Episode 1: Player Piano

This week on The Last Archive, 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 world.

KEY SOURCES

• Listen to songs from the episode on “Player Piano: Raymond Scott”

• “Raymond Scott: Artifacts from the Archives” Edited by Irwin Chusid & Jeff Winner

• The Raymond Scott Collection at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

• “The World of Sound: A Division of Raymond Scott Enterprises” by Jeff E. Winner in Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture

• “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization Through the Phonograph, The Player-Piano, and the Piano” by David Suisman

• “Raymond Scott: Rediscovering the Forgotten Wit of Jazz” by Corey M. Goldberg

• Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective (Edited by Christopher Haworth and Eric Drott)

• Pearl Zimney Winters interviewed by Irwin Chusid & Jeff Winner

• THE ELECTRONIUM panel at Scottworks 

• A Walker In The City by Alfred Kazin

• “Day of the Player Piano” by Joseph Fox

• Inventing Entertainment by Brian Dolan

• The Rush for Second Place by William Gaddis

• Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

• “Raymond Scott” New Yorker August 20, 1938

• “The Menace of Mechanical Music” by John Philip Sousa

• Critical Asthma Causes Divorce The Sun (1837-); Jun 19, 1965; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Baltimore Sun

• Dorothy Collins Granted Divorce Los Angeles Times (1923-1995); Jun 19, 1965

• “How Detroit Assembly Lines Changed Music Forever” by Chris Perkins

• Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space 1961-1971  liner notes

• The Jingle Workshop: Midcentury Musical Miniatures 1951-1965 liner notes

• Manhattan Research, Inc. liner notes