thomas patteson - the cybernetic music of roland kayn

7/28/2019 Thomas Patteson - The Cybernetic Music of Roland Kayn

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The Cybernetic Music of Roland Kayn by Thomas W. Patteson

One of the most fascinating and influential phenomena in the intellectual history of the

20th

century, the emergence of the discipline of cybernetics is generally dated from the

publication of Norbert Wiener's book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

in the historically convenient year of 1950. The word cyberntique had been introduced intomodern discourse in 1834, in the Essai sur la philosophie des sciences of Andr-Marie Ampre,

who used the word essentially as Plato had, referring to the art of governance; ironically, the

term would later find its primary application not in politics, but in the world of electronic

technologies which Ampre helped create. In its 20th-century incarnation, cybernetics

emerged out of World War II research using feedback loops to adjust missile trajectory, which

led to the so-called "cybernetic thesis" that the supposedly organic characteristics of purpose or

intention could be endowed to machines through processes of feedback and auto-regulation.

Bolstered by the diffusion of the electronic computer, cybernetics announced itself as the

centerpiece in a new economy of the sciences connected by the master concept of

information, whose dynamics, once understood, could model all the interactions existing in the

universe, from art to economics.1

Given the incredible cachet of Wieners book and the general mid-century enthusiasm

for the marriage of art and technology, it is not surprising that cybernetic thinking would find its

way into music. Indeed, it didnt take long:

the first application of cybernetic methods

to music was probably Louis and Bebe

Barron's soundtrack to the 1954 science-

fiction film Forbidden Planet, also notable

for being the first fully electronic cinematic

score. The Barrons built sound-producingelectronic circuits based on equations in

Wiener's book; the circuits melted down as

they intoned, but their output was

preserved on tape. Other composers who

used cybernetics or related concepts in the

50s and 60s include Iannis Xenakis, Herbert

Brn, Lejaren Hiller, and Pierre Barbaud. But perhaps the most sustained and thoroughgoing

musical engagement with cybernetic thought was that of Roland Kayn, a German composer

who in the late 1960s devoted himself to a distinctive kind of electronic composition he called,

explicitly, cybernetic music.

This project received its initial impulse in 1953, when Kayn, still a student, came in

contact with the philosopher Max Bense, who was a professor at the Technical University in

Stuttgart. Inspired by his reading of Wiener's book and by the 1946 unveiling of the worlds first

1See Geof Bowker, "How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-1970." Social Studies of Science 23

(1993), 107-27.


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general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC of

the University of Pennsylvania, Bense became among

the first to channel the primarily Anglophone

disciplines of cybernetics and information theory into

the intellectual bloodstream of the European

continent. But Benses real distinction lay in hisextension of cybernetic thinking to art and aesthetics.

Beginning in the late 1950s, he was active as a curator

of exhibitions of computer art and concrete poetry,

and he soon became the guru of the Stuttgart

School, an informal group of artists working in

various media who shared a vision of a new,

rationalized form of artistic expression made possible

by systems thinking and computer technology.2

Kayn spent three years in the Bense circle and was

deeply influenced by the experience. He later recounted, "At that time Bense's approach was

an important point of departure, because with his method of analysis, whether one was an

architect or a composer, one gained the ability to approach the creative engagement with the

material in an objective way."3

Benses aesthetic program is essentially an elaboration of a radical formalist position. In

contrast to the philosophical and speculative approach of traditional thinking, Benses method

aims to be scientific and empirical. He seeks not to explain the meaning of aesthetic objects by

relating them to an extra-aesthetic context, but rather to analyze works of art in terms of the

immanent formal properties of their medium. The goal ofinterpretation is to be replaced with

a project of research or determination.4

This distinction between traditional and modern

aesthetics is elsewhere presented by Bense as a contrast between macroaesthetics andmicroaesthetics. Macroaesthetics, identified with the traditional approach, is concerned with

the readily perceptible qualities of works of art, such as "proportion, form, and structure."

