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 Decodering 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 Nadaf-Haffrey. It's about a very early kind of artificial

intelligence, a machine that was built to write songs. It was created by a mad cap

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 Erwin Chousett 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.

Chousit 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.

...