Pet sounds. (Hotlist).

A pet only Steven Spielberg could love? Sony commissioned Japanese animator Katsura Moshino to develop a mass market version of the electronics giant's $1,500-a-tail-artificially intelligent robot dog AIBO, a companion only somewhat more lifelike than Haley Joel Osment. Going by the name Latte or Macaron (the two models in the LM Series), this affordable ($850) dog's yapping is literally pure music: Visionary glitch-kitsch composer Nobukazu Takemura was hired to create the digitally equipped watchdog's electronic vocabulary Takemura--whose recently released CD Sign (Thrill Jockey) continues his singular recombinations of smooth jazz, Steve Reich, and industrialism in equal measures--has devised for Moshino's aggressively cute creatures a palate of sounds onto which listeners can project desired meanings. The artist Hollis Frampton once observed that when photographic representations [became] associated with things as their names our culture had passed an epistemological point of no return." And so it is with the language of the robodogs, which should provide the emotional narrative necessary to create the Illusion of sentience and alliance at the crux of the master/slave relation we call pet ownership.

Which is to say, Is there any real difference between a bucket of bolts and a schnauzer? Though LM Series owners can'' reach inside their pet and change and "genetic" hardwiring (as owners of the high-end AIBO can) the mechanical mutt will still learn up to seventy-five words and maintain a multistage growth cycle from puppyhood through adolscence and into adulthood--though only its owners will be allowed to actually die.