SOUND MACHINES

IN THE SUMMER OF 1917, the Russian engineer and inventor Evgeny Sholpo (1891–1951) wrote “The Enemy of Music,” a polemical science-fiction essay describing a colossal instrument he called the Mechanical Orchestra. Combining miles of slatted black paper tape with a network of electrical wires, pipes, levers, tuning forks, sine wave oscillators, and horns, this fictional sound machine allowed a piece of music to unfold automatically, rendering the musical performer obsolete. “Now,” Sholpo proclaimed, “we will receive ready-made pieces of music according to a specific recipe.” Years later, while working at the Central Laboratory of Wire Communication, a Soviet film lab in Leningrad, Sholpo attempted to bring this speculative project to life, incorporating elements of the fictive Mechanical Orchestra into a functional device called the Variophone, a proto-synthesizer used for scoring films that could reproduce—theoretically—any spoken or musical sound using abstract visual forms cut from paper. The Bureau of Realization of Inventions at the state-run film production company Lenfilm Studios agreed to fund the project; Sholpo built the first prototype in late 1931.

Sholpo’s projects developed amid an explosion of activity in the early twentieth century around the emancipatory and utopian potential of sound technologies, devices based on the transmission, reception, or generation of sound waves that offered new modes of communication as well as novel ways to produce and disseminate information. These technologies experienced rapid refinement in the 1920s and 1930s, as scientific research and engineering advanced new understandings of acoustics, recording, noise reduction, and auditory perception, and they were quickly absorbed into everyday life. While proponents argued that these devices would open up new frontiers for communication and creativity, critics expressed skepticism about the supposed benefits they could provide, anxiety that mechanization would replace human labor, and distress at the perceptual dislocations and destabilizing effects on the modern psyche that they generated. 

What strikes the reader most today about these debates, which are by now more than a century old, is how much they resemble contemporary ones. Sholpo’s proposal to undermine the performer through mechanical music mirrors recent developments with generative AI platforms that use simple prompts to produce unique musical tracks or texts. Just as he and his colleagues sought to eliminate the musician and grant performative agency to a machine, new technologies like chatbots, self-driving cars, and image generators reconfigure human intervention to delegate complex tasks to machines, removing subjective interactivity in favor of rational procedures. The attendant fears of these advances today, from AI outpacing human capabilities to more existential risks, seem to reflect the pervasive mood that has historically accompanied the development of new technologies. Is Sholpo’s project a portent of technology’s dystopian misuse or a lost model for how to embrace automated systems without reifying a brash belief in the market-enhancing power of mechanized labor?

IN THE EARLY 2000S, sound scholar Andrey Smirnov began publishing recently rediscovered material from Sholpo’s long-forgotten archives, which had languished in obscurity since his death in 1951. Among these papers was Sholpo’s manuscript for “The Enemy of Music,” which had been accepted for publication in two different music magazines, both of which folded in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution, before the text could be printed. Sholpo originated his concept of performerless music as part of the short-lived Leonardo da Vinci Scientific and Artistic Society, which he cofounded in Petrograd in spring 1917 with Sholpo, composer and theorist Arseny Avraamov and musicologist Sergei Dianin as a response to Avraamov’s 1916 article “Emerging Musical Science and a New Era of Music History,” a futurological text that anticipated possibilities for synthetic musical expression. “To build abstract harmonic schemes and then ‘orchestrate’ them is not creative anymore,” he wrote. “In the act of true creativity, each sound should be born already incarnated.” Avraamov believed that composers could invent tonal sequences and realize them synthetically by analyzing the structure of the sound waves, creating mathematical models to simulate the waveforms, and reproducing them by hand.

Excited by Avraamov’s proposition for a music without musicians, the society members conducted extensive research into acoustics, music theory, physics, and recording technologies. They aimed to ground the subjectivity of musical composition in objective research drawn from the fields of science and math (hence the society’s invocation of the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci as a model for the integration of the arts and sciences) and to explore the possibilities for performerless music through the production of mechanical instruments. “We were going to tear down the performing artist,” Sholpo reflected in his 1939 essay “The Artificial Phonogram on Film as a Technical Means of Music.” “This ‘caste of middlemen’ that had insinuated itself between the composer’s idea and the listener’s sensation seemed to us superfluous.” 

Sholpo’s eccentric project announced a new era of Bolshevist music concerned with engineering, construction, and mechanics rather than with the supposed bourgeois formalism of composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff. At a time when members of the avant-garde were attempting (often unsuccessfully) to model themselves as inventors or social engineers, Sholpo proposed a workable system for automated musical production. One Soviet critic urged musicians in 1919 to “listen carefully to the new tempo and sonorities in the revolutionary life of the proletariat” and to “work out new instruments and instrumentation to express the sounds of contemporary life.” Sholpo heeded this call, and his proposition to bypass the musical performer by asserting the primacy of new technology represented one possible future for musical expression.