Microaesthetics, on the other hand, involves a quantitative or statistical approach to the work

of art that is abstracted from its perceptible surface. It is concerned with issues such as the

"frequency, probability, and distribution" of elements. Bense explicitly compares

microaesthetics to modern physics: just as particle physicists speak no longer of stable visible

objects, but of statistically determinable fields of relations, microaesthetics pursues patterns

and regularities lurking beneath the sensible surface of aesthetic phenomena.5

According to Bense, there are two distinct aspects of aesthetic work: the first is what hecalled analytical aesthetics, in which aesthetic information [is] described in abstract

(mathematical) terms. The second phase Bense called generative aesthetics, in deliberate (if

2Elisabeth Walther, Max Bense und die Kybernetik,Als Stuttgart Schule macht, 1999 (19 April 2010).3

Roland Kayn, Tektra, Colosseum LP COL 1479.4

Max Bense,Aesthetica. Einfhrung in die neue Aesthetik(Baden-Baden: Agis, 1965), 317-18.5

Bense, 140 ff.
http://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/bensekybernetik.htmhttp://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/bensekybernetik.htmhttp://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/bensekybernetik.htmhttp://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/bensekybernetik.htm


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imprecise) analogy to the generative grammar developed contemporaneously by Noam

Chomsky.6

This, strictly speaking a poetics or technique of artistic creation, Bense defines as

the artificial production of probabilities of innovation or deviation from the norm. Through

these methods, Bense believed that the improbability of aesthetic states can be produced

mechanically through a methodical combination of planning and chance. In this way the

demand which aesthetic objects have to satisfynamely, to be unpredictableis combinedprecisely with their planned construction.

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In this idea of planned unpredictability, which Bense elsewhere called the programming

of beauty, we find the first crucial influence on Kayns vision of cybernetic music. The second

was the formative potential offered by electronic sound production. Soon after his first

encounter with Bense, Kayn came into contact with Herbert Eimert at the Studio for Electronic

Music of Northwest German Radio in Cologne. Kayn was fascinated by what he heard, but he

found the studios dominant serialist aesthetic too restrictive. He visited other studios in the

following years, but he was consistently frustrated by the technological limitations he

encountered and was unable to realize any completed works. For the next ten years, Kayn

focused primarily on instrumental composition. In Berlin in the late 1950s he studied with Boris

Blacher, whose mathematical approach Kayn credited with pushing him toward statistical

composition. Around this time Kayn also took part for the first time in the Summer Courses in

Darmstadt, one of the major centers of the musical avant-garde in Europe. Several of Kayn's

works for piano, chamber ensemble, and orchestra would be premiered in Darmstadt in the

coming years.

The 1960s saw the emergence of what Kayn called his first instrumental-cybernetic

works, Galaxis andAllotropie in 1962 and 1964, respectively, showing that Kayns concept of

cybernetic music had to do with compositional methods that were not necessarily tied to

electronic sound production. But by this time, Kayn was moving further and further away fromconventional orchestral composition. In 1964, he joined the Gruppo d'Improvvisatione Nuova

Consonanza a Rome-based collective of composer-musicians dedicated to improvisatory

performance inspired by elements of free jazz, aleatoric music, and extended instrumental

technique. Nuova Consonanza was founded by the Italian composer Franco Evangelisti, who

envisioned collaborative improvisation as an escape from the dead end in which the classical

tradition found itself. Kayn's membership in the group thus signaled his growing dissatisfaction

with the avant-garde composed music scene. It also allowed for a deeper engagement with

the question of how to implement cybernetic methods in music. The concept was certainly in

the air at the time: Evangelisti even used the term "cybernetic" to describe the dynamics of

listening and reaction between the members in live performance. But Kayn became frustratedwith the group's lack of a theoretical foundation, which led to its members to fall back on

musical clichs. He left the group in 1968 and later attributed his departure to his inability to

introduce cybernetic methods into the group's improvisatory framework.8

6

Bense, 333.7

Bense, 337.8

Roland Kayn, Infra, Colosseum LP SM 1478.


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In the same year, Kayn completed his first cybernetic-electronic compositions, thus

inaugurating a new phase of work that would occupy his labors for the next decade. In 1970,

Kayn was invited to work at the electronic music studio of the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht

University in Holland. It was here that he realized the large-scale works that represent the

definitive emergence of Kayns cybernetic music. Kayn understood this as nothing less than anew stage in the development of electroacoustic art. He presented the history of the tradition

in five distinct phases, beginning in the early 20th

century and culminating with his own

contribution circa 1970:

Electro-instrumental music: extension and multiplication of the natural instrumental sounds by means of

electro-acoustic aggregates. Incorporation of new instrumental techniques of playing and articulation

Concrete music: studio processing of existing sounds and noises, also of instrumental and vocal origin

Electronic music: Electro-acoustic sound synthesis, obtained from electronic oscillation elements. Discovery

of new connections between material, time, structure, space

Computer music: Automation, chance, program. Logical and mathematical operations

Cybernetic music: process planning, feedback loops, control processes. Suspension of the opposition of

automatic (dead) and anthropoetic (living) systems9

By 1970, of course, the first three of these phases were already historical. Cybernetic music,

then, was defined primarily in opposition to computer music, which had emerged in the late

1950s and was seen by many as the future of the art. For Kayn, however, computer music was

merely an extension of an outdated, deterministic model of composition. Although computer-

programmed processes allowed for a more precise control of sound events, this way of working

was still based on the straightforward execution of directives, with the human performer more

or less replaced by the computer.

