Organisation and Sound: environmental systems in experimental music

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Copyright: Thompson, Nathan
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Abstract
This thesis investigates how composers and artists have used self-organising systems to respond to nature. In particular, it examines how Cybernetic concepts used to describe the natural world entered experimental music between 1950 and 1970 through the compositions of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier. This research brings these observations into the contemporary context by exploring emergence and self-organisation through sound installations that combine steel, transducers and electricity to create adaptive audio feedback compositions. These installations produce sound from a recursive relationship between their networked materials and their spatial environment. In the 1950s cybernetic theorists Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson defined life by its ability to organise contingently and separated it from a world understood in terms of forces and impacts; according to Wiener Cybernetics began with the study of these isolated pockets of organisation. This organisation was defined through feedback and homeostasis and supported by physical systems that impacted conceptually and technically on the ways in which Cage, Tudor and Lucier developed compositions in response to nature. Their systems-based compositions not only introduced the sounds of the world back into music but produced sounds independent of the composer and the performer. In the process they placed an emphasis on listening to the systems that composed the environment. If, as Bruno Latour states, “we have no direct access to nature”, then artists and musicians have the potential to broaden our vision of nature. This thesis expands on this possibility by looking at the legacy of systems-based approaches to nature in the works of artists who have explored specific aspects of self-organisation. Included in this discussion are Maryanne Amacher, Nicolas Collins, Ted Kruger, Felix Hess and Allan Lamb. Their works contribute to a broader picture of nature through compositions and experiments that explore perceptual connections to the environment. Overall the thesis examines how Cybernetics’ emphasis on the organisational properties of nature has pervaded experimental music and asserts that this organisational approach contributes to a specific understanding of what nature might be.
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Author(s)
Thompson, Nathan
Supervisor(s)
Kelly, Caleb
Munster, Anna
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Publication Year
2017
Resource Type
Thesis
Degree Type
PhD Doctorate
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download public version.pdf 2.26 MB Adobe Portable Document Format
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