| Abstract-
Christina Dunbar-Hester
(full paper) http://hdl.handle.net/10002/459
Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems,
1950-1980
The influence of the field of cybernetics on scientific thought and disciplines
has been explored in a number of contexts. However, cybernetics was remarkable
for its portability and potential application in a wide variety of contexts;
from the inception of the field, “cyberneticians” in the sciences
had explicitly envisioned applications reaching beyond the purview of
scientific disciplines. This paper explores connections between cybernetics
and experimental music from 1950-1980, which was a period of experimentation
with electronic techniques in recording, composition, and sound production
and manipulation. Examples include musicians, engineers, instruments builders,
composers, and cyberneticians who invoked cybernetic themes in their work
on electronic or experimental music. “Cybernetics” was used
and interpreted in a variety of ways by these actors, from human-machine
integration, to Shannon and Weaver’s work on information theory,
to the ideas of autopoiesis (self-making), control, and indeterminacy
in complex systems. These examples present a fuller picture of cybernetics,
which was, as scholars have noted, a malleable and “seductive”
concept and body of practice(s). This paper will discuss the resonance
between the concepts undergirding experimental and electronic music composition
and construction in the 1960s and cybernetic theory, which resulted from
complex and interrelated ideas about human-machine interaction and relationships,
communication and control, and changing aesthetics. The paper argues that
the uses of cybernetics by experimental musicians illuminate the migration
of cybernetics between arts and scientific discourse communities, and
represent a difficulty in addressing cybernetics as a universal scientific
discourse. |