How Cybernetic Thinking Reshaped Music Creation

Lift the arm of a double pendulum until your fingertips hover just above the perpendicular, to roughly sixty degrees. Let it fall under its own weight. As gravity takes hold, the downward motion sets the second arm into a randomised pattern. The movement is beautiful: endlessly changing, always original, like a perfectly formed work of art. A double pendulum is mechanically simple — it merely adds one extra element to a single pendulum. Yet the difference is extreme. The straightforward back-and-forth motion of a single pendulum suddenly becomes a random, multidirectional machine. For Brian Eno, this device helped illustrate the fundamental ideas behind cybernetic systems theory.

Cybernetics was central to Eno’s art college education. It shaped his production and composition processes, imbued his major works, and holds promising lessons for music educators — especially those teaching songwriting. His first encounter with system-based creation came in 1964 when he accidentally enrolled on Roy Ascott’s revolutionary Groundcourse in the fine art department at Ipswich Civic College. Under Ascott, Eno later recalled, “the first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation.” The course helped Eno define himself and his future “interest in systems, creative problem solving and thinking pan-culturally across the arts and sciences.” It also sparked his “fascination in the connection between intellect and intuition” and his habit of producing complex results from simple, defined processes.

Eno’s albums were shaped by these ideals in both composition and production. A thorough examination of his work within Higher Popular Music Education (HPME) is long overdue. Music journalist Paul Morley captured Eno’s influence by listing My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Byrne and Eno), Fear of Music (Talking Heads), We Are Not Men (Devo), Achtung Baby (U2), Low (Bowie), and For Your Pleasure (Roxy Music) as his six favourite Eno-inspired albums — and then admitting these might actually be his six favourite rock albums overall.

Every one of those records contains elements that represent paradigm shifts in late twentieth-century popular music, both in composition and production. They demonstrate principles of change where non-hierarchical concepts challenged established music-making hierarchies. The authentic auteur gave way to a collaborative, self-determining creative group operating through systematised processes — processes that could be explored productively in songwriting education to examine how hierarchies shape relationships among band members and with audiences.

Ascott saw the changes sweeping through art and was energised by new technologies and a turn toward thought processes rather than specific techniques. He argued that “a shift of human interest is from the thing, the object, the product, to the process, the system, the event in which the product is obtained.” By the mid-1960s, a wave of UK Art Schools supported exploration of creative processes, reflecting postmodernism’s growing influence. Traditional artistic ideals gave way to conceptual art, op art, and pop art (Ehrenzweig 1967; Madge and Weinberger 1973; Tickner 2008). The artist’s role was rethought, connecting to the “low” art ideals of pop music where traditional musicianship mattered less than the concept (Frith and Horne 1987; Bracewell 2007). Ascott’s 1967 manifesto Behaviourables and Futuribles laid out the philosophy behind his teaching: “When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.”

The art school revolution

The Coldstream Report of 1960 added regulations but also gave UK Art Schools freedom over course content and structure, enabling many creative classroom experiments (Banks and Oakley 2016; Westley cited in Llewellyn et al. 2015). The traditional “life room,” where students developed figurative techniques by drawing the human body, began to disappear. It was replaced by experimental workshops — Roy Ascott’s Groundcourse and Peter Kardia’s Locked Room being key examples. In these spaces, concept and process mattered more than product or artefact. Pop art, formal abstraction, minimalism, and performance art rose in importance, so that “in practice, this avant-gardism was supported by the state” (Westley cited in Llewellyn et al. 2015: 56). Colleges that embraced experimentation reflected a pedagogical ethos “in which process, imagination and spontaneity were elevated over technique” (Charnley 2015: 1).

The sound studio became another creative space — a place to sculpt with sound. Collage techniques introduced by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy into photography and other art forms at the Bauhaus helped redefine art. Tape machines gave music artists a medium to transform sound. For a visual and audio artist like Brian Eno — a self-proclaimed non-musician — this was an extraordinary opportunity. He drew inspiration from experimental artist-musicians like Jean Dubuffet, John Cage, and Cornelius Cardew, who redefined music so that “all sound, all manipulation of sound, was of interest, as was silence, quietness and self-generating not-quite-repetition” (Hegarty 2007: 93). For songwriters and composers inspired by the art college avant-garde, minimalist ideals opened a new field that relied less on technical accomplishments. Repetition of sound, rather than harmonic or melodic shifts, became the key ingredient. The non-musician needed to “create parameters, set it off, see what happens” (Eno quoted in Sheppard 2008: 55). Steve Reich’s 1968 text Music as a Gradual Process was a key document, centred on the systematic development of compositional process. Within this system, chance became an additional compositional element, along with trusting the listener to untangle the complexity hidden in minimalist simplicity.

