2024-05-01
53 分钟We’re bringing you an episode of The Last Archive from our friends at Pushkin Industries. In this episode: an exploration of early artificial intelligence, the story of the composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hi, it's Willa.
This week we're bringing you a story that we think you're really going to like.
An episode from the show the Last Archive from Pushkin Industries.
The Last Archive, like so many episodes of decodering, is all about diving into history to understand our present, digging into the past to better comprehend what's going on right now.
It's all about how we know what we know or what we think we know, and why it can seem like we don't know anything at all anymore.
This episode we're bringing you today is hosted by Ben Nadf Halfrey.
It's about a very early kind of artificial intelligence, a machine that was built to write songs.
It was created by a madcap inventor and musician who was hugely successful in his own day and who labored for years, eventually at Motown Records, to figure out how to get a machine to create music.
It's a great, relevant yarn, and I bet you'll be thinking about it for a long time.
I know I have.
So here's the Last Archive episode called Player Piano.
You can and should go follow the Last Archive wherever you listen to podcasts.
About 30 years ago, a man named Irwin Chuzit encountered one of the strangest machines almost nobody had ever heard of.
I was 40.
I was broke.
It was kind of a professional failure.
Chuzit was a DJ for a small community radio station in New Jersey.
A friend of his had put him on to a musician named Raymond Scott, one of the most famous musicians of the early 20th century who had somehow been completely lost to history.
These were records that were 25 cents a pop in used record stores back then.
And you didn't even.