Trk 8 From Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791) at :38 – in contrast to the clockbell of a loving heart in La Serva Padrona (trk 5), bells here make slaves dance automatically, conflating the mechanical and Blackness in a “racist technopoetics” (Chude Sokei’s term)Ĭhapter 1 Becoming Android: Reinterpreting the Automaton Flute Player
Tracks 6 & 7 Queen of the Night aria from Mozart, Magic Flute (1791) & android Olympia’s aria from Offenbach, Tales of Hoffmann (1881) illustrate leaping vocal virtuosity that became sounding inhuman/like a machine.
Track 5 From Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, La serva padrona (1730s), the main characters mimic a clock bell and bass drum as the sounds of their hearts/love, to which they direct each other to listen, ex. Track 4 Nona Hendryx, “Transformation” (1983) another alternative to vocoder = robot, Hendryx’s use can be heard to sound the voice of mother nature, dissolving natural versus tech/artificial.
