{"id":14096,"date":"2026-07-16T17:27:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=14096"},"modified":"2026-07-16T17:27:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T21:27:10","slug":"electric-concert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=14096","title":{"rendered":"Electric concert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, as I was listening to the thumpety-thump of distant Bluesfest, the concert halfway across town, I was reminded of this passage from Jules Verne’s posthumously published Paris in the Twentieth Century<\/em>, written in 1863:<\/p>\n

As he walked on, silence and abandonment were reborn around him. Yet far in the distance he saw what looked like a tremendous light; he heard a great noise that sounded like nothing he knew. Nonetheless he continued, finally arriving in the center of a deafening racket, an enormous arena which could easily hold some ten thousand persons, and on the pediment of the building was written in fiery letters:<\/p>\n

ELECTRIC CONCERT<\/p>\n

Yes, electric concert, and what instruments! According to a Hungarian method, two hundred pianos wired together by means of an electric current could be played by the hands of a single artist! One piano with the power of two hundred!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"

Illustration by ChatGPT<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

This passage appears near the end of the book, when our now homeless protagonist aimlessly wonders a futuristic city. I am deeply fascinated by how well Verne predicted, no, not the technical details of mechanical amplification, but the social phenomenon: mass cultural events that become oddly alienating and impersonal, a cacophony of light and noise that, from a distance, often feels more hostile than inviting.<\/p>\n<\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, as I was listening to the thumpety-thump of distant Bluesfest, the concert halfway across town, I was reminded of this passage from Jules Verne’s posthumously published Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863: As he walked on, silence and abandonment were reborn around him. Yet far in the distance he saw what […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-pop-culture","category-9-id","category-25-id","category-31-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14096"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14106,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14096\/revisions\/14106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}