2010 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Geeta Dayal

Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World, a book on Brian Eno (Continuum, 2009). She has written about music, art, and science for numerous publications. She lives in Boston.Panel(s):
Mad Scientists
Friday, April 16, 2010, 9:00 - 10:30Abstract:

"Brian Eno, Cybernetics, and The Studio as a Musical Instrument"
Some of the most interesting technological innovations in popular music didn''t have to do with a particular machine, but the idea of a machine. In this paper, I''ll talk about how cybernetics -- the study of systems -- inspired Brian Eno''s pioneering work in the recording studio in the 1970s.

Cybernetics was famously defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as the science of "control and communication, in the animal and the machine." Cybernetic systems were used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success – factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Eno was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s.

Eno first became exposed in cybernetics as an art school student in the 1960s. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno''s thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno''s favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go."

How did ideas from cybernetics inspire Eno, and others, in the recording studio? How did this concept of a system -- the idea of a machine -- inspire them to conceptualize the process of making music in a different way?