JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I’ve written here before about the early incursion of technology into the spheres of human creativity and imagination. Now, some of those bits have stretched the idea a little, but when people (or Our Future Robot Overlords) look back into the dim dust they may be more prepared to accept some of propositions of these posts as pre-history implications of the future domination of something along the lines of AI or universal intelligence. For example, one of the posts dealt with the replacement of live music in theaters with “robot music” , which was simply “canned”, or recorded music replacing the live players. (See https://historyofideasblog.com/thesciencebookstore/2016/10/robot-songs-of-love-.html for example.)
Along these lines came another example today, this one from 1922 (just a year after the creation of the word “robot” from Karel Capek’s R.U.R.): the marching band with no instruments. This was the “Phantom Band” depicted in the pages of Popular Mechanics in March 1922 and shows a band identified so, marching with a radio set playing the music rather than the human performers. (If you look closely you can see the drum major is carrying an antenna, and the sousaphonist is actually carrying a loudspeaker, and somewhere in there are folks carrying the battery set, and so on. There’s no clue in this short article why this demonstration was taking place, but it did.
And another example of “robotic” music (1929):
