Book

In The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America, I ask: what can a black box do for a composer? What can a composer do with a black box? These intertwined questions have fueled nearly a century of musical and technical experimentation. I explore some of the earliest approaches to these questions in the mid-1960s in my first book, forthcoming from the University of California Press. 

From their website: 

Stories about new musical instruments are often told as quests for new kinds of sounds. The Composer's Black Box asks, What happens when new musical instruments produce not only new sounds but also new dynamics of musical agency and control? And what consequences do those new dynamics have for musicality beyond sound? With a focus on five key figures—Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, Donald Buchla, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra—this book explores how scientific and technological developments in mid-twentieth-century America galvanized musicians to reconfigure their conceptions of sociality, freedom, and the creative self. Theodore Gordon shows how cybernetic thinking in a range of disciplines, from experimental music to jazz and electrical engineering, shaped musical techniques and technologies and changed what it means to be a composer—or, more broadly, a music-making human—in an increasingly informational world.

The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America


Book Chapter

“The Buchla Music Easel: From Cyberculture to Market Culture,” in Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People, edited by Ezra J. Teboul, Andreas Kitzmann, and Einar Engström.
In this book chapter I map the short life and long afterlife of one of the most mythologized instrument designs of the late Donald Buchla, the Buchla Music Easel, from its emergence in early 1970s Californian cyberculture to its re-emergence in the “analog revival” of the 2010s. In addition to documenting the genesis of the instrument, this chapter also offers a critique of the instrument’s libidinal economy in the neoliberal synthesizer marketplace. 
Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People


Article

‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation

Contemporary Music Review Vol. 40, Issue 4, 2021

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pauline Oliveros developed new techniques for improvising with new electronic instruments, which she described using language and metaphors from cybernetics and information theory. First using just a tape recorder, and later using a series of tape recorders connected to an unstable pair of oscillators, Oliveros created what she later called a ‘very unstable nonlinear musicmaking system’ (Oliveros, Pauline. 2016a. “Improvising Composition: How to Listen to the Time Between.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian H. Siddall, and Ellen Waterman, 75–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). By positioning herself as only one member of an instrumental system that facilitated the self-regulating flow of sound as signal—operating as air pressure waves, electrical waves, psychoacoustic phenomena, and even human consciousness—Oliveros began to reconceptualize the role of her body in musical performance. By the early 1970s, Oliveros began to embrace the new kinds of musical performance and musical subjectivities produced by this system as a part of her exploration of gender in music, positing the concept of ‘androgynous music’—defined as music that is simultaneously ‘linear’ and ‘nonlinear’. Oliveros thought of her performance practice as one that could destabilise socially constructed musical identities of composition, performance, and listening, and also integrate different modalities of interacting with musical ‘signal’. This article maps Oliveros’s cybernetic, improvisatory practices with her earliest electronic systems, showing how her performance within these systems laid the groundwork for her later theorisations of technology, gender, and the body.


‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation


Interview

Tom Erbe Interviewed by Ted Gordon
Organised Sound, Volume 27 Issue 1, 2022


In this interview, Tom Erbe reflects on his three decades as a developer of computer music software and hardware, both freeware and commercial. Tom met with Theodore Gordon on 8 December 2021 and discussed the beginnings of SoundHack and its roots in experimental music studio practice and hacker culture, ideas behind the design of sound processor interface and the shift from experimental software development to Eurorack modular hardware design.

Tom Erbe Interviewed by Ted Gordon



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