Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Introduction| December 01 2021 Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective: (Introduction to the special issue edited by Christopher Haworth and Eric Drott) Christopher Haworth Christopher Haworth Christopher Haworth is senior lecturer in music at the University of Birmingham. He researches contemporary and historical electronic musics as they are practiced, theorized, taught, and experienced, using a range of historical, ethnographic, interpretive, and data-driven methods. Christopher is PI on the AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship Music and the Internet: Towards a Digital Sociology of Music, and he is currently working on a monograph and edited collection stemming from the project. Although primarily a musicologist these days, he also composes and performs electronic music when he gets the opportunity. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Resonance (2021) 2 (4): 461–474. https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2021.2.4.461 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher Haworth; Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective: (Introduction to the special issue edited by Christopher Haworth and Eric Drott). Resonance 1 December 2021; 2 (4): 461–474. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2021.2.4.461 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentResonance Search 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... You do not currently have access to this content.