*Recursions: Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective*
St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh
Keynote presentation by Eric A Drott (UT Austin)
Symposium date: 24-25 October 2019
CFP deadline: 30 April 2019
https://recursions.org/
Cybernetic thinking, engineering and pedagogy left indelible marks on the
progressive arts and sciences of the late twentieth century. There is now
widespread recognition of the role cybernetics played in inspiring many
Cold War composers and improvisers, from Cagean experimentalists and
Schaefferian acousmaticians to afrofuturists, conceptual artists, ravers
and psychedelic rockers. Less widely acknowledged is the extent to which
cybernetics shaped the epistemology of late twentieth century music
theoretical, pedagogical and ethnographic research, including early
iterations of what is now called sound studies, notably in the work of
Jacques Attali, Christopher Small, Barry Truax, Charles Keil and Steven
Feld. In fact, the impact of cybernetic principles and methodologies on our
understanding of music and musicality is ongoing. They permeate the
management and outreach discourse of the institutions that support music
and music research. They lie at the foundation of recent accounts of
cognition and brain function involving predictive processing, dynamic
systems theory, and ecological models linking perception with action. They
are even gaining a significant foothold in the study of music history, both
directly in the computational techniques reshaping corpus studies and
network analysis, and indirectly through the ideas of communication and
social theorists like Friedrich Kittler, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Serres and
Bruno Latour.
Assessments of the political and scientific value of cybernetics have been
as varied as its applications. On one hand, it has been said to offer an
open, nondualist alternative to the ontology of modern science (Pickering
2010). On the other, it seems to create the conditions for a permanent
revitalization of the modern project, optimizing life, knowledge and
society in terms of automated information exchange (Tiqqun 2001).
We seek to gather researchers interested in cultivating a deeper
understanding of the ways cybernetics, systems theory and information
theory have informed musical practice, theory, policy and industry since
the Second World War, with a particular emphasis on perspectives from
cultural, social and intellectual history. We are especially interested in
proposals that expand the framework of normal musicological inquiry to
encompass: the role of cybernetics and information theory in constructions
of race, gender, sexuality and/or ability; connections between music and
other cultural or scientific practices; ideas and practices inherited from
the work of 19th and early 20th century educationalists, scientists and
spiritualists; and connections with the management of decolonization and
deindustrialization in science, culture and education policy at local,
national and/or international levels.
Presenters will be allotted 30 minutes each plus 15 minutes discussion
time. Proposals of 250-300 words should be submitted as pdf of docx
attachments to [log in to unmask] by 30 April 2019. A programme will
be announced in mid June.
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