The process in action

Roy Ascott declared that “audience expects, not a fixed attitude or viewpoint to the work, but a field of uncertainty and ambiguity in which they can, endlessly take part” (Shanken 2015: 66). In this postmodern ideal, the musician collaborates with the listener. Creative process becomes “a shift of human interest … from the thing, the object, the product, to the process, the system, the event in which the product is obtained” (Shanken 2015). This alteration of hierarchy was central to cybernetics. It became a focus for popular musicians like David Byrne and Eno (Steenstra 2010), who were inspired by minimalist composers Reich and Philip Glass. These system-based ideals remain part of Ascott’s pedagogical approach on the Technoetic Arts courses at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art (Ascott 2017).

The Bristol-based improvisational group Marcy exemplifies cybernetic principles of system and control in composition. Their performances are random, without any discussion of genre or instrumentation. Planning is limited to arranging venue and performance times. Their work constantly teeters on the edge; risk-taking is a core concept. They set the double pendulum in motion, let it swing under its own gravitational pull, and allow randomised chaos to unfold within a system of samplers, effects, microphones, and everyday objects that define the boundaries in which the three musicians operate. There is no hierarchy. The music unfolds with power and rawness. This is art in the spirit of John Cage or the 1960s Fluxus group, showing, as performance artist Allan Kaprow might have said, that the artist’s motivations and values carry revolutionary potential: “Innocence, imagination, intuition, pride, passion, courage, endurance, independence, freedom, recklessness, adventure.” These revolutionary creators believed that if you maintained allegiance to these principles, you could remain creative throughout your life (Filiou 1970: 42).

John Conway’s Game of Life (1970) embodies cybernetic game principles that Ascott sought from his students. It revolved around pre-programmed computer data consisting of cells that transformed from single into multiple bodies through simple mathematical rules. Depending on these algorithms, cell growth related to the data already provided, replicating the systemic notion of complexity arising from simplicity (Sheppard 2008: 304). This cell development exemplifies the non-hierarchical standpoint central to cybernetic principles: the system is linear and feeds back into itself. Eno explains with reference to classical music:

Well there is god, who inspires the composer, the composer passes that music down to the conductor. These are all sort of diminishing god-like figures. Then there are the leaders of the orchestra, the second section principles, sub principles, down to the people in the back row of the second violin, the ones who scrape away. But that picture of organisation, everything went in that direction (drawing downward lines); the power is at the top, power and intelligence is at the top and it diffuses down. […] What we started to learn with cybernetics was that first of all, all of these different nodes are not connected in a chain like that, but they are complexly cross connected […] you suddenly got used to the idea of an ecology […]. It doesn’t mean that all these nodes are necessarily important, or strong or substantial or whatever, but it does mean that they are connected in very complicated ways, and that they are inherently chaotic.

Nature and organic form

Growth patterns in nature also reveal cybernetic processes that are organic and complex. Pioneering pop artist Richard Hamilton, following on from Paul Klee and Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus, was deeply influenced by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917). This book examined the biology and mathematics of nature’s mechanics. For artists, its appeal lay in the form and function embedded in natural beauty (Romans 2005: 200). It was the patterns and systematised life processes visible in nature that attracted artists like Hamilton: beauty was bound up with systems of growth. This work informed his philosophies of creative development, including the idea that an effective drawing could serve as a diagram of thought processes (Romans 2005: 207).