Sholpo’s proposition to bypass the musical performer by asserting the primacy of new technology represented one possible future for musical expression.

“The Enemy of Music” begins with a conversation between an inventor and his unnamed friend, the narrator, about the expendability of the musical performer. The inventor explains that he has been expelled from musical circles because of his unorthodox ideas about performerless music. He then proceeds to demonstrate the Mechanical Orchestra, “an obedient weapon in the hands of each composer,” the creation of which brands him an “enemy” of music. This theoretical device comprises a vast array of parts—gears, cables, electromagnets, etc.—that form “the body of the organism,” while the graphic system of lines that the inventor has poked into the paper tape, and which are read as music, constitute its “brain and soul.” 

After leaving the inventor’s studio, the narrator offers some final reflections on the Mechanical Orchestra. While he acknowledges his profoundly emotional listening experience and the beautiful music that the inventor has created, he also questions the authenticity of that experience: Can music still be enjoyed if it is based on a “lie,” on the absence of a performer and the fabrication of musical expression? He voices concern about the inventor’s “total power over music” and concludes that the Mechanical Orchestra symbolizes not the birth of a new form of synthetic music after all, but the death of music in general: “This orchestra is a coffin into which my friend hammered music.”

Sholpo’s ideas emerged at a moment of machine worship and revolutionary attitudes toward musical composition and coincided with a push toward electrification and industrialization that thrust new machines and technological modes of communication into public life. With its narrative about a powerful genius and his visionary sound apparatus, Sholpo’s text reflected a vogue for science fiction and that genre’s obsession with futuristic gadgets. Advances in rocket science and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s pioneering theories of astronautics, promoted from the 1880s to the 1930s, fueled the public’s imagination for space exploration, resulting in numerous fictional texts that featured air and space devices such as Alexander Bogdanov’s The Red Star (1908), a novel chronicling a techno-utopian socialist society on Mars that glorifies machines. Research into biomechanics inspired cyborgian visions of man as machine, as with Solomon Nikritin’s Projection Theater (1922–25), an experimental performance troupe for investigating the efficient mobility of human actions and speech. Authors like Proletkult poet Alexei Gastev wrote texts glorifying machines, new technologies, and biomechanical visions of man. Sholpo’s anthropomorphic description of the Mechanical Orchestra as having a body, a brain, and a soul suggests the influence of such theories.

Sholpo’s essay also invoked cultural conversations about “free music” and Futurist noise in Russia that took place before the 1917 revolutions. The musician and theorist Nikolai Kulbin’s 1909 treatise “Free Music,” written during the early years of atonal music’s development, argued for a modernist revitalization of music free from tonal restrictions. The author promoted the use of unusual musical durations (like third and thirteenth notes rather than quarter and whole notes) and cited the music of nature (“light, thunder, the whistling of wind,” etc.) as a model for liberated musical expression. Kulbin’s ideas—about new types of melodies, harmonies, dissonance, and modes of music making—had significant purchase in Russia at a moment when many artists and musicians were grappling with the same issues. 

Sholpo himself was an ardent defender of mechanical sound; it is easy to read him in the role of his essay’s inventor—as music’s “enemy”—given his subsequent efforts to realize a version of the Mechanical Orchestra. The Variophone—or the “Sholpograph,” as it was termed by his Lenfilm colleagues—was a partially automated mechanical device for producing graphical sound. Sholpo made hundreds of paper disks punctured with holes of varying shapes and sizes, each disk corresponding to a specific note. These flimsy sheets, resembling cogwheels or modern-day View-Master reels, were then attached (one at a time) to a tabletop gearbox constructed of wooden parts controlled by ropes, wires, and levers that could precisely control the speed of the disk’s rotation and synchronize it with a moving film strip running through the same machine. A ray of light directed by prisms penetrated the holes on the rotating paper disk and printed an image of the negative light shapes onto the moving strip. 

Sholpo’s utopian ideas about the future of musical technique and creative technology had a kind of delayed futurity.

Paradoxically, the “performerless” Variophone required a highly skilled operator. Though extremely flexible and precise, its use demanded significant forethought and planning. The operator could program the machine to produce any pitch at any scale, but only by setting buttons, switches, and meters in advance, so Sholpo had to calculate the waveform and rhythm he wanted to create before cutting the paper disk. While the Variophone prototype could generate polyphonic soundtracks, it was only able to do so through multiple exposures, achieved through a painstaking process that involved shooting over the same film again and again with different disks until numerous sounds built up onto the optical track. (In later versions of the device, Sholpo produced polyphonic disks, with up to twelve sounds cut into the same paper wheel.) Since the results of the process could only be confirmed once the film was developed, a mistake could result in the loss of several months of work. 

