Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950-1980 by Christine Dunbar-Hester. This text was presented at re:place the second conference on the histories of media, art, science and technology - November 15-18 2007.

From the abstract: 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.

The entire paper is available in the Media Art History Archives.