Player Piano
99% Invisible27 Jun 2023

Player Piano

This week we're featuring an episode of The Last Archive

The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and diaries, government documents. Facebook posts, Youtube videos, DVDs. Oral histories. This stuff is known as the “historical record,” but of course it’s not a record, in the sense of an audio recording: It’s everything.

On this episode of 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.

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Episoder(780)

The Automat

The Automat

The inside of a Horn & Hardart Automat looked like a glamorous, ornate cafeteria -- but instead of a human handing you hot food over a counter, you would push your tray up to a wall of little glass cu...

4 Jun 201935min

Depave Paradise

Depave Paradise

Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the city began piping water in from far away as well as from aquifer belo...

28 Mai 201936min

Sound and Health: Hospitals

Sound and Health: Hospitals

Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals.According to Joel Beckerman, sound designer and composer at Man Made Music:...

24 Mai 201917min

La Sagrada Familia (Repeat)

La Sagrada Familia (Repeat)

There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of bones or sand. But there’s another thing tha...

21 Mai 201931min

Sound and Health: Cities

Sound and Health: Cities

Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term impa...

17 Mai 201919min

Weeding is Fundamental

Weeding is Fundamental

Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up library space is called weeding. When the...

14 Mai 201937min

From Bombay with Love

From Bombay with Love

From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union had completely different politics, languages, and cultures...

7 Mai 201933min

Uptown Squirrel

Uptown Squirrel

This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities...

1 Mai 201930min

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