[AUDITORY] CFP: Recursions - Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective

[VALIQUET Patrick <patrick.valiquet@xxxxxxxx>]

Recursions: Music and Cybernetics in Historical Perspective
St Cecilia’s Hall, University of Edinburgh

Patrick Valiquet (Edinburgh) & Christopher Haworth (Birmingham), convenors
Keynote presentation by Eric A Drott (UT Austin)

Symposium date: 24-25 October 2019
CFP deadline: 30 April 2019

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 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 Patrick.Valiquet@xxxxxxxx by 30 April 2019. A programme
will be announced in mid June.
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.