Information Storage and Retrieval: A Composition about Digital Looms, Player Pianos, and Early Computers

Information Storage and Retrieval is an audiovisual composition inspired by three classes of machines: digital looms, player pianos, and early computers. These machines have intertwined histories, shared control mechanisms, and common abstract data structures. All three classes of machines are fully digital and fully physical, all mechanize work previously done by human hands, and all turn information stored on punched paper into material artifacts. Pianists, programmers, and weavers use punched paper to store data as grids of holes, a data structure that mirrors gridlike weaving patterns, staff music notation, and matrices of numbers. This composition celebrates the commonalities of these machines. The piece features field recordings of looms; MIDI sequences generated by transformer models trained on the composer’s original material; projected digital video collages of weaving patterns; and a performer controlling laptop, projector, and prepared player piano live.