Hi, it's Willa. This week we're bringing you a story that we think you're really going to like,

an episode from the show The Last Archive from Pushkin Industries. The Last Archive, like so many

episodes of Decoder Ring, is all about diving into history to understand our present, digging

into the past to better comprehend what's going on right now. It's all about how we know what we know

or what we think we know and why it can seem like we don't know anything at all anymore.

This episode we're bringing you today is hosted by Ben Nadef. Hafri. It's about a very early

kind of artificial intelligence, a machine that was built to write songs.

It was created by a madcap inventor and musician who was hugely successful in his own day

and who labored for years, eventually at Motown Records, to figure out how to get a machine

to create music. It's a great, relevant yarn, and I bet you'll be thinking about it for a long time.

I know I have. So here's the last archive episode called Player Piano. You can and should go

follow the last archive wherever you listen to podcasts. About 30 years ago, a man named

Irwin Chuzid encountered one of the strangest machines

almost nobody had ever heard of.

I was 40. I was broke. It was kind of a professional failure.

Chusit was a DJ for a small community radio station in New Jersey.

A friend of his had put him on to a musician named Raymond Scott, one of the

most famous musicians of the early 20th century, who had somehow been completely lost to history.

These were records that were 25 cents of pop and used record stores back then. And they didn't even

have them in a bin. They had them under the bins.

Chuzid loved Scott's music, and he began to get drawn into the mystery of it all.

Who was this guy?

...