by Harley Byrne
Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices
Harley Byrne
Copyright 2012 L’Institute Zoom
Illustrated by Elly Strigner
UNIVERSAL EAR
Harley Byrne works in Manchester, 2012 A.D. for the UNIVERSAL EAR DIGICORP, a record company for whom he has pledged to record and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever”. This ongoing mission has seen him cross the length and breadth of the Earth, travelling through time with his shed-built Universal Ear recording device and frequently battling wits with his arch-enemy, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.
We have presently been able to pre-construct parts of his memoirs, from which the following chapter is an extract.
For more information on UNIVERSAL EAR visit alltheworldsmusicever.com.
Listlessness in Early Automated Composition Devices
(From Volume 6, Part 3: So-called Experts of the Mid-Twentieth Century)
But on my return to 2012 and the quiet familiarity of the club, my mind continued to race. Recording McLuhan’s musical doorbell should have been straightforward. Instead, I had allowed Being in disguise, and then the real McLuhan, to put me off, each of them procrastinating and equivocating until I lost all sense of my mission. McLuhan was an over-thinker, he talked all the joy out of his electronic tune. In retrospect, I found more truth in Being’s assertion that the medium, whatever the message, would need new batteries from time to time.
If McLuhan had been a windbag, though, at least he was thorough. I remembered now that Sunday morning alone in his Toronto home when, unwilling to mic up a doorbell I didn’t fully understand, I took the liberty of breaking into my host’s study and examining his papers. Discovering the handwritten manual for his programmable doorbell amongst a pile of magazine clippings, unfiled correspondence and hastily-scribbled half-jokes, I sat on my haunches and tried to make sense of the thing. It was thick with theory. The circuit diagrams, where I thought I might find a little light relief, made sense only as far as the chimes, from where all sorts of esoteric currents and waves radiated out across crude neural maps of McLuhan himself, his patient wife and their countless children. I decided that the manual was another attempt to confuse me by a man who held the record industry in the highest suspicion, and that I would do best to ignore what I had seen. What I did find, though, folded up as a bookmark and tucked into the back cover, was a single page of bullet-point notes concerning the British mathematician and homosexual, Alan Turing.
Turing – dead a good decade and a half by this point – was by no means a well-recognised figure by the end of the 1960s, but to my astonishment the notes included revelations that would not even be known to history in my own time. My host had identified Turing’s importance not only as the progenitor of the very information and communications technology that McLuhan now wrangled with, but also – and this was new – as a short-lived pioneer of electronically programmed music. Furthermore, McLuhan’s research hinted at another specific music track lost to obscurity which it was, as such, my duty to record for my employers at the Universal Ear Digicorp. Preoccupied at the time with the doorbell gig, however, I replaced the notes in the instruction manual, where they were doubtless consumed by the electrical fire detailed in the previous chapter.
I succeeded, eventually, in recording McLuhan’s doorbell, as I have already related: but only now, at the club, did the memory of Turing’s as-yet uncatalogued track resurface. Postponing my nap, I made for my brother’s atelier, where I asked Santiago to arrange passage back to the period of Turing’s most intensive secret musical experiments: for it was my intention to befriend the man and thus lever access to the machine that he was lately using, unbeknownst to history or to his university colleagues, to create the first computer-generated musical compositions.
I didn’t have far to travel: a couple of rainy miles across Manchester, and sixty years backwards through time. All the same, I landed awkwardly, cracking my clavicle and banging my head on the mid-twentieth century architecture. My survival instincts must have kicked in, for as I came to my senses, my fists still swinging, I found that I had neutralised the two most imposing figures among a feckless watch of scholars. A third had taken refuge under a stationary bus: the vehicle had since pulled away and the coward lay there still, oily and shivering.
I adopted a policy of absolute honesty, repeating my explanation of where and when I’d come from and the nature of my work to the arresting officers, desk sergeant and chief inspector in turn. The latter was the first to take the trouble of making eye contact, and I fixed him with a look of utmost sincerity as I spoke. He began to chew his moustache as he listened, and I had the sense of being taken seriously: in the end, it seems, my story was believed, as he ordered my release with a simple wave of the hand.
The city centre gaol was a hub for regional crime gossip, and it was whilst being discharged that I heard talk of my mark. Having reported a burglary at his Wilmslow home, Turing had inadvertently drawn attention to his love affair with a local man: the type of affair the age, and the Wilmslow constabulary, could not abide. He had been arrested that very morning and charged at his local station. I now shook each of the loose-lipped officers by the hand, once for the acquaintance and again for the tip. On exiting the gaol, I requisitioned a bicycle from a postal worker on Peter Street and pedalled south.
Warming down outside the police station at Wilmslow, I filed away the intense pain of my broken collarbone, rationalising it as punishment for my clumsiness: perhaps Santiago might prepare some crash-landing training for me on my return to 2012 (it was something he frequently spoke about and I had seen some of his ideas in sketches). But now I fancied I had identified Alan Turing’s figure exiting the station. The deep set eyes, the frame slight but spring-loaded, a curious shiftiness about his manner - or was it mere discomfort? I recognized in Turing the bearing of a man out of time.
My name is Harley Byrne, I told him, outstretching my hand, and I come to you from the year 2012. Turing smiled kindly, as though he had somehow been expecting me.
I suppose so, he responded, but I really must get home. With this he broke into a north-north-easterly trot and was fully 200 metres down the road before I could secure my utility belt and give chase.
I caught up with him and we jogged on together. The unforgiving mid-twentieth century road surface took its toll, every step jolting my shoulder so that I found it hard to string a sensible sentence together: yet I must have succeeded in conveying the importance of my visit, for when I blacked out on his garden path Turing took the trouble to make me comfortable with pillows and blankets. On regaining consciousness, however, I found he was reluctant to invite me in, and it was only by standing up again and passing out directly through his doorway that I was able to gain access to the house. This time I awoke in an armchair, my bootlaces loosened, Turing dabbing at my forehead with a damp feather duster and muttering.
Yet, despite his misgivings, Turing’s hospitality was impeccable. He made sandwiches and tea and brought through various home projects to show me: chemical experiments, domestic gadgets and lists of mathematical figures, all of which I of course found irrelevant. At my request, he found me a stretch of strong, plain fabric, and when he saw my agonizing attempts to tie this makeshift sling behind my neck he completed the operation himself. Something about the situation, however, seemed to make him uneasy, and his behaviour became strange and superstitious. When it got dark, he closed all the curtains, then immediately opened them again. Then he closed the curtains and left the front door open, laying out an austere provincial bun and a glass of milk
on the welcome mat without explanation. But we grew cold and hungry so these measures were undone, and finally he invited a local spinster to join us, apparently as something like a witness or chaperone. Although she made every attempt to involve herself gesturally in our conversation, I don’t believe she understood a word.
So, you’re from the future? Turing asked, when we were finally settled. I nodded in the affirmative. What bit?
The idea of a Manchester sixty years hence caught his imagination – in particular, the development to that point of the universal Turing machine, or ‘computer’ as we would come to know it. He blushed with pride at the idea that every civilised person would carry two or three devices conforming to the specifications of his machine about their person. I told him some of the things computers are used for, and he sniggered; I mentioned some of the other uses the machines are put to, and he sighed.
Doesn’t anybody use them for mathematics?
For mathematics, I told him, standing to retrieve my pocket calculator from my belt, we use these.
Turing gazed right past the calculator to where the Universal Ear’s hard drive hung from my hip, its
