Conference Agenda

Emerging during a period of tumultuous social and economic change in the USA, James Ritty’s 1879 “Incorruptible Cashier” was born out of concerns about thieving employees draining his profits (Friedman, W. 2004). The 1879 patent for this “Incorruptible Cashier” states: “Connected with the machine is a bell or other sounding device…if the bell or other alarm is not sounded, the customer is aware that the amount paid has not been properly recorded by the clerk”. Sound, therefore, was primarily a surveillance mechanism for this thief catching machine, making audible the content of the clerk’s supposed moral character to the customer, a listening witness.

By the twentieth century, the cash register and its bell became one of many technologies exported under the guise of techno-hubris, a “civilizing” force (Rydell, R. 1984, Domosh, M. 2002, Adas, M. 2009). “The Bell heard ‘round the world first rang in Dayton, Ohio…ringing wherever men trade – throughout the civilized world.” proclaims a 1955 National Cash Register print advertisement; the ringing of the bell – once an identifier of a clerk’s moral fiber – has become a marker of “civilized men” more broadly through its global export of American values.

In this paper, I explore the role of the cash register bell as Foucauldian dispositive, considering the implications of this sound as an index of moral character and its function in American imperialist narratives. Through the application of approaches from actor-network theory (Latour, B. 1992, Law, J. 1999), in tandem with performance studies (Coeckelbergh, M. 2019, Maze, J. 2020), I argue that the sounding of the cash register bell makes audible the convergence of heterogeneous materials which uphold disquieting systems of power, performing the socio-economic and political priorities which support the formation and reification of this power. In doing so, I call attention to the significance of sound in otherwise “non-musical” technologies as an avenue for engaging critically with socio-technical systems of past and present.

In 1890s Milan, ballet and opera performers occasionally found themselves alongside—or astride—bicycles. Increasingly popular across Europe, bicycles symbolized the progress of modernity. In Italy, the growing presence of bicycles produced both excitement and trepidation because of its economic and social potential. This was especially true for women riders, as the freedoms cycling afforded were counterbalanced with concerns of hygienic and moral decline. These popular discourses influenced how bicycles would appear and sound on stage in works such as the ballet Sport (1897) by Luigi Manzotti and Romualdo Marenco and the opera Fedora (1898) by Umberto Giordano. Each portrays cyclists of both genders in markedly present-day scenarios drawn from everyday life; the bicycle symbolizes the modernity of the world the characters inhabit. Theatrical bicycling was thus reflective of a culture wrestling with its kinetic modernity, and the musical scores archive not only the choreography of dancers or stage action, but affective responses to the novel cultural and embodied phenomenon of bicycling. With these examples from opera and ballet, my paper explores how music contributes dramatically to the contemporary feel of these stories, and, more broadly, to our historical knowledge of Italian modernity.

The music for bicycles was attentive to and expressive of changes in Liberal Italy’s kinaesthetics—its governing practices of movement. In Sport and Fedora, the music for bicycling shares certain features and is consistently made distinct from its surroundings. The similarities in these scenes, which traverse the generic boundaries of ballet and opera, suggest a musical topic which encapsulates the hybrid mobility of cycling. Through close reading of scores, I further recent musicological investigations of ballo grande (Lockhart 2019, Williams 2019) and builds on studies addressing the gender politics of Sport specifically, and bicycling more broadly (Pivato 1990, Chapman 2020). Following dance theorist Mark Franko (2016), I underscore how the conjunctural circumstances regarding the broader economic and social effects—for good or for ill—of modern mobility intersect with theatrical bicycling. Careful consideration of the bicycle on stage illuminates this technological trend in opera and ballet, as well as the far-reaching cultural shifts produced by two-wheeled mobility.

Pinball, a product of the Depression-era U.S., has received nearly no attention to its music and sound, although it was an important predecessor to video games. Despite the outpouring of new research into video game music and sound, scholars have given relatively little attention to games from the important formative decade of the 1970s (Karen Collins, Nils Ditbrenner, Melanie Fritsch, and Neil Lerner have filled in various pieces of this story) or to earlier coin-operated but non-video games like pinball, whose game design principles and manufacturing infrastructure played a key role in the emergence of the video game industry. Collins has pointed to connections between emergent video game sounds and a history of earlier coin-operated mechanical and electromechanical amusements such as bagatelle, slot machines, and pinball (Game Sound, 2008), but a detailed history of pinball’s sound and music has yet to be written.

After the 1934 introduction of the first electric bell in pinball (Contact), almost no innovation occurred in pinball sound until the introduction of a three-note chime box by Gottlieb in 1969, which allowed for up to three simultaneously sounding pitches that formed a diminished triad. As pinball companies began to incorporate solid state (instead of electromechanical) technologies into their machines in the second half of the 1970s, they created at least four audio innovations: 1) they attempted to include more realistic sounds (such as horses galloping in 1979’s Sharpshooter); 2) they introduced dynamic audio that responded to changes in the rhythm of the gameplay (the continuously rising pitches as gameplay intensified in 1979’s Flash—following the earlier example of the accelerating tetrachord accompanying Space Invaders [1978]—were pinball’s first dynamic audio sounds); 3) they introduced recognizable monophonic melodies (e.g., Dolly Parton and KISS, both 1979); and 4) they expanded timbral possibilities beyond beeps and bloops with the development of wave table synthesis. Studying the innovations of sound for pinball machines and comparing them to developments in video games demonstrates pinball’s considerable influence on the soundscapes of early video games, reveals instances where video game sound was incorporated into pinball, and deepens our overall understanding of game music.