Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective

There is nothing especially surprising or controversial in observing the significant influence that cybernetics exerted on music, especially in its heyday during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Indeed, it is hard to see how things might have been otherwise. Cybernetics was distinct from traditional sciences in aspiring to create a universal interdiscipline that patched together the probabilistic worldview of information theory and the flattened abstractions of systems theory.1 Its founding Macy conferences of 1946–53 assembled a cross-disciplinary network of intellectuals, the majority of whom worked in what would now be termed STEM disciplines, but some (and some of the most influential) were drawn from social science, linguistics, literary theory, and management theory.2 Many of the scientists were returning to universities having undertaken war research, and the specter of totalitarianism shaped the overarching ethos of collaboration and cooperation that both the conferences and cybernetics itself would embody.3 Some believed that the superdiscipline could contribute to a postwar “Unity of Science” movement based on the universal concepts of information, feedback, and homeostasis,4 and in this way we can see cybernetics as aligned with supranational efforts to restore and protect liberalism following the war.5 Yet scholarship of the past 30 years has suggested that it was via its extra-scientific mediation that cybernetics secured such a foothold in the 20th- and 21st-century imagination.6 As Geoffrey Bowker put it: “Where traditional sciences operated behind the walls of the laboratory, cybernetics was everywhere you went. Where traditional sciences repudiated all possible mention of society, cybernetics proclaimed that it could produce the best possible description thereof, and that its universal truth was immediately tied to this historical conjuncture.”7 Bowker suggests that these factors worked together to position cybernetics as a “distributed obligatory passage point” capable of translating knowledge between incommensurate languages and facilitating exchanges of legitimacy in the process,8 and from one perspective the cybernetic traces in music are simply an affirmation of this. They show how successfully cyberneticians managed to consolidate their universal discipline across intellectual spheres, describing and to an extent creating the conditions of a new technological age—famously dubbed the “age of communication and control” by Norbert Wiener.9It is precisely the aspiration to universalism that makes musical cybernetics difficult to analyze. From experimental music to rave, musical social theory to psychology, jam bands to computer music, cybernetics can appear to be at once everywhere and nowhere—a situation that contributes to both its paradoxical imperceptibility and its capacity for continual rediscovery. As a science, cybernetics is historical, left behind in the 20th century. Yet as a musical knowledge practice, it is positively contemporary, put to work either directly in the service of music theory,10 history,11 analysis,12 and composition13 or indirectly through the mediation of auditory psychology,14 structuralist and poststructuralist theory,15 or the methods associated with digital musicology.16 These examples affirm the flexibility and hybridity of cybernetic language, yet music has also provided a keyhole into cybernetics’ critique. For Alexander Weheliye, the cybernetics-derived figure of the posthuman represents the “white liberal subject in techno-informational disguise.”17 Addressing Katherine N. Hayles’s “canon” of posthuman literature, he writes that “[c]ertainly, New World black subjects cannot inhabit this version of selfhood in quite the same manner as the ‘white boys’ of Hayles’s canon due to slavery, colonialism, racism, and segregation, since these forces render the very idea that one could be ‘free from the will of others’ null and void.18 In finding space for Black subjectivity within the body-agnosticism of cybernetics, Weheliye turned to sound and sound technologies, offering that such an orientation complicated the effacement of embodiment that theorizations of the posthuman enact, gesturing “toward a more complex interaction between embodiment and disembodiment, the human and posthuman.”19 Weheylie’s attention to the racially marked absences and occlusions of cybernetics therefore gave the lie to its universalism, echoing Peter Galison’s remark that cybernetics represented not the unity of science but the (white) Americanization of unity.20Weheylie was not the first to draw Black sound and music into a critique of cybernetics. Writing a decade earlier, the information scientist and cultural theorist Ron Eglash drew attention to Blackness in the actual patterns of data that cyberneticians took as their object of analysis. Eglash’s argument is too involved to do full justice to in this short essay, but at base he offers a critique of the organicism and romantic humanism of Varela and Maturana’s cybernetics, which “made the erroneous claim that analog systems were more concrete, more ‘real’ or ‘natural,’ and therefore (according to this romantic cybernetics) ethically superior” to digital ones.21 Eglash deemed this a “debilitating valorisation” for African Americans, for it meant that “African modes of representation in the use of sculpture, rhythm and movement were often abandoned to the claim that Africa was the culture of non-representation, the culture of the Real.”22 In seeking moments of resistance to this association Eglash looked to rap and rap-reggae fusion bands who display “an appreciation of cybernetics which is politically oppositional but no longer primitivist or naturalizing.”23 Eglash claimed not only that these hybrids celebrate the alienation of posthuman digitality (a view he partially credits to the Black political activist James Boggs’s intervention at the first Cybercultural Research Conference in 1966),24 but that this was actually visible in the statistical analyses of rap music’s global waveform, which shows white noise rather than fractal noise.25 Resistance was thus carried through both sound and information. The fusions of reggae (as analog, organic) and rap (as digital, alien), he argued, staged a clash of modernism and postmodernism, past and future. As he put it in “Africa in the Origins of Binary Code,” the “beat” of African knowledge “is a heritage heard by those who listen to the future.”26Turning our attention to existing music-historical treatments of postwar encounters with