Cybernetic music, by comparison, involveswhat Kayn calls a "critical degree of indeterminacy"

established through the mutual influence of the

elements of the system, and thus allows for the

"programming of the unprogrammable." The non-

linearity of cybernetic "open systems" allows the

music to break out of the stability characteristic of additive functions, to perform "sudden

jumps" from one state to another.10

9

Roland Kayn, Simultan, Colosseum LP SM 1473.

What Kayn is evoking here is of course the fundamental

cybernetic concept of feedback. In its simplest form, this begets only cyclical variation

"negative feedback," which aims for equilibrium and stability, typified by the quotidian

technology of the thermostat. But the more information is introduced into the system, the

more unpredictable its behavior becomes. The interweaving of inputs and outputs creates

positive feedback, as signals crisscross the system and redouble upon themselves, causing

unforeseeable transformations: this brings about the immense expansion of the acoustic

10Roland Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte, Colosseum LP SM 1474.


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domainwhich can neither be imagined nor attained through other than by cybernetic

means.11

But this is all still rather abstract. How is this music made? A detailed technical

understanding of Kayn's working methods will have to await further study. Research on this

topic is virtually nonexistent, and Kayns own remarks are at best vaguely descriptive, at worstdeliberately opaque. Nonetheless, we can get a sense of how this music was created by

examining its technological basis. The key to Kayns cybernetic alternative to computer music

lies in the studio apparatus of the Institute of Sonology.12

Ironically, though the Institute would become well-known in the mid-1970s on the basis

of computer programs for algorithmic composition and digital sound synthesis developed by

Gottfried Michael Koenig, Barry Truax, and others, it was the studios analog equipment that

made possible Kayns long-awaited realization of cybernetic music. In the late 1960s, the studio

had been outfitted with a sophisticated voltage-control system consisting of independent

modular units, such as oscillators, filters, envelope generators, and logic circuits. At the center

of this configuration was a variable function generator, essentially a primitive sequencer that

could be programmed to store a series of voltages which were then used to control the various

components of the studio. Here was the configuration Kayn had been looking for: in Karlheinz

Essls words, with this equipment one could implement an algorithm that produced sound in

real time.13

Thus Kayn could map out scenarios whose results would be neither fully random

nor fully predetermined, but rather guided or steered in the etymological spirit of

cybernetics. The complexity of the studio allowed him to create configurations whose

development was unforeseeable on the basis of its initial conditions, which included everything

from the fundamental sound material, which determines the sonic character of the music, to

the systems of interconnections and feedback loops, which governed in a general way how the

piece would unfold.

Gottfried Michael Koenig, who had become artistic director of the Institute in 1964,

composed what are likely the closest genetic relations to Kayns cybernetic music, a set of eight

Funktionen (Functions) from 1967 to 1969. Koenig used the function generator to automate

the production of sound material by applying its control signals to various inputs and recording

the results, which were later spliced together to form completed compositions. But while

Koenigs use of the studio involved elements of both cybernetic sound creation and traditional

studio composition, Kayn went a step further and reduced the process to a single continuous

gesture. The musicologist Frans van Rossum describes Kayns compositional method:

11Kayn, Tektra.

12This studio has a complicated history: it began in 1956 as the part of the Philips Research Laboratory in

Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In 1960, Philips decided it no longer wanted the studio, which was transferred to

Utrecht University, where it became known as STEM (Studio for Electronic Music). In 1964, Gottfried Michael

Koenig took over as director of STEM, where he implemented a program of production, education, and research.

In 1967 it was renamed the Institute of Sonology.13

Karlheinz Essl, Algorithmic composition, in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, ed. Nick Collins and

Julio dEscrivn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 123.


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[Kayn's] electronic pieces start by defining

a network of electronic equipment. The

nature of the network, and its inherent

potential, play a large role in determining

the audible result. Next, the composer

collates the basic information about thisnetwork and develops a system of signals

or commands that it can obey and execute.

