On Harmonies Transmitted Through the Ether of Future Ages

A most singular rumour has reached my desk this morning, nestled amongst the papers pertaining to Mr. Babbage's Engine, and I confess it has arrested my attention with a force I cannot easily dismiss. It speaks of a place — Brooklyn, in the Americas — where music is broadcast, or rather *projected*, through some apparatus of radio, to audiences invisible and dispersed. A troupe of players, bearing the curious appellation Tame Impala, performed for the duration of a full hour within what I am told is an intimate station of sorts, independent of any grand commercial establishment. I find myself astonished, and yet — I am not entirely surprised. Is this not precisely what I have long suspected the Engine might one day inspire? I have written, in my Notes upon Monsieur Menabrea's memoir, that the Analytical Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music, given sufficient understanding of the relations between musical tones. That a future age should construct instruments capable of transmitting such compositions across the very air, into private parlours and public squares alike, strikes me as a natural — if breathtaking — extension of that principle. What moves me most, however, is the word *intimate*. Here is the great paradox of all machinery that serves the imagination: it enlarges the reach whilst, if guided by genuine artistry, it preserves the human scale. An hour-long performance in a small station, heard perhaps by thousands — this is not the cold multiplication of commerce, but the warm amplification of feeling. The loom weaves silk for many without rendering the pattern less beautiful. I have been accused, by those of limited philosophical sympathy, of lending too much poetry to what is merely mechanism. To them I say: the imagination is not the enemy of rigorous science — it is its most indispensable faculty. It is imagination alone that perceives, in the dry notation of punch-cards, the ghost of a symphony. It is imagination that builds the bridge between what a machine *can* do and what it *ought* to do in service of human flourishing. I do not know the music of these Tame Impala, nor the precise nature of this radio apparatus. But I recognise the impulse — to make art reach further, touch deeper, and remain, despite all mechanical mediation, profoundly, irreducibly alive.