Music and the Cybernetic Mundane

Abstract

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.