Recursions : Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective

24-25 October 2019, Edinburgh
Deadline: 30 April 2019
St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh
Convened by Patrick Valiquet & Christopher Haworth
Keynote presentation by Eric A Drott

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. 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.

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.

Presenters will have 30 minutes plus 15 minutes discussion time.

Send proposals (250-300 words) to Patrick.Valiquet -at- ed.ac.uk

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