Christina Dunbar-Hester, Cornell University
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For re:place conference, Berlin, November 2007
Listening to Cybernetics:
Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980
Introduction
“Cybernetics” emerged as an area of academic study and popular interest shortly after the
end of World War II. It was concerned with broad themes including command and
control, systems, information, and analogies between organisms and machines, including
computers. In the academy, cybernetics came to constitute “one of the dominant
intellectual paradigms of the postwar era” (Turner 2006: 27). Cybernetics has recently
attracted attention in social studies of science, particularly in terms of its application in
“hard” scientific fields and in the social sciences. Yet from the inception of the field in
the late 1940s, cyberneticians explicitly envisioned wide sociocultural applications
extending beyond the purview of scientific disciplines. Indeed, many cybernetic
concepts were seen by cyberneticians, the public, and artists as having broad social
significance beyond their “technical” meanings.
In this paper, I emphasize cybernetics’ adoption in one of the humanities (music). I ask
how this application was manifested and why cybernetic principles may have held appeal
for people in experimental music circles. I aim to explore the implications of
cybernetics’ appearance in music for the consideration of cybernetics by historians of
science. In particular, the treatment of cybernetics as “closed” in the sense discussed by
Paul Edwards does not match the use of cybernetics by musicians and composers. In
viewing cybernetics primarily in relation to the sciences, scholars have neglected to see
how “open” or indeterminate cybernetic discourse could also be.
Materially, this was a period of experimentation with electronic techniques in recording,
composition, and sound production and manipulation. Musicians and composers seeking
unique sounds and modes of musical production often looked to new electronic
technologies to aid them, including computers.
N. Katherine Hayles suggests that the meaning of cybernetics changed over time, and she
sketches three “waves” of cybernetics. Many examples I found seem to have roughly in
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common what Hayles has termed “second wave” cybernetic principles; they are united
around a conception of cybernetics as “autopoiesis,” or the self-making of a complex
system. For Hayles, the equilibrium-seeking aspect of first-wave cybernetics gave way to
a more reflexive notion of “turning a system’s rules back on itself so as to cause it to
engage in more complex behavior,” privileging “change over constancy, evolution over
equilibrium, complexity over predictability” (1994: 446).
Below, I identify four categories of uses of cybernetics in musical practice, and in the
interest of length, I will keep examples to a minimum.i
I. HUMAN-MACHINE INTEGRATION
In his 1948 book, Norbert Wiener wrote of the “unity of the set of problems centering
about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in
living tissue…” (1948: 19). He emphasized conceptual similarities in feedback systems
in organisms and machines. Wiener held that the electronic circuits of computing
machines were “precise analogues” to “neuronic circuits and systems” (1948: 22).
Bebe (b. 1927) and Louis Barron (1920-1989) were trained composers and pianists with
an interest in electronic music. Around 1950, the Barrons moved to Greenwich Village,
New York City, where they were active in an experimental music community,
collaborating with John Cage and others, while running an early electronic music studio
out of their home. The Barrons aspired to larger projects than experimental films and
scored MGM’s 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet. This film is notable because
by most accounts it features the first all-electronic soundtrack in a mainstream
Hollywood film; “soundtrack” may not even be the correct term, because the Barrons
“complete[ly] obliterat[ed]…distinctions between music and effects.”ii The sounds for
the film were all rendered using custom-built circuits designed by the Barrons.
According to Bebe, Wiener’s ideas about cybernetics were a direct source of inspiration:
What we did was pretty elementary: we would attach resistors and capacitors to activate these
circuits… negative and positive feedback was involved—Wiener talks about all that. The same
conditions that would produce breakdowns and malfunctions in machines, made for some
wonderful music. The circuits would have a “nervous breakdown” and afterwards they would be
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Christina Dunbar-Hester, Cornell University
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very relaxed, and it all came through in the sounds they generated. (Bebe Barron in Vale and Juno
1994: 200, emphasis in original)iii
In likening their instruments and the effects created by them to cybernetic biological
processes, the Barrons emphasized that they were sought an “organic” quality of sound,
albeit through the use of electronic circuits. They also cited a particular model of
cybernetic principles in which electrical circuits were explicitly likened to the neural
“circuitry” of an organism.
II. INFORMATION
Another principle of cybernetic theory was related to the supposed ability of a cybernetic
system to detect, through communication and feedback, signals or messages containing
“information”. Shannon and Weaver’s 1949 A Mathematical Theory of Communication
provided fodder for a1956 article in the popular magazine Scientific American that
exclusively focused on the relationship of this theory to music (Pinkerton 1956). The
author calculated the amount of information per note in simple melodies. He argued that
“melody, rhythm and harmony can all be fitted into a statistical scheme… A set of tables
could be constructed which would compose Mozartian melodies or themes which would
out-Shostakovich Shostakovich” (1956: 86).