Ascott absorbed these ideas during his time with Hamilton and Victor Pasmore at Kings College, Newcastle, and encouraged his own students to produce progressive, diagrammatic descriptions of their artistic development. Fellow key Art School pedagogue Tom Hudson, who taught at Leeds and Cardiff colleges of art, asked students to create an “idea sheet” — a diagrammatic flow of ideas across the page. The process itself, rather than any “artyness,” was what mattered. He called these “research explorations” (Tibbetts 2014: 214). Clifford Ellis, director at Bath Academy of Art, “built up a considerable collection of natural specimens for students to study, and encouraged the development of a visual biology laboratory run by Geoffrey Spencer for the benefit of art and education students” (Yeomans 1987: 278). Harry Thubron, also at Leeds Art School, believed examining the natural world was essential because it taught observation, analysis, and synthesis of information — a lesson visible when watching flowers gradually decay over time.

Eno’s album Ambient 4: On Land, released in March 1982, reflects nature and systematised construction processes:

The album suggests an environmental re-creation as much as a music composition. This is the mystery of Eno’s work: presented as art, yet calling into question the very nature of art, Eno’s compositions encourage listeners to reappraise their understanding of music and the uses of music.

(Albiez and Pattie 2016: 103)

The sounds resonate with Eno’s life and influences. The track “The Lost Day” includes noises that evoke the metallic ropes of sailing boats clanging together — sounds he remembered from childhood in Suffolk (Pattie and Albiez 2016: 2). The music takes its cue from, and becomes indistinguishable from, the background. Eno attended Winchester College of Art in 1966, finding a more traditional academy-style Art School compared to Ipswich, with more focus on the finished product. This did not sway him from his attention to process. He created a Drip event that combined music and art: “it made the most beautiful, delicate noise” (Scroates 2013: 36). Water dripped through tubes onto various objects, producing a range of varied sounds, with the river bubbling in the background (Scroates 2013). The music played at a lower level, and the background ambience became part of the evolving sound — always different, repetitive, and connected — echoing the influence of Erik Satie’s “Furniture Music” (Scroates 2013: 120).

Cybernetics and creative practice

Ascott discussed how cybernetics was fundamentally about change, and this idea was central to his pedagogical philosophy (Lambert 2017: 51). As a systems-based process, it applies across disciplines, including all creative arts. Ascott saw it as a fitting framework for art education — a replacement for the traditional life room — because of its focus on “change, interaction and dynamics” (Ascott 2017). Philosopher Marshall McLuhan (1964) helped disseminate ideas from cybernetics-based systems as an influence on 1960s and 1970s conceptual art. The notion that “the medium is the message” permeates many areas, making the packaging of a message crucial. McLuhan recognised the importance of individuals within cybernetic systems and contributed to universally held media theory. Feedback is important and adaptable: the individual within the system can manipulate and develop it within its framework, updating the Bauhaus doctrine that “art and production can be reunited only by accepting the machine and subjugating it to the mind” (Gropius quoted in Royal Academy of Arts 1968: 14).

The 1960s teemed with revolutionary ideas, including The Whole Earth Catalogue, conceived by Eno collaborator Stewart Brand. This utopian counterculture toolkit offered an introduction to systems thinking and design, examining relationships between nature and technology alongside ecological and cybernetic systems.

The work of David Byrne and Brian Eno was informed by the systems-based elements of cybernetics as expounded by Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer. These principles manifest in the decision paths and levels of control in their music-making and production. Beer’s cybernetic work, Brain of the Firm: The Management Cybernetics of Organizations (1994), helped inspire Eno’s set of information cards developed with artist Peter Schmidt, called Oblique Strategies. These cards randomised procedures by attempting to eliminate musicians’ preconceptions and habitual practices. Eno also manipulated studio technology through cybernetic techniques, including dub mixing and routing all signals through his ubiquitous VCS3 synthesiser. For Eno, the studio functioned as a form of integrated management — a self-regulating environment where the recording process and development of musical impulses were controlled (Steenstra 2010: 7).

A key element of Beer’s cybernetic principles was variety, related to Ross Ashby’s (1956) Law of Requisite Variety, “which states that control can be obtained only if the variety of the controller is at least as great as the situation to be controlled” (Beer 1994: 41). Beer observed that many businesses and systems add variety into the system rather than incorporating it into the design from the start. I argue that songwriters could benefit from embracing this element of variety — examining how it is generated, reduced, filtered, amplified, and controlled (Steenstra 2010: 8). As Eno stressed, keys and clues exist within experimental music where systematic approaches use defined limits and variety (1996: 335).