By the time he built the first version of the Variophone in 1931, Sholpo had been hired as the manager of the department of graphical sound at the scientific and technical laboratory of Lenfilm Studios. It was there that he produced the soundtrack for the short film Simfoniya mira (Symphony of Peace), perhaps his best-known project. A collaboration with Gyorgy Rimsky-Korsakov (grandson of the composer Nikolai), who composed the music, and the filmmaker Eduard Ioganson, Simfoniya mira is an allegorical cartoon about a European peace conference in Geneva that critiques Western disarmament efforts. Remarkably, although the cartoon is now lost, a short instructional film about the Variophone that Sholpo inserted before the main program has survived; the footage offers us the only filmed record of the device in operation. In the clip, Sholpo himself is seen fiddling with the Variophone, smoking a cigarette as he makes his calculations, sets the paper wheel, and starts the device. Sholpo carefully constructed this demonstration, which would have been the public introduction of the device. Unfortunately, the film was never released, as the studio deemed the two-color animation of insufficient quality—the first of many professional disappointments for Sholpo in his attempts to promote the Variophone.

For the next few years, Sholpo and Rimsky-Korsakov collaborated on a number of other film and music projects using the Variophone, including a series of soundtracks for educational films about cars, such as Siuita karbiurator (Carburetor Suite, 1933); they also created graphical-sound versions of classical compositions like Wagner’s “Ritt der Walküren”(Ride of the Valkyries; 1851–56), Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6”(1846–53), and March-Trot “Galop”(1935) by Rimsky-Korsakov himself, ostensibly intended as soundtracks for films. The brisk polyphonic soundtracks of Siuita karbiurator (which still exist, though the film is lost) demonstrate the remarkable variability of tones, rhythms, and pitches achievable with the Variophone, unlike other contemporary electronic instruments, such as Henry Cowell and Leon Theremin’s Rhythmicon (1930), which produced unmodulated, staccato, and rhythmically rigid sounds.

Sholpo recorded the soundtrack for several films with his new Variophone, including one for the experimental cartoon Sterviatniki (Vultures, 1941), about the fight between “Soviet” hawks and “fascist” carrion birds, that he realized with the composer Igor Boldirev during the 1941 blockade in Leningrad. Unfortunately, Krasin died in 1936, and Sholpo’s contract for the Paris World’s Fair died with him. 

Misfortune continued to plague Sholpo and the Variophone, preventing both from gaining widespread recognition. The advance of German troops into Russia in 1941 halted work on Sholpo’s magnum opus, a book titled The Theory and Practice of Graphical Sound,cowritten with fellow sound-synthesis pioneer Boris Yankovsky. On January 31, 1943, during the Siege of Leningrad, the second version of the Variophone was destroyed by an enemy shell. After the war, in 1946, Sholpo built a third version of the Variophone while director of the Scientific-Research Laboratory for Graphical Sound in Leningrad, but no images of this third device exist. The fourth and final iteration, constructed beginning in 1949 at the Sound Recording Institute in Moscow, remained unfinished at the time of Sholpo’s death in 1951. Photographs, diagrams, patent applications, and even a video of the operational Variophone—which had swollen in size to human height—provide the only insights we have into its construction, as none of the machines have survived.

The Variophone never fully lived up to Sholpo’s expectations for an automated Mechanical Orchestra, since funding problems and critical errors in its manufacture meant the device could not be completed as intended. And the engineer’s aim to eliminate the interpretative nature of musical performance and authentically convey a composer’s intentions with the aid of a complex technical system also ultimately floundered. Yet Sholpo’s utopian ideas about the future of musical technique and creative technology had a kind of delayed futurity: The concepts first laid out in “The Enemy of Music” finally took decisive, concrete form forty years later, in 1957, with the completion of the ANS synthesizer (named after the composer and occultist Alexander Scriabin), a unique photoelectronic musical instrument designed by engineer Evgeny Murzin that was modeled in part on the Variophone and expanded its primary innovations. Now considered precursors for modern versions of the synthesizer, these devices forecast the ubiquity of music synthesis today, when digital platforms and phone applications allow those with access to create music at the push of a button.

The performerless revolution imagined by Sholpo and his colleagues failed to materialize. Musicianship has not been abolished. Instruments persist. But the intention—to eliminate human interaction from cognitive processes, to teach machines to behave like people—reverberates today, when technologies like AI automation threaten to simulate and supplant human labor amid a promise of enhanced productivity. While the touted benefits and known perils of evolving digital systems prompt debates about their utility and possible future applications spark fears of a techno dystopia, we might look to the past for models of what to anticipate. Incipient technologies might develop at a rapid pace, but their ultimate use value lies in the accurate predictions of producers that they will meet the capricious needs and desires of consumers. This path is one of constant fits and starts, as new models, new operating systems, and new devices are introduced to feed a fickle populace hungry for computational power before these advancements fade into obsolescence or spark further innovation, in a perpetual spiral of life and death. Like Sholpo’s contingent concept for a Mechanical Orchestra, technologies are imperfect, unfinished, imminent—and yet somehow always already here. 

Lauren Rosati is an associate curator in the department of modern and contemporary art and research projects manager in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.