Cybernetic scientists, musicians, and composers also drew on these discussions, referring
to the degree of redundancy, entropy, and information contained in musical compositions.
The introduction to a late-1960s conference proceeding volume entitled Music by
Computers, dealt directly with these themes Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002), an
Austrian émigré to the U.S., was an architect of the field of cybernetics. He taught
biophysics and electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, and where he interacted
with composer Herbert Brün. In his introduction to the 1969 conference volume, von
Foerster wrote:
Let us consider the sounds that are stored on the records attached to this book. Are these sounds
music? A century ago this question would have been unanimously answered in the negative.
Today, however, we would have to be more cautious. Why is it that a sizable number of people
are willing to pay admission to a concert that to an audience of two generations ago would have
been cacophony rather than euphony?
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…[This] is most clearly understood in information-theoretical terms, namely, as a gradual
reduction in the redundancy of works of music, or expressed differently, as a continuous increase
in the complexity of sound and composition, hence an increase in the amount of auditory
information transmitted during a given interval or time. (von Foerster and Beauchamp 1969: 8-9)
III. SYSTEM AND PROCESS ORIENTATION
N. Katherine Hayles’ description of “second wave” cybernetics is useful to introduce the
idea of process orientation in music. She states: “Interest is focused not on how systems
maintain their organization intact, but rather on how they evolve in unpredictable and
often highly complex ways through emergent processes” (1994: 463). Examples of this
shift in orientation away from a musical product and towards a musical process can be
seen in a variety of instances, and I do not mean to suggest that cybernetics was entirely
responsible for process-oriented music. At the same time, a number of prominent
musicians and composers claimed to have incorporated cybernetic principles into their
music-making.
Brian Eno (b. 1948) is a renowned composer/performer who is recognized for
contributions in experimental and rock genres. During the 1970s, Eno developed a strong
interest in cybernetics and published a 1976 article on systems theory and music. Eno
also made a point about process orientation, using the example of the work of
experimental composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981). According to Eno, the use of the
“fade” effect on Cardew’s recordings is significant, as it “implies that not that the piece
has finished, but that it is continuing out of earshot” (1996: 340, emphasis in original).
Cardew underscored this point by recording pieces with fade beginnings, which are more
atypical in recorded music than the fade-out ending, which may be commonly found not
only experimental music but in the rock genre. For Eno, the use of the fade production
technique at either end of a piece indicates that “the music is a section from a
hypothetical continuum and…it does not exhibit strong ‘progress’ from one point
(position, theme, statement, argument) to a resolution” (1996: 340). This material
technique is consonant with the idea that a musical recording may reflect a process rather
than a finite composition; it suggests that the listener is only hearing a portion of a larger,
or perhaps endless, piece of music.iv
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Herbert Brün also composed works, including Infraudibles and Mutatis Mutandis (both
1968), which emphasized the process of making the music. Of Infraudibles, he wrote:
“Instead of approaching again the aesthetic question: ‘Which process will generate the
desired audible event and thus music?’ it attempts to deal with the political question:
‘What audible events would be generated by desirable processes, and thus music?’”
(Chadabe 1997: 278). In these examples, the composers’ attention is not on the musical
product.
IV. CONTROL AND (IN)DETERMINACY
Paul Edwards writes of what he calls a “closed world discourse”. The closed world was
“a chaotic and dangerous space rendered orderly and controllable by the powers of
rationality and technology” (1996: 72), including computers. The idea of control was
additionally an important one to people working in experimental and electronic music
who had adopted cybernetic theories about communication in human-machine systems.
John Cage was prominent American experimental composer who worked in electronic,
minimalist, and process-generated music, and he was an admirer of cybernetic theory. A
student later recalled: “In 1965 John Cage handed me a book to read. It was Cybernetics
by Norbert Wiener”. Cage was also a proponent of “chance music”. For Cage, this
included measures to enhance randomness and eliminate the taste and agency of the
composer and the performers; indeterminacy could lead to pieces that even the artist
might not have imagined. He enumerated this in a 1966 article in a cybernetics journal:
“the word 'experimental’ [is taken] to mean making an action the outcome of which is not
foreseen,” and he challenged others to employ this value in their work (Cage in Ascott
1966: 262).
