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There is still less to prove that Bliss and Co. or Coleman Sellers could use it.

It seems to me that the thing will start with some crank fooling about in his machine shop after hours ; or some foreman stopping a few presses for three seconds, every eight minutes ; or by some equally simple experiment. ..... some experiment that will put a rhythm into the work.

One effect that I have particularly noticed in the U.S. Mint, occurs when some " unbearable noise " (rip'rip'rip'rip')" is reinforced by another still louder and apparently faster (BRIPRIPBIPBIBBIBBP !!

Nearly all kids LIKE noise. It is very hard to get them to pipe down. No one has yet made a study of the effect of female neurasthenic headaches on the " Ideal of the Beautiful in Music. "

It is very difficult to persuade a healthy male child that ~~this is the melancholy pipping of the piano~~ is pleasant.

I don't want to boost my private and personal sensibility, but it seems to me that one's first interest in sound comes either from very loud or very delicate sounds.

This seems to me perfectly natural, as the middling loud sounds, in middling pitch, strike on parts of the ear already full of

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association with ordinary things;
things from which one's interest has been exhausted.

I don't mean that the best music may
not be made, and probably has been and is made
in the middle of the register. I am talking
of the awakening of interest. This usually starts
from an unusual perception or stimulus.

/////

Lemmi Rossi with his "sistema ", and ten dozen other
renaissance theorists, all worked at " proportions "
and other now dead details, then necessary to musical
theory. Machine acoustic will not be charted
and elaborated in a week or ten days.

Machine plastic is already equal to other
plastic. The object exists; the man in the shop
may or may not be able to see it, or he
may have too many associations with it to judge it
clearly.

One eminent man of letters argues that he
has associated ideas with any piece of machinery.
I don't much believe it. At any rate he must
have been with the spare part of some machine
whose function is unknown to him, than with machines
which have; and so even for his sophisticated
and possibly beclouded mind, the machine part
offers a chance of perceiving form unaffected.

But between the plastic and acoustic of machinery
there is the greatest possible gap; the gap between
a thing done, a thing in a high state of development

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is the least interesting and has, possibly the longest and fullest tradition. They had war machines in Byzantium so solid that they were found in working order three hundred years after the date of construction. They had also a pestilent bureaucracy. One could do without either. One will probably have to do without them if one wants, as a nation, to leave a more interesting record than that of Byzantium.

## SOCIOLOGY OF MACHINES

I leave this section to Charles W. Wood. It is possible that machinery will lead men to cooperate more sanely, and break up a too virulent concept of private property, in so far as that concept relates to machines; or it is equally possible that it won't, and that a nation imbecile enough to produce our current bureaucracy, copyright villany, customs cretinism and paraphernalia, will merely fall into the pit of Byzantinism.

The aim of economy, according to the more enlightened economists is to release more energy for invention and design. Bureaucracy doesn't.

Machines do not move against the amenities. The engineering mind is about the most satisfactory mind of our time; like all other mind-types, it has its borders, but the practice of engineering seems to me less stultifying than most other contemporary practices. It does not seem to me,

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Nothing could be more entertaining at least personally entertaining than the present author than the way in which flapdoodle professorial economics have given way to engineers' economics.

## OJECTIONS TO MACHINES

Objection to machines has probably disappeared from all save a few belated crania. No machine ever interfered with a man's personality or damaged his liberty. Machines were made to eliminate work and produce leisure. Overcrowding, bad placing, bad ventilation of work rooms, all the results of greed and ineradicable human stupidity may have done harm, but can not be blamed on the machine. Machine products have been ugly but even the perjochial aesthete knows by now that this is due to human stupidity and not to machines; the same result has occurred in hand work, painting, music, whenever the worker or artist has gone in for flummydiddle instead of proportion.

## FAITH

" Modern man can live and should live in his cities and machine shops with the same kind of swing and exuberance that the savage is supposed to have in his forest "

E.P. in " Workshop Orchestration "
That might almost be my last word on the subject.

NEW PAGE

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I am inclined to think that this effect increases
as one becomes more familiar with the composition.
As for Antheil's musical competence and sense of
métier, one need only examine the early contrapuntal
work, four of the short pieces for piano, called for
some reason six sonatas and third the first sonatas for
violin and piano.

Both as a step in the history of music,
and as the transition point from concert music
into machine-composition, the ballet is
important. Musically, the point is that Antheil uses
the longer durations; the divisions of time are
so big that the NOISE is, as it were, swallowed
up by them, or at any rate brought into proportion
with something else of corresponding magnitude. It
is perhaps quite just to graph it:

duration : loudness

there is some sort of triple relation

duration : silence : loudness

////// for machines will have
When I say that composition has a key
in "great bass", I naturally do not mean that
what is now called "pitch" will be eliminated,
Any more than ~~time is eliminated by~~
Mozart when he composes in ~~1929~~ 1928
~~E//nchtr. O E//nchtr. A//nchtr. A//nchtr.~~ flat.
E

I merely think that as practical start the
organizing will have to start from the great bass
begin will

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and the various kinds of noise, compounds of pitches and overtones, fitted into it.

SOCIOLOGY

The sociology of the question does not belong to this book, it impinges a little, possibly, because Chas. W. Wood is one of the few intelligent men now writing in America and thinking at all about the effects of machinery.

He sees big plants leading, if not to communism, at least to some sort of combination-thinking or group thinking, etc. We had something of this sort from Jules Romains years ago with his Unanimisme, though he was not thinking about machines in 1910.

One may as well look at other possibilities and likelihoods. The state, if we could but rid our minds of superficial appearance, is probably, as now in our time, simply the banking business. This is not new, the Medici state was simply the banking business, banking business with hardly any trimmings or camouflage. It succeeded a sort of democracy.

An organization like Henry Ford's is probably feudal. I use the word here with a sense of relatively very high commendation; it implies the responsibility of the overlord to his vassals; and implies a very different mode of thought from that implied in the abusive term "industrial

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system" or "industrialism".

To put it another way, I might say that Kublai Khan's power was founded on finance and pillage, the Byzantine empire was founded on money (backed by war machinery and bureaucracy) produce produce
feudalism was founded on ⑈/⑈, or on ⑈/⑈ plus service, obligations, and a good deal of sentiment. this last
If you don't like the term, call it "good will".

The people who have sneered at Ford's biography in my presence have been people who have not read it.

The conflicts between the old modes of thought change very slowly, I don't know that they change at all fundamentally, there is an infinite change on the surface.

The cathedral at Modena is said to have been built by mass action, but the passage that makes this claim for it is very brief, and does not go into any elucidative detail.

All speculations about the ultimate social effects of machinery are really outside the scope of this brochure.

As for Ford himself, I see no reason to disguise my interest in either his theories or his practice. He has already experimented in tempo.

He might have a dozen reasons for not experimenting in sonority. There might be any number of obstacles; there might be any number of reasons, invisible

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When it comes to this listening, Antheil's music may be useful. Antheil at the age of 26 has not revealed all music or all possible music of the future. I suggest, simply, that from two of his works the auditive might get hints, he might find in them clues to the way in which machines he might deal with machinery, and bring it. Its noise under control. These compositions are a start, not a finish.

As to the plastic, plasticity a man can not learn plastic by reading books, he can only learn it by looking at objects.

All the "critic" can do for him is to knock him out of his habitual associations, to show him a thing in a new light or better, put it somewhere he hadn't expected to find it, even if that be between covers.