The concept of seemingly unlimited freedom in Cardew’s piece The Great Learning often yielded remarkably similar results, owing to the allegiances and limits performers brought with them. These constraints stemmed from societal norms instilled through technique-heavy musical training, embedding inherent prejudices and practices that curtailed variety. Cybernetic self-regulating systems offered a way to sidestep these preconceptions: with the artist out of control, the traditional hierarchy dissolves.

The rise of postmodern ideals — redefining what counted as “high” versus “low” art, adopting new technologies (Huyssen 1984), and elevating the non-musician — was showcased at the 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA). Art, music, and science collided here as computers seized artistic control for the first time. Curator Jasia Reichardt described the significance of merging machines and creativity:

People who would never have put pencil to paper, or brush to canvas, have started making images, both still and animated, which approximate and often look identical to what we call ‘art’ and put in public galleries. This is the most important single revelation of this exhibition. (1968: 5)

The lone genius gave way to the machine; automation, computers, and systems now governed the creative process.

Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles was a major exhibit highlighting cybernetic processes. This installation interacted with visitors based on how much enjoyment they found at various points during their engagement. Audience members used mirrors to direct light back to different sections of the mobile, which Pask described using male and female light sources meant to mimic societal conditioning. He outlined its purpose:

An aesthetically potent environment encourages the hearer or viewer to explore it, to learn about it, to form a hierarchy of concepts that refer to it: further, it guides his exploration; in a sense it makes him participate in, or at any rate see himself reflected in, the environment. (Reichardt 1968 ‘n.pag.’)

Earlier, Pask had built one of the first music systems rooted in cybernetic principles: the Musicolour machine, fuelled by his interest in synaesthesia. It altered visual patterns on a colour wheel using filters that analyzed frequency, attack, and rhythm, which then prompted performers to adjust their music as they grew familiar with the patterns, preventing repetition (Lambert 2017: 48). The machine was programmed to shift its responses independently of the performer; they could not influence its output, enabling it to create things they could never achieve on their own (Pickering 2002: 427).

Byrne and Eno attempted to pinpoint which control mechanisms shaped their music’s development (Steenstra 2010: 46). Stafford Beer argued that “the first principle of control is that the controller is part of the system under control,” governing the input a songwriter might utilize and relating it to cybernetic principles that let the system take charge of creation (Steenstra 2010: 32). He believed humans were overly introspective by nature, and that failing to look outwards muddled the

creative process. This suggests the creative artist must remain externally active, adopt a panoramic view, and be reciprocal in approach. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson held that “we might say that in creative art man must experience himself – his total self – as a cybernetic model” (Steenstra 2010: 33).

Talking Heads songs were frequently reduced to their essentials and rebuilt; sometimes each musician played half a part, and those sections were welded back together. This method increased randomness and reduced direct intention in creativity (Steenstra 2010: 52). Byrne used a Dada poem for “I Zimbra” on Fear of Music, illustrating how stripping meaning from lyric-making drives listeners to craft new definitions (Steenstra 2010: 53). Both musicians began reinventing their craft, implying the vocal part and stitching numerous simple components together into a complex, invigorating whole. They looped parts, dropped them in and out, and took cues from the dub production techniques Eno was exploring — a convoluted array of signal paths and effects where simple adjustments to auxiliary sends (routing audio to reverb or delay units) could yield many outcomes.

Cybernetics played an even bigger role in their follow-up, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a record built around “interlocking parts.” The approach deferred to Steve Reich: multiple repeated patterns with slight variations produced gorgeous harmonic shifts, so that layering several simple versions coalesced into a more complex whole (Steenstra 2010: 339). Byrne’s vocals and lyrics on Remain in Light emerged from

Eno’s rough outlines, preachers’ inflections, randomly dialled radio stations, and African chanting and vocalizations. This reflected the non-hierarchical ways traditional African societies often function, with music embedded in communal life. Both Remain in Light and Bowie’s Low demonstrated Eno overhauling standard rock hierarchies, injecting influence from The Velvet Underground’s minimalist aesthetic, where all instruments and vocals received equal weight in composition and mix.