Cage’s ideas about indeterminacy and chance music were influential. The Barrons had
worked with Cage in early 1950s New York. Bebe later recalled:
We explored the idea that we didn’t want to control the circuits…Nevertheless, John Cage
declared that we were “disgustingly orchestral and musical” in our approach—which was amazing
because actually we had less control; we didn’t want the control and in fact had rejected the
control—yet it came out sounding “musical.” And I never could understand how that happened,
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Christina Dunbar-Hester, Cornell University
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yet it did sound quite musical in many ways—much more so than John Cage’s music! (Vale and
Juno 1994: 199-200, emphasis in original)
CONCLUSIONS
Norbert Wiener used “cybernetics” in 1948 to refer to “the entire field of control and
communication, whether in the machine or in the animal” (1948: 19). However, this is
sufficiently vague to encompass vast amounts of research and theory; I have examined
how cybernetics was actually employed by artists. Fred Turner’s work on the “cybernetic
counterculture” of the 1950s and 1960s indicates some of what may have been at stake
for musicians and artists (as well as music listeners and art fans): “[C]ybernetics and
systems theory offered an ideological alternative… [M]any in the counterculture saw in
cybernetics a vision of a world not built around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows
of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information…” (Turner 2006: 38).
And of course, prominent figures’ interest in cybernetics extends beyond scientists and
musicians, including for example Stewart Brand (Turner 2006) and Marshall McLuhan
(Kline 2006); Norbert Wiener himself both wrote popular books that were widely
consumed and worried about the overexposure of cybernetics as early as 1952 (January
22, 1952, Robert S. Morison Diaries). Thus, the issue of popular interest in cybernetics is
a part of this story as well; unlike some scientific concerns that might be appropriated by
arts practitioners without much public interest, cybernetic discourse was widespread.
As scholars attempt to understand the early history of cybernetics in science, we may also
benefit from consideration of electronic and experimental music as another site where
cybernetics-inflected discussions of human-machine integration, information,
autopoeisis, and (in)determinacy, control, and complexity may be found. It is certainly
appropriate to “follow the actors,” attending to the bulk of cybernetic theory that was
indeed oriented around the sciences (Latour 1987). But as prominent cyberneticians such
as von Foerster began to experiment in music, and as John Cage appeared in a scientific
journal, it seems worthwhile to extend the analysis of the science of cybernetics to its
migration into music.
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Christina Dunbar-Hester, Cornell University
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Geof Bowker notes that in the natural and social sciences, the language of cybernetics
could “be yanked out of one context…and plugged into another…with the translation
into the language of cybernetics doing the work of glossing the discontinuity” (1993:
116). The example of experimental music might be seen as an instance of cybernetic
language being “translated” into another context. Yet the example of experimental
music demonstrates that cybernetics was more than a universal language within the
sciences.
Cybernetic theories were capable of focusing potent anxiety about the future of
humankind generally. Following his World War II research, Norbert Wiener suffered
an acute crisis of faith over his participation in scientific research due to its potential
applications in wartime and wrote about these topics in his popular writings.
In the above applications, the issue of control is one that the artists approach with
ambivalence. It would seem that the attitude towards control is often a discourse that is
neither a “closed world” nor anxious one; instead the deliberate application of
cybernetics is more open and indeterminate. The possibility of openness that these
musicians and composers interpret to be part and parcel of cybernetics stands in contrast
to the “closed world” discussed by Edwards. The new possibilities afforded by
electronics and computers provided both a material and imaginary link for experimenters
interested in pursuing new structures and new sounds, but this was not focused only on
control.
In Cage’s writings, he moved freely between indeterminacy in society and in music.
Cybernetics may have offered a means to frame ambiguities, anxieties, and potentials.
Paul Edwards has referred to the “open horizon of an unpredictable and increasingly
complex postmodern world” (1996: 252); one wonders if Brian Eno may have been
referring to this issue when he titled a1978 album Before and After Science.v John Cage
stated, “Everything we do is music’” (Cage in Cope 1976: 197). Clearly, cybernetics was
more than science, as early as the 1950s, and certainly by the 1960s.
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Christina Dunbar-Hester, Cornell University
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For re:place conference, Berlin, November 2007
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Christina Dunbar-Hester, Cornell University
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i
An article-length version of this paper is available. Please email the author at cd92@cornell.edu.
Greenwald 1986: 57; Taylor 2001: 94. Often films would use acoustic/standard instruments for earth
settings and humans, and electronic sounds for space and space creatures; the Barrons ignored this
convention in this film.
iii
Here I wonder if Bebe is referring to Wiener’s discussion of animal reflexes and Pavlov’s research with
animals, Human Use of Human Beings (1954): 68-69. The first edition of Human Use of Human Beings
was actually published in 1950, not 1951 as Bebe stated.
iv
Thanks to Lee Klein for a conversation about this topic.
v
This album was more on the pop end of Eno’s work, but some of the lyrics were generated using what
Eno called “oblique strategies,” used to jog the mind during the process of generating music. The artwork
for this album was created by Eno’s artist friend Peter Schmidt, who shared an interest in working this way
and helped inspire Eno to create his deck of cards that contained the strategies. See MacDonald 1977.
ii
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