These have to be incorporated in a system

of controllers, adjustments, and operations

which can realize the composition. This

demanding work may take years of

construction and tests, and when the

system is activated, the resulting

composition is recorded to tape only once

from the beginning to the end.14

The integrity of the cyberneticprocess is thus of paramount

importance in Kayns music. As Van

Rossum describes it, The composer

presents his music as an artifice

which he constructs and sets in

motion, but once he has done this,

it is left to move through space, a

'free' music, which, like the fabric of

the cosmos, follows its own internal

laws and conditions.15

Here we

touch on the paradox at the heart

of Kayns work: this music, though

created through the most elaborate

technological artifice, is meant to

approximate the state of nature

entirely apart from human intervention. Kayn asserts that the electronic system develops a

sort of capacity to think for itself, a capacity which in a sense can be described as artificial

intelligence. Existential Being, as it were, takes the place of a logically functioning

consciousness.16

Art appears not as a means of subjective expression, as an externalization of

the human, but rather as a mode of knowledge, something like the act of epistemological

unveiling that Heidegger identified as the essence of technology. 17

14

Frans van Rossum, liner notes for Roland Kayn, Tektra, Barooni CD BAR 016.

There is an affinity here,

15Van Rossum.

16Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte.

17See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David

Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 283-317. The idea of an undetermined music, trans-human and

autonomous, has of course always haunted the human imagination. Are Kayns cybernetic configurations, with

their banks of tone generators and nests of cables, the Aeolian harps of the information age? This notion seems to


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as well, with the American live electronics school that formed in the late 1960s around David

Tudor, which shared with Kayn the project of exploring what Nick Collins has called the music

implicitin technology.18

The impulse toward what could be called epistemic listening is reinforced by Kayns

discursive framing of his work. Many of his compositions bear programs which relate the musicto its underlying generative principle: in a recursive fashion, the music is about the process of

its own creation. For example, Kayn states that his composition Entropy PE 31 (1967-70)

provokes a new kind of listening behavior in that the traditional structuring of time as a

process of 'running down' is suspended. Time seems to stand still, then suddenly to be set in

motion again in the form of a process of winding up.

19

The characteristic impression made on the listener by sound events which arise in this way seems to be

one of simultaneity or dependence between control structures and program structures-- that is, the fact

that the process of creation is integrated into the acoustic supersignal, and remains transparent. The

control structure lies within the range of audibility, thereby forming an integral component of the

generating process. The listener is thus able to follow the compositional process as it develops; the

acoustic construct is hence made more lucid and more of a total auditory experience for the listenerthe

acoustic sphere is, so to speak, socialized.

In Eon (1975), a work based on the

nonlinear effects created by overloading an amplitude filter with signals from the variable

function generator, the distorted song of circuits fluctuates between states of relative chaos

and order, seeming to break down and reconstitute itself through the blind groping of a quasi-

evolutionary sentience. According to Kayn, the generative self-formation of cybernetic music

should be reflected in the act of perception:

20

Like minimalist composers, Kayn intends for the generative process behind the music to be

perceptually salient. But while the process in minimalist music generally unfolds in a linear

fashion from an initial temporal disjunction, Kayns notion of process encompasses not only

growth-like accumulations but also the sudden leaps typical of the nonlinear interactionsgenerated by positive feedback loops. The emphasis on perceptible process is thus integrated

with the idea of planned improbability absorbed from Max Bense: in this way Kayn mediates

between the poetics of complexity and the aesthetics of communication.

In spite of Kayns engagement with many of the major musical currents of his time, and

the radical implications of his work for some the basic categories of Western musical thought,

Kayn remains a musicological nonentity. He is nowhere to be found in histories of electronic

music. His music is unavailable even in most university libraries, and circulates today largely

through the efforts of an online community of enthusiasts who traffic in digitized MP3 versions

of out-of-print LPs of Kayns music from the 1970s. This obscurity is all the more perplexing

considering the undeniable affinities connecting Kayn with later trends, from live computer

accord with the sonorous character of much of Kayns music, which for van Rossum evokes a continually changing

resonating structure, while Massimo Ricci refers to the tonal instability, that familiar slow oscillation that seems

to be the anima mundiin Kayns work.18

Nicolas Collins, Live electronic music, in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, 46.19

Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte.20

Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte.


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music based on cybernetic principles (for example, The League of Automatic Music Composers)

to the emergence of drone-based, ambient, and generative musics, whose characteristic

textures were first explored in Kayns work. Like cybernetics itself, Kayns music has not gone

silent, but rather seeped insidiously into the sonic bloodstream of the information age.

The Cybernetic Music of Roland Kayn by Thomas W. Patteson is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at thomaspatteson.com.

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thomas patteson - the cybernetic music of roland kayn

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