Music and the Mechanical Mind

The possibilities and dangers of Artificial Intelligence is one of the major issues of the day, but for centuries people have imagined machines that could think, able to create and possibly even enjoy art, so we feature early fictional examples of mechanical minds from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Thea Von Harbou's Metropolis, and automata like a moving sculpture of a silver swan and what was known as the 'talking Turk'.

We consider the limits of art created by computers in poetry by Adrienne Rich and musings from Nick Cave.

And our playlist features Philip Glass's The Robot, music composed by Tarik O'Regan using AI, and played by pianola alongside a reading from HG Wells's Tono-Bungay in which the player piano assists romance.

The readers are Annette Badland and Daniel Millar.
Produced in Salford by Jessica Treen.