For a songwriter or producer, building a structure can diminish personal influence, paradoxically yielding a truer sense of self less burdened by ingrained artistic prejudices. Byrne sought to extract personality traits from his writing, aiming to create personalized work by removing conscious intention. He remarked, “my own ambition is to write a song that sounds like I stole it, like I didn’t write it, but it has always been there. To get the “I” out of the song is the ultimate compositional coup” (quoted in Steenstra 2010: 192). This points to avant-garde composer John Cage, whose philosophy embraced the “acceptance of accident and the elimination of conscious interference” (Diaz 2015: 92). Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No.4,” from 1952 for twelve radios, had musicians tune stations and harness frequencies alongside gaps in songs to produce random music. They acted “like fishermen catching sounds,” and Cage concentrated primarily on “the perceptual relationship between composer, piece and audience” (Steenstra 2010: 192). The listener became integral to the composition, reflecting a more art-based vision. More recently, British artist Stephen Willatts wove cybernetics and semiotics into his work, enabling dynamic exchange

between ideas and society: “[i]f the artist was in a relationship with the audience, and the audience was part of society, the artist was in a relationship with society, so there was feedback” (Shanken 2015: 70).

Feedback loops and systematic composition inherent to tape processes defined two landmark 1975 albums. Lou Reed’s controversial Metal Machine Music used the studio live room as an interactive space with instruments: guitars rested against his amps, left to sound and react, generating extreme feedback. In contrast, Brian Eno’s first Obscure label release and original ambient album, Discreet Music, employed feedback directly — a pair of tape machines built loops where sounds amplified one another (Dayal 2009: 91–92). Both recordings contain multiple degrees of feedback: instruments interact among themselves and with the space around them. The rooms carried their own tone and generated enough resonance that they acquired distinct characters and timbres (Stearns 2017: 36). This mirrors a visual artist deploying contrasts and varied materials in making a work.

Flow

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (2013) discovered that his research subjects often relished the act of creating or working more than the end result. In a state of “flow,” creativity seemed embedded in systems, where each tiny discovery within a process became exhilarating (Csikszentmihalyi 2013: 109). During composition,

unforeseen eureka moments surge to energize the proceedings and steer the trajectory or flow of the piece. Structuring the work helps sustain the interest and fresh sparks that arise, just as the controller’s reactions to those moments shape direction. UK avant-garde composer Gavin Bryars spends a great deal of time planning and developing musical ideas before writing them out, essentially arranging the system into which creativity can flow (Bryars 2017).

Combining structural transformation with a redefinition of music-making systems allows engaging and novel work to evolve naturally. Alongside Cardew’s improvisation-focused Scratch Orchestra, Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinphonia — founded at Portsmouth College of Art in 1970 — welcomed musicians of all abilities and featured an eclectic array of mostly A-level-based players. Core contributors included Eno on clarinet, Michael Nyman playing cello, and Deaf School’s Clive Langer on lead flute. They intended to perform as expertly as possible; it just happened that many players were lapsed or casual classical musicians, producing music that alternated between stunning discord and moments of exquisite beauty alongside oceans of humour (Bryars 2017). As Eno reflected:

Something very magical happened when people tried their hardest to play things that they often had no hope of managing. There was something so touching about this. It was like flocking behaviour in birds: following the melody was a cloud of misinterpretations. (Eno quoted in Bracewell 2007: 240)

Keith Sawyer notes that group performances or compositions promote a flow state because of the complexity involved when multiple artists interact, continuously incorporating

“their partners activity into their own unfolding activity” (2012: 350). He goes on to emphasize the importance of group dynamics in blurring boundaries between conscious and unconscious thought during creation (Sawyer 2012: 351).

Tom Phillips — an art educator and musician who mentored, lived, and worked alongside Eno — believed membership in the Portsmouth Sinphonia was an ideal music education, given the appreciation it bred for outcomes emerging from seemingly haphazard processes (Bracewell 2007: 240). The fundamental architecture of an orchestra and its score remained in place, enabling creative energy to flow within those boundaries. Clive Langer (2018) characterized the experience as “a bit like being on a roller coaster instead of being on a drag track. The music was being pushed and pulled in tempo and in pitch, which at times sounded really good.”

