By some accounts, the Æolian harp represents the first mechanical (or automatic) instrument. The harp dates from ancient Greece where literary references to it describe it as a stringed box played by the god of wind Aeolus. The harp as it has come to us today is usually the size of whatever window it is designed to sit in. The window sash is lowered on top of the harp to force the flow of air over the strings. Though there is no agreement on the number of strings to be used all Æolian harps are strung with a different gauge wire for each string and all strings are tuned in unison. Apart from the strangeness of tones being played without any visible agent, the timbre of strings is very eerie, almost Theremin-like. The unique tuning of the strings creates patterns of harmonics that ebb and flow with the intensity of the wind.

inspiration, an Æolian harp
[see also a schematic diagram of the harp]

The modern incarnation of the harp dates from the recreation of the ancient instrument in the 17th century by Athanasius Kircher. Two centuries later -- in the fever of Romantic literature of painting -- the harp would reach it's apogee of popularity both as a domestic soundmaker and, more importantly, as a metaphor for inspiration. Like Pythagoras' music of the spheres, the harp became an established literary device.

As in so many languages the latin word for inspiration, spiritus, also means breath or wind; this double-meaning enchanted the Romantics. They theorized artists as mere conduits through which inspiration found a poetic sounding-board. The artist in this formulation emulates a kind of artistic machine. Poesis as techné, ala Heidegger. In "Ode to the West Wind", Shelley implores nature to play him like the harp:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Though the Æolian Interface project bears only a slight mechanical resemblance to the harp that so fascinated the English Romantic imagination, we believe that the ideas that undergird it -- both as an instrument lacking human agency and as a metaphor for the artist-as-mechanism (or mechanism-as-artist) -- strike a chord with contemporary theories of digital art and aesthetics.