The Brain at Work: Cognitive Labor and the Posthuman Brain in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (original) (raw)
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Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, 2021
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. 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. 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. Some believed that the superdiscipline could contribute to a postwar "Unity of Science" movement based on the universal concepts of information, feedback, and homeostasis, and in this way we can see cybernetics as aligned with supranational efforts to restore and protect liberalism following the war. Yet scholarship of the past 30 years has suggested that it was via its extrascientific mediation that cybernetics secured such a foothold in the 20th-and 21st century imagination. 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." 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, 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. It is precisely the aspiration to universalism that makes musical cybernetics difficult to analyze.
Music and the Cybernetic Mundane
Resonance, 2021
Few intellectual movements have been as influential as cybernetics was in the 1950s and ’60s. Fewer still have seen their stock fall so precipitously in the years since. Despite the growing body of literature that has reassessed this postwar “cybernetics moment” (Hayles, Kline, Pickering, Medina, et al.), its far-reaching impact remains curiously underappreciated, especially as regards music. This article seeks to redress this neglect, by focusing not on works and practices that spectacularize cybernetics (the “cybernetic sublime”), but instead on those activities, discourses, and projects that so thoroughly internalized and normalized the cybernetic ethos that it eludes notice (the “cybernetic mundane”). A first case study considers the little-known role played by information theory and cybernetics in the design of the RCA Synthesizer, one of the first instruments of its ilk to be developed. Among other things, I contend that cybernetic thinking pervaded the instrument’s conception to such an extent that it paradoxically contributed to the subsequent erasure of its influence from accounts of the instrument’s development and subsequent implementation as part of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. The second case concerns more recent applications of cybernetic ideals to digital music distribution, exemplified by the platform Spotify, whose routinization of these ideals has ensured not just their persistence, but their persistent misrecognition.
Introduction to Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman
2023
An engaging argument about what experimental music can tell us about being human. In Experimenting the Human, G Douglas Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to the contemporary posthuman, a condition in which science and technology decenter human agency amid the uneven temporality of postwar global capitalism. Time moves forward for some during this period, while it seems to stand still or even move backward for others. Some say we’re already posthuman, while others endure the extended consequences of never having been considered fully human in the first place. Experimental music reflects on this state, Barrett contends, through its interdisciplinary involvements in postwar science, technology, and art movements. Rather than pursuing the human’s beyond, experimental music addresses the social and technological conditions that support such a pursuit. Barrett locates this tendency of experimentalism throughout its historical entanglements with cybernetics, and in his intimate analysis of Alvin Lucier’s neurofeedback music, Pamela Z’s BodySynth performances, Nam June Paik’s musical robotics, Pauline Oliveros’s experiments with radio astronomy, and work by Laetitia Sonami, Yasunao Tone, and Jerry Hunt. Through a unique meeting of music studies, media theory, and art history, Experimenting the Human provides fresh insights into what it means to be human.
In this presentation I address the phenomenon of prosthetics in music to outline aesthetic and phenomenological facets of a more-than-human music making. I begin by reconsidering the ostensible emergence of prosthetics and the creative machine in the contemporary historiography of art; rerouting and repositioning the existence of these apparatuses into the stream of technological dependencies that leads back to the earliest periods of human civilization. I point my magnifying glass at selected features of collaborative hybridizations between humans and machines in contemporary arts. My phenomenological inquiry involves a qualitative content analysis of works from artists selected for their contribution to the fields of more-than-human and cybernetically enhanced organisms. I begin my inspection of the humanmachine relationship with Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: the Iron Man. I then proceed to a series of experiments in body modification performance art: Stelarc’s body prosthetics, and the bio-art of Marion Laval-Jeantet. I conclude with Alvin Lucier’s composerly experiments in psychoacoustics, particularly his Music for Solo Performer from 1965. This investigation addresses a vast and uninterrupted discourse generated by the rhizomatic interconnectedness of techne, music, art, and the human body.
2024 New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), 2024
The article about the work-in-progress outlines the practice of braincomputer interfacing for music-making. While the history of the practice is not yet written, the surge of interest in bio-media technologies calls for genealogical and theoretical consideration of biofeedback music. Deeming the inward-directed critique necessary for the evolution of the discipline, I would like to intervene and attempt to historicize the artistic uses of BCMIthus, to raise awareness of the genealogy of the practice and encourage reflection on contribution of a new work in the advancement of art and research. Analyzing 50 years of David Rosenboom's practice of biofeedback music, I intend to a) discuss the key technological and theoretical advancements that informed composer's view on BCMI as an artistic and research (hybrid) practice; b) based on the pioneer's work, offer takeaways that other artists and researchers may take advantage of; and c) suggest further steps to be taken in scholarly scrutiny of biofeedback music.
Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer: Experimental music beyond sonification
Organised Sound, 2014
Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer(1965), often referred to as the ‘brain wave piece’, has become a key work of experimental music. Its setup, in which the brain waves of a solo performer are made to excite percussion instruments, has given the work a central place in the discourse on artistic sonification. However, only a small number of the authors making reference to the work seem to have studied the score, and even fewer have given thought to the score's implications for performance practice and aesthetic reflection. This paper pays detailed attention to these yet overlooked aspects, drawing on accounts of early performances as well as the authors’ participation in a 2012 performance led by the composer. We also trace the history of live-electronic equipment used for Music for Solo Performer and discuss the work's reception in sonification research.
"HARMONY AND DISSONANCE": THE MUSICAL PERSPECTIVE ON POSTHUMANITY
2019
The paper explores the role of music as a communicative tool between the human and the posthuman. It utilizes the theories of embodiment and perfomativity of Karen Barad and Deniz Peters, as well as the perspectives of Continental Realism and contemporary phenomenology (Serres, Merleau-Ponty, Harman, Morton). The examples are drawn from a range of speculative fiction: dystopia, biopunk and science-fiction. It is shown that the authors bring to attention the enharmonic quality of the relationship between the ALife and its creators and advocate the eupsychian coexistence between these, portraying posthumanity as musicaficta: the sounds without notation that, although not recognized by musica recta ("true music"), make the invisible part of the reality outside the currently described systems.
Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance: Hope in a Posthuman Landscape
American Society for Theatre Research Conference “Hope” Providence, Rhode Island, November 9–12, 2023
What is hope in a posthuman framework? A posthuman lens asks us to account for the material reality of our history, present environment, and future entanglements between human and non-human agents. Rosi Braidotti calls for an “affirmative politics” as an element of posthuman subjectivity: “We should approach our historical contradictions not as some bothersome burden, but rather as the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative and hopeful future, even if this approach requires some drastic changes to our familiar mindsets and established values” (Posthuman Knowledge, 2019). In line with this call toward drastic changes in perception, we focus on less visible human/non-human alliances. We invite participants to consider the following questions in relation to the conference theme: • How can a posthuman perspective highlight the complexity of collaborations or interferences between human and non-human agents involved in the creation and sustaining of hope? • Historically, what imagined performances or practices hoped for in the past are possible now thanks to the availability of new technologies and other non-human collaborators, or remain as yet utopian and unrealized? • What are the material networks that construct the affective response of hope, in and outside of the performance space? • How do performances or play texts point to hope for a peaceful cohabitation with and reciprocal improvement of human and non-human entities, at all levels of intelligence, from nature to AI-driven robots or other technologies? • What are other possible sides to hope, such as hope for the end of unwanted and destructive assemblages with agents like viruses or pollution? • Certain posthuman thought focuses on being after or without the human, where the human becomes obsolete. What is hope, without the presence of humans? • What new configurations of assemblages between humans and non-humans do you hope to manifest? Continuing the generative meeting of the 2022 working group, we invite scholars interested in reframing current theatre studies methodologies to attend to a broader spectrum of non-human actors and the crucial ways they exert agency in the performance event. We invite participants to think broadly about a variety of agents such as everyday and performing objects, robots, machines, technology, algorithms, media, natural phenomena, hyperobjects, microbes, assemblages, ensembles, institutions, capital, historical events, religion, ideology, audiences, or affect. We hope to provide a forum for discussing works-in-progress, posthumanist theoretical frameworks, and methodologies such as Actor-Network Theory, Assemblage Theory, New Materialism, Feminist New Materialism, Object Oriented Ontology, Flat Ontologies, Ecology, Dramaturgy. We ask participants to submit abstracts of their research. We will then place participants in small groups organized around themes in order to share drafts of works-in-progress for feedback prior to the working group meeting. In addition, before we meet, each participant will prepare an introduction to one other paper in their subgroup in order to facilitate conversation. When we gather, we will allow these introductions to forge connections and aim for an organic discussion with group members and observers. We will conclude by articulating a series of questions and gathering resources that can drive our investigations forward.