Chance

Discussing the ideas behind his second solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy), Eno mentioned his attraction to systems like those in Maoist China. Strategy intrigued him because it “interests me because it deals with the interaction of systems, which is what my interest in music is really, and not so much the interaction of sounds” (Sheppard 2008: 176). This philosophy also surfaces in his generative music, which used software called Koan Pro developed by SSEYO: it reduced the performer’s control, letting the system make compositional decisions independently. Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards, similarly, were designed to sideline the composer’s or performer’s will, connecting to Cage’s chance operations and George Brecht’s “Water Yam Box (Sheppard 2008: 178–79). A talk at Winchester School of Art by Tom Phillips, titled Ephremides,

also shaped the strategies through his use of “randomised, aphoristic cards” (Sheppard 2008: 178).

The adoption of chance-based methods in creative work was investigated in the 1950s by the New York School of musicians and artists. Morty Feldman famously told Cage that with the I Ching “you’ve hit it,” and from that start Cage incorporated deliberate chance into his compositions (Johnson 2002: 25). Silence (1961) collects some of Cage’s most well-known lectures and articles, inspiring many pop musicians including Eno and Bowie. These writings demonstrate how he harnessed poetry to express and expand on his Zen, Dadaist, and pedagogical perspectives; he devoted as much care to his written presentation as he did to graphic scores, justifying chance activities through carefully considered design. As Feldman explained: “[c]hance is the most academic procedure yet arrived at, for it defines itself as a technique immediately. And believe me the throw of the dice may be exciting to the player, but never to the croupier” (2000: 2). Eno pushed Ultravox! to produce songs grounded in cybernetic principles — for instance, “I Want to Be a Machine (Sheppard 2008: 234) — and The Dice Man, a popular novel of that period, revolved around adopting chance occurrences determined by rolling dice.

Time

“The parameter of duration was more hospitable, a more reasonable structural means for music, than pitch had been” (Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003: 54).

Cage considered time a crucial parameter in music (Kostelanetz 2003: 54), and he related a piece’s duration to the sounds within it, saying “[W]hen I come to an empty space it defines empty time” (The Poetry Foundation 2017). Like fellow minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley, he was influenced by Eastern music traditions with circular rather than linear senses of time — echoing the foundation of cybernetic systems. Time now became a prominent subject for musical inquiry: it did not have to be linear; tape machines made sure of that. Lengthy strands of ferric oxide stretched across studio spaces physically depicted time extended. Visconti and Eno’s Eventide Harmonizer “fucks with the fabric of time” (Wilcken 2005: 60). Time both defines the creative process and is crucial to the system, yet it need not be considered linear — in cybernetics, it may be circular. The feedback loops fundamental to delay units had lengths set by the controller, whereas Eno’s recent work, Reflection, uses the seasons themselves to determine duration. La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings — consisting of a held B-flat and F-sharp — lasted an indefinite period. Regarded as static in this manner, time gains greater impact, and its apparent simplicity permits boundless complexity. Gavin Bryars champions “the idea that you can repeat something that can go on for a very long time and can be really understated, technically simple, conceptually very clean” (2017). This fosters a meditative state that gives listeners room to unpack the intricacy hiding within the apparent simplicity: “once the process is set up and loaded it runs by itself(Reich quoted in Prendergast 2003: 91).

Roy Ascott stated that an audience “expects, not a fixed attitude or viewpoint to a piece of work, but a field of uncertainty and ambiguity in which they can endlessly take part” (Shanken 2015: 66). Audiences accept that visual artworks might have random, unfixed lengths, but music usually sticks to more finite timescales. The artist, the product, and the audience interact, where a “shift of human interest is from the thing, the object, the product, to the process, the system, the event in which the product is obtained” (Shanken 2015). In Conway’s Game of Life, simple rules generate complex outcomes without a set time limit. Defining boundaries leaves room for multiple ideas to flourish in an environment where orderly and random elements can intersect.

