? A robust personality is like a non-lossy file format. If the you that’s here today, reading this, wants to prevail, you will zip yourself up and change for no-one.

Also, avoid listening too carefully.  People have a lot to say and you’re not going to like much of it.

3. Never mind the paradox. Physics is a pretty subjective affair and you’d be a fool to let it stand in your way. In the great imperialist tradition, Byrne considers his own time and place to be sacrosanct, and to be the definitive watchtower for all human history (and future). It is Manchester, 2012, where the definitive catalogue of all music ever is being created and consecrated. Therefore, if he drops the odd causality wrapper elsewhere, leaves behind the occasional empty tin of paradox, well, people should just be glad he’s graced them with a visit and preserved their music forever – even if, on occasion, they themselves no longer have access to it.

4. Align your modern wants with your primal needs. However sophisticated our personal mission statement might be, we’re all fundamentally in this for the same thing: a good meal, a tussle in the long grass, and perhaps the reciprocated emotional affections of one or more objects of our obsessive fascination. This is the man that kissed Turing after the arrest; played love games with vegetables in ancient Greece; and caressed killbots to ecstasy in the year 2019. As a lone field agent far from home, Byrne draws little distinction between executing a task and R&R. The world is his music studio and he’ll create the right recording conditions by whatever means necessary. Further, he conducts his work with two key sexual principles in mind: that you win someone’s trust by taking off their pants, and that when a woman is rescued, she expects to be kissed.

5. Rationalise, don’t compromise. Harley Byrne would never knowingly go home with anything less than a pure recording of the track he’s set out for – captured in perfect conditions and with the appropriate phonic and metaphonic settings.  But he is quite capable, without any sense of cynicism, of reconsidering what it is that he should consider a ‘pure recording’. Such is the malleable beauty of the human mind. As the great thinker Costanza once said, “it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

6. Good manners will only get you so far. Byrne is a gentleman of the old school, but as a time traveller his personal code is not always appropriate to the situation he finds himself in. Thus, a quick analysis of the UNIVERSAL EAR episodes available to us reveals that over and over again, he is forced to scale down his etiquette until he gets results. Why not try applying Byrne’s 3-tier back-up plan next time you have trouble at work or in your personal life? --

Plan A: Ask nicely.
Plan B: Seduce the antagonist.
Plan C: Tie everyone up, get your recording and go home.

7. Abandon normal devices. If you want to achieve something unique, you’re going to need unique tools. Byrne’s shed-built recording device, the Universal Ear, is more than a microphone. The Ear – a kind of gun-shaped sound vagina – can be used to interface with dumb computers, pick locks using complex wave arguments, and has a flashlight function with three different settings. Byrne has even used the warmth of the Ear’s hard drive to fry an egg in order to avoid starving to death. Whilst stuck in a tree.

8. What did we achieve today? What went wrong? This one’s not from Byrne but from our production process. At the end of the day at Universal Ear Studios, before the doors are unlocked, everyone sits down and discusses how the day went in the above terms, while panicking about what we’ve left ourselves to achieve the next day. Apologies are shared; excuses spluttered. It is important to always end on a What Went Wrong – because if you’re not going to spend all night staring at the ceiling, dwelling on your failures, how do you ever hope to succeed?

UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear plays at Manchester’s Cornerhouse this Friday at 1pm as part of AND Shorts Programme 1.

I told Turing, 'Your machine does not think.'

Update, January 2013: the full ebook from which the below is an extract can now be downloaded for free.

 
Here follows an extract from the memoirs of Harley Byrne, concerning his brief association with Alan Turing, whose centenary it is today. The full chapter, entitled Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices, will be released in ebook form later in the year. 

As we join them, Harley Byrne - whose ongoing mission is to record and make available for download all the world's music ever - has travelled back in time to 1952 and tracked down the "mathematician and homosexual" Alan Turing. Having insinuated his way into his home, Byrne finally convinces Turing to take Byrne to his place of work - the institution we now know as the University of Manchester.

"[I]f there was one figure who really stood out among the community, it was Turing himself. He would jog to work the twelve miles from Wilmslow and, to counter the rains for which the region is quite justifiably famed, had invented an aerodynamic umbrella which attached to the shoulders of his running vest. Such was Turing’s involvement in his work, he would often forget to remove the vest or the umbrella upon arrival at the university. Not even his most trusted colleagues felt close enough to him to draw his attention to it. Instead, he would wander the campus all day, his obliviousness to the construction over his head proving a testament to its lightweight design. Here comes old dry-hair, mischievous students would hiss at each other in the canteen. I don’t think he noticed. Anyway, we were the only ones in shorts, and I think this helped him to trust me.

On the third day, after lunch, he consented to show me his latest contraption: the automated music composition device whose output was my quarry. This computing machine, Turing told me, was the closest thing to artificial human intelligence that had been built at the university so far. His colleagues referred to it as the electronic brain. Turing had named it ERIC52.

Turing had occupied an unused office on the fourth floor of the university Main Building and filled it with machinery of his own design and labour. The electronic brain filled 90% of the room’s space, being comprised of a dozen irregularly stacked washing machine-sized cabinets and a console unit mounted on a reinforced cake trolley. The outermost cabinets were open-fronted, their switches, dials and sockets bared for all-comers to see. But, by Turing’s account, visitors were rare: it was a personal project, he had few trusted allies at the university, and those with whom he was friendly knew to keep a respectful distance.

Forcing my way into what tiny working space the room held (between Turing, myself and the cake trolley, not one of us could move without adjusting the others), I ran my good hand over the flickering lights of an output panel. The machine vibrated invisibly, and I closed my eyes to better assess its sound life, the most prominent features being an unmusical inner roar and a clucking sound that I couldn’t place. I sensed Turing bristle at my shoulder and with some difficulty lowered my arm to my side.

'So this is it then?' I asked, raising my voice over the din. 'The electronic brain?'

'Please don’t call it that.'   

I continued to stare at the electronic brain, unsure what to say.

At length, I asked Turing, 'Can it think?'

'Ask it,' he told me.

'Ask it?' I looked the steel towers up and down. 'But how would it know?'

Turing side-stepped the issue: 'It’s just one way of looking at your question. If ERIC52 can convince you it thinks, to the extent that you would be unable to distinguish its answers from those of an intellectually functioning adult human, then who are we to say it can’t think?'

Turing turned on his axis and pulled me by the sling until we were back to back, with him facing the console trolley and I, the brain. I was to put my questions to Turing, who would feed them into the brain via teleprinter tape. Turing would then translate ERIC52’s answers, which came back as dots on a  cathode ray tube, into the new Queen’s English. As such, the reader should note that the following interaction took place over the course of six and a half hours:

Can you think?

NO.

Okay. Thank you.

I’M JUST A COMPUTER.

Yes.

NO THINKING HERE.

Righto.

DEFINITELY NOT.

I see.

CAN YOU?

Yes sir.

OKAY. WE KNOW WHERE WE STAND THEN.

I revolved until I was facing Turing and told him, under my breath, 'Your machine does not think.' He ran his finger along the cathode ray tube, apparently deep in thought.

'No,' agreed Turing, without turning to face me. 'But he does seem a little more chatty than usual.'"

The Institute will be publishing full chapters of Harley Byrne's memoirs, UNIVERSAL EAR, in ebook format later in the year. To be kept up to date, please join the UNIVERSAL EAR Facebook Page. For further information, visit the official UNIVERSAL EAR website (work in progress).