Research project
Tracing Players Playing Traces: Non/Human Music in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Musical instruments are multiple things: they are objects but also means of communication; they are technological and also deeply connected to embodiment through the player; and they leave certain cultural traces (Ricoeur 1975/1984). This research project explores how literary texts from the 19th century to the present represent these musical posthuman, non/human, or more-than-human traces. The project aims to chart new territory by combining the study of musical literature with a cultural studies, critical theory, and science-based theoretical context. A particular focus of the project is speculative fiction: how music, sound, and technology is incorporated into fiction which imagines possible non/human worlds. As well as building new theoretical genealogies of historical media, this approach offers extremely current connections to debates on the role of AI in society and academia.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2026
- Contact
- Daný van Dam
- Funding
-
NWO Starters grant
- Partners
Leiden University
Tracing Players Playing Traces is a two-year research project funded by the NWO (Dutch Research Council).
The project team consists of principal investigator (PI) Dr. Daný van Dam and postdoctoral researcher (PD) Dr. Ruth Alison Clemens.
As well as traditional means of academic knowledge production, such as peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations, this project involves hands-on research in material archives, conversations with museum curators and archivists, and experimental work with artistic researchers. To make this happen, we are working with a number of external collaborators:
- The Pianola Museum in Amsterdam, associated with the Geelvinck Museum. This museum provides access to its extensive and highly diverse collection of music rolls and working instruments, as well as a space for performances.
- Sandipan Nath, an artistic researcher who works closely with the Royal Academy of Art The Hague (KABK) in close collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (KC) and Platform for Arts Research in Collaboration (PARC). Together with postdoctoral researcher Ruth Alison Clemens, he is developing an experimental new composition for player-piano which explores the project’s posthuman and technological themes.
- In September and October 2025, the Department of English at City College New York will host Ruth Alison Clemens as a visiting research fellow. This will allow her to undertake archival research in key collections such as those held in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.
Over the course of the project, a number of events are planned. In spring 2026, there will be a hands-on postgraduate training day on sound media archives in collaboration with the Pianola Museum and national research schools. In summer 2026 there will be a two-day international conference on ‘Listening to Possible Worlds: Music and the Posthuman in Literature and Culture’, held at Leiden University. In summer 2026, there will be a public concert and performance with Sandipan Nath at the Pianola Museum, showcasing an experimental new composition for player-piano as the culmination of the artistic research component of the project. In addition to these one-off events, there are occasional meetings of the new ‘Speculative Sounds, Speculative Fictions’ Reading Group across the duration of the project.
If you would like to receive updates or information about any of these events, please get in touch with a member of the project team.
Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola
Postdoctoral researcher: Ruth Alison Clemens
The historical rise of the pianola or player-piano revolutionised automatic music. Originally marketed to a growing affluent class in the early 20th century as a commercial entertainment technology, the pianola’s proto-computational musical programming led to musical compositions that were difficult or even impossible for human players, establishing it as a posthuman music machine.
This project studies how Anglo-American literature from the age of the pianola (1896-1929) engages with the posthuman, non/human, or more-than-human: modernist experiments with form and consciousness; futurist interest in (or anxiety for) automation and mechanisation; and the overlap with the genre of science fiction by imagining speculative futures through pianola technology. Literary engagements with programmed sound blur the line between human and machine, creativity and reproduction, original and copy. This connects to contemporary debates around the impact of creative AI and offers an important – but lost – cultural stepping stone in the history of encoded, mechanised, synthesized music.
Tracing Non/Human Music in Contemporary Speculative Fiction
Research Assistant, 2025-26: more information to follow soon.
This RA project will focus on the technological, non/human aspects of music creation and performance in contemporary speculative fiction. As not much work has been done on especially very recent texts, part of this sub-project's goal is to inventory the different texts available and the uses they make of music creation and performance (including, for example, the use of musical sound as a metaphor and the contrast between music and silence).
Listening to Possible Worlds: Music and the Posthuman in Literature and Culture
A two-day international conference, hosted at Leiden University. More information and call for papers to follow in autumn 2025.
At the Pianola Museum in collaboration with artistic researcher Sandipan Nath. More information to follow soon.
Presentations
- R. A. Clemens, ‘Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola’ (LUCAS Role of Experience Reading Group, Leiden University, 27 March 2025).
- R. A. Clemens, Keynote talk: ‘Being on the Same Frequency: Ways of Listening to the Incompossible’ (ASCA International Workshop on Re-imagining Universality in the Pluriverse, University of Amsterdam, 26 May 2025).
- D. van Dam & R. A. Clemens, ‘“Which no human hands could play:” Anxiety, authenticity, and literature in the age of the Pianola’ (International Association for Word and Music Studies Conference: ‘Frauds and Fakes in Words and Music’, University of Richmond, VA, 29-31 May 2025).
- R. A. Clemens, ‘Cultures, Technologies, and Media of the Sonic War Machine’ (2025 Braidotti Summer School ‘Beyond Collapsology: from Contemporary Negativity to Affirmation’, Utrecht University, 19 August 2025).