cybernetics, we get little sense of the cultural dominance it came to assume, or the cultural power it would represent. As Eric Drott remarks in his essay for this issue, scholars who have considered how cybernetic concepts like feedback and autopoiesis found their way into musical practice have tended to train their attention on a fairly narrow slice of history (the decades after World War II), a fairly narrow selection of musicians, collaborators, and repertoires (mainly composer-engineer groupings working within the experimental tradition), and a fairly narrow set of pieces that wear the cybernetic influence on their sleeve (e.g., the biofeedback collaborations of Alvin Lucier and Edmond Dewan). When these examples are chronicled, cybernetics can appear less as a rigorous science and more a kind of practical poetry—an amateur, hobbyist craft concerned with experimentation and art–science cooperation, supported by an “upsurge of bricolage and homegrown elements that were seen as manifesting resistance to institutional hegemonies.”27 In trying to account for cybernetics’ difference from traditional sciences, Andrew Pickering’s adoption of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between “royal” and “nomad” sciences has been influential. “The royal sciences,” he writes, “are the modern sciences, which function as part of a stable social and political order—which prop up the state.” Nomad sciences, on the other hand, “are a different kind of science, one which wanders in from the steppes to undermine stability.”28 But held against its totalizing aspirations we seem to have a cognitive dissonance: cybernetics as at once a metalanguage for articulating life in the information age and a maverick science steered by ontological experimentation.The divergent lives of cybernetics are in part a product of its uneven reception across the many scientific and cultural fields it touched, but also of the impact its translation and “domesticization” outside of America had on its genealogy and lexical field.29 In contrast to “sister” disciplines like informatics, cybernetics found only an occasional home in university research centers and curricula.30 Instead, its influence spread via other channels, whether directly through quasi-popular science books like Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Human and Animal and The Living Brain, indirectly through journals and magazines like the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly, or in experimental education contexts such as the British artist Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse.31 But even as these forums were often countercultural, they were also modeling the flexible, collaborative, postindustrial world of work that was just around the corner. Fred Turner has analyzed these dynamics in his history of the journalist Stewart Brand’s movements from communes, to countercultural art worlds, to tech communities, to corporate culture and politics. As Turner shows, these alliances do not tell a story of the counterculture being recuperated by capital, technology, or the state, as accounts of neoliberalism often claim.32 Rather, the counterculture (to be specific, the “new communalist” wing of the counterculture)33 embraced those forces early on and subsequently, creating new “intellectual and practical contexts within which members of the two worlds could come together and legitimate one another’s projects.”34 Cybernetics served to simultaneously enable the migrations and para-disciplinary collaborations that sustained this ambivalent two-step, and to rationalize and legitimize them.The closer we look at musical cybernetics historically, the more this ambivalence rises to the surface. Take the San Francisco Bay Area–based League of Automatic Music Composers, for example. Like many of their contemporaries, the League’s work was steeped in the language of cybernetics. In particular, it was the fragmentary “metalogues” of countercultural guru Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind that inspired the group. Concert flyers featured aphorisms from the book that were dramatized in the music.35 But other groups employed feedback systems without taking the detour through cybernetics, and one could be skeptical and ask whether the League’s music would have developed similarly had its members never encountered cybernetic theory at all. What cybernetic theory surely did do was help naturalize the fluid exchanges between art and engineering contexts that members of the League would take advantage of. In 1991, the League’s Rich Gold took a position at Xerox PARC, where he was encouraged to become “a corporate provocateur, cultural mediator, and institutional visionary, and to act as a catalyst for creative thinking and practice.”36 Gold helped the company innovate the area of “ubiquitous computing,” a term that has since been eclipsed by the concept of “smart devices” but basically describes home and work environments where all electrical devices are connected and involved in data processing. In his 2017 essay on the group, George Lewis assesses this leap from interactive music to the corporate world of computing optimistically, as “linking the cybernetics orientation and social aesthetics of the early interactive computer musicians with a later vision of interactivity that may one day embrace an understanding of improvisation as a fundamental aspect of the human condition.”37 It could equally be seen the other way, however—as raising a question of whether the critical dimensions that are so often attributed to cybernetic arts were ever really there in the first place. The vision of a “physical world richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives and connected through a continuous network”38 is precisely the infrastructure of “instrumentarian power” undergirding what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism.” Indeed, in defining it Zuboff quotes Gold’s collaborator at Xerox PARC:Under the lash of the extraction imperative, digital instrumentation has been transformed into a global, sensate, computational, connected architecture of behavioral surplus capture and analysis, fulfilling computer scientist Mark Weiser’s 1999 vision of “ubiquitous computing” memorialized in two legendary sentences: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”39From this perspective “everyday improvisation” starts to resemble the “full blown technology of the body moving” that feeds surveillance platforms in order to “optimize” user behavior, and that increasingly enroll sound and music to do so.40 The music for on and to in order to to