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Rudy Hertz

Player Piano and Technology | Van Kooten on Player Piano

Should We Be Worried? Rick Van Kooten   Ah, to return to the days of the skinny black tie, white shirts, and horn-rimmed glasses of the Houston-we-have-a-problem-era engineers! First a digression on the difference between scientists and engineers, from personal experience: as an undergrad, I was in an “Engineering Science” program that straddled both fields. Despite this increased scope, I …

What Is the Soul of a Man? | Harriss on Player Piano

Vonnegut’s Ghost in the Machine M. Cooper Harriss   Reading Player Piano conjured an old song that I’ve enjoyed returning to for the past couple of weeks. Not unlike the way a player piano engineers sound from collected data, the record of an earlier performance replicated with some precision, I know this song as a mechanical reproduction of Blind Willie …

“To the Record” | Sandweiss on Player Piano

A Historian Sits at Vonnegut’s Piano Eric Sandweiss   “To the record.” It seems an oddly resigned cry with which to toast the failed revolution that closes Player Piano. Is this what it all comes down to—Paul Proteus’s final survey of the wreckage left by his comrades’ failed effort to upend the machinery of a soulless society, punctuated with a …