The Instruction — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-ART-RB-SCO-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

The Instruction Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

From 1959 Scott built the Electronium, a machine for composing that you gave an instruction to and out came music that never repeated itself. The print is the instruction and what came out of it.

A Author

Raymond Scott

B Subject

Automatic Composition

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

Raymond Scott had money to spare: his pieces from the thirties ended up in the Warner cartoons and play in the head of anyone who has seen one. With that money he set up a laboratory and shut himself in.

What he built there over years was the Electronium, a machine you do not play. It has no keyboard. You give it an indication — denser, another direction, something similar but different — and the machine generates music that never repeats, collaborating with whoever works it rather than obeying them.

He never finished it. He redesigned it continually and never made a second; Motown bought it and hired the inventor, and the device never produced anything commercial.

A single unit exists, now in a collector's hands, and it does not entirely work.

It is the first machine that set out to compose rather than perform. Sixty-five years later that argument is exactly where he left it.

Details