their by of musical a of their and with a of the as it data thus on and can and other feedback most that which the of digital As Eric Drott writes, makes music so a of the as and have is also what platforms to it as an equally technology of science against a stable increasingly it is in the of and that social of and have been It is no for that the theory of in the and sound has at its a cybernetic understanding of The that only political to is not to or to its at the of its but to its from and critique of Norbert against termed rather than and by the and of their for and the white of the that we are no longer but into with was the liberal mediation between and and that as a on Yet also drew into the of cybernetics with As it did it early resistance to cybernetics. In the of a of makes one fundamental of the its its to the into an of the into an of and into a of there of resistance to the cybernetic in the has that was into cybernetic art from the via the of computing devices and the for corporate view with Fred of the supported where he that and the other an act of cultural the of and themselves not as the that had the but as and sense of directly of their understanding of the everyday world as a probabilistic closer look at the of cybernetic that served to cybernetics in the and early a of drawn up but not In the for the the systems art to that cybernetics in would just of in of the it was to position on cybernetics and systems theory was in these from early cybernetics like to like As has the of the that were critical of systems theory In the to the would have encountered a until they at which it would to writes use of the by cybernetic to In the later work the technology is and cybernetic its vision of human systems of the through the of a systems no longer their book In the of an a the question of the in the around and sound art the social and political that to be up and into of sound as sound as and For the is the of or he writes, the When the arts in the of so the story the arts the has been up in whether directly in the of music and critical seeking to a musical art or critical or indirectly in the way it and into in the of new It developed of the history of art in of the and those that have to the art of systems art a in the of the into and of is an and one that is too often by a to the of like institutional only to this up as a that music or sound art in a to the reception of cybernetics will be in both in understanding the and how the arts were to come together in the first place. the we might not on the unity of cybernetics, but on its as in and a universal interdiscipline that could cybernetics was equally to and that were often in to a more account of the moments of and that the between a cybernetics and historical we to music’s cybernetic into than and the of music, technology, and as it took in the of the 20th and has into the In we to music’s to cybernetics not as a from a of to an equally of musicians, but as a and feedback one that is as and as the systems by of the and of cybernetics and information theory as they musical music theory and and and music offers a of the by information theory and cybernetics in the of one of the most music to have with this intellectual during its from his to the of where to into his of musical and within the of his intellectual the one hand, by with information theory and cybernetics against the of his (and of of to music, how these intellectual both the way for and shaped his adoption of concepts of and the same these same concepts (as it a of of as a for to a for what was as a the figure of the had from in the of the to one of the of of a the other hand, the of information influence on later work on musical and musical the of to this As makes with information theory and cybernetics may have been but its impact was Indeed, after his intellectual had yet this to cognitive (a discipline itself to cybernetics and systems concepts like and a in But as also makes the cognitive of later work has meant that information theory a position in music at its with music having and from its for their work (a in the of the of computational methods that other disciplines with the digital have embraced in essay British from to up to the of this cybernetic theory, and assesses the impact it has on work and against both and of the and the computer music on display at by the show that on in art were in with and the of with by to with the being the embodiment of this. also a of cybernetic influence in with the based Research to As shows, the that has no and it is for this that of have or taking this and by finding a in theory rather than it from offers a new perspective both on and on the cybernetic work centers on the and music theorist The of and an for both and little to Like were both in of sound and in with as shows, this influence came from the influence of his the developed in order to not to the of (as in but to to the of of music and to between and information. a to a musical cybernetics, one that not only has on our understanding of postwar but that also has for historical essay the cybernetics of the the of the the of cybernetics, in it was as a through its with and science during the the the between sound and it a to cybernetic the fusion of information and that in the War of the of the with and analyses of the of that for the The the Earth and It from As cybernetic shows how and cybernetics in the way its could in as as Yet assesses the cybernetic as capable of and more just on to between and and to cybernetics’ universalism, that the is no more than the and universal human that the is to have Eric essay to a at the of this having to do with the in trying to music’s to cybernetics. is a that from cybernetics’ very in its has its into the intellectual and of the Drott these via a of what he the that the and that cybernetics and information theory have without attention to at the of his essay is the a in the history of music, as Rather, as Drott shows, the was to part of a which to put work on to work on of Yet even after efforts to this were and the was as a the of the was this more than with the of music with information. in was to the of cybernetics and information theory from the history of the as to the cybernetic and in such the same to this as cybernetic feedback and the of music with information the architecture of most digital music being a in with the of digital cybernetics’ influence on music has never been so has it ever been so hard to to Eric Drott and for and to this and to for his with the as a work was possible by the of

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