A piece of music’s length can be arbitrary, as seen comparing the canonical pop song length of 3’52” to Max Richter’s seven-hour Sleep. Bryars (2017) discussed how the artifact itself governs the elasticity of time, referencing various incarnations of Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet:

Well Jesus Blood, for example, doesn’t have a specific time because the duration of time has always been due to physical factors. The first time I did it live it was determined by how long was a reel of tape, which is 32 minutes. When I made the first record for Obscure and Brian it was one side of vinyl, 23/24 minutes; you could go longer but you would lose sound quality. When I did the CD version it was 75 minutes because you can have longer durations. Some live film versions, and a reel of film would last about 30 minutes, on a 16mm projector. It was always determined by physical things or how long you needed for a particular event. When I created the 1993 version with Tom Waits we made a single for Xmas for Shelter, for the homeless, but the rule for a single was that it had to be less than 4 minutes, which meant that it was 9 repetitions for 3 minutes 54 seconds. I then fit the piece within that time frame. I also did a B side, which would be now a remix, that uses other materials. One version lasted less than a minute.

The time framework defines the creative process for any musical piece. This mirrors nature, where life cycles shape growth patterns but never in an exact way; the fluidity of natural life emerges through shifts or slippages in time, sources that often lend music its magic and allure (Morley 2004: 170). The universally used Roland TR808 drum machine, along with the Akai MPC samplers and Atari 1040 computer, were considered by hip hop and dance producers to carry near-mythical timing that seemed to boost a natural swing. That reflects Reich’s discovery that the space between notes contains an almost infinite array of lengths, thanks to slight fluctuations in timing.

As the tape machines ran side by side, chance-induced phasing within these time-shifts introduced new dimensions and intrigue:

Performing and listening to a gradual musical process resembles: pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling, and listening to the waves gradually bury them. (Reich 1968 n.pag)

There is an inherent complexity in the simplicity of gradually shifting time. As the music unfolds, listeners are invited to discover fresh details. In the words of John Cage, the beauty of musical rhythm is its capacity to hold both sound and silence (Kostelanetz 2003: 64).

Outro

Cybernetic systems of creation became a cornerstone of art college education as the mid-1960s rise of postmodernism coincided with the emergence of new technologies and a redefinition of creative processes. This facet of art school pedagogy was crucial in shaping the work of popular musicians, notably Brian Eno. For higher popular music education, cybernetic, systems-based songwriting and music creation should be considered a core element.

The pendulum continues to move in random spheres. Each push on the first hand sends energy into the second, which then rotates in unpredictable directions across different levels and at varied forces. Eno explains how this device captures a cybernetic idea, allowing random and beautiful events to emerge within a simple framework:

This is so quick and easy to understand. So I am having one made that will be 2 1/2 metres tall and have it in here. The bigger you make it the slower it is, the easier it is to see this little thing spinning. This is why I want to make a big one; It is such a lesson, so simple systems when connected to each other become very complex systems. It’s counter-intuitive because we always think of complexity as sort of linear. You do this, you add a bit and it just goes up step by step. But this is like a phase shift; a complete step difference. (Eno 2017)

Composing a piece of music can be outlined and generated within a systematic process, bounded by parameters that nurture complexity and a wide range of ideas. Byrne and Eno produced music shaped by interactive systems, chance decisions, and the removal of the self—a creative space where organization and sound take priority. The arrival of the tape machine contributed to delivering feedback and recording results, giving birth to the cybernetic device.

Students in higher popular music education programmes should be encouraged to engage with their unconscious, untutored selves and focused on developing self-regulating music systems. Songwriters can embed their expertise and create structures that, within defined boundaries, allow them to be creatively unleashed. Eno remarks: “Art students relish the experiment; I’m just going to do that and see what happens. Simplicity for me is the magic. That’s why this pendulum is interesting: you can see exactly what it is, yet it does something fascinating” (Eno 2017).

References

Albiez, Sean and Pattie, David (eds) (2016), Brian Eno: Oblique Music, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Albiez, Sean and Pattie, David (eds) (2011), Kraftwerk: Music Non-Stop, New York: Continuum.

Ascott, Roy (2003), Telematic Embrace: Visionary theories of art, technology and consciousness, University of California Press.

Ascott, Roy (2017), interview with Roy Ascott, Bristol, 27 July.

Ashby, W. Ross (1956), Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Chapman and Hall.

Banks, Mark and Oakley, Kate (2016), ‘The dance goes on forever. Art schools, class and higher education’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 22:1, pp. 41–57.

Bateson, Gregory (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Beer, Stafford (1994), Brain of the Firm, 2nd ed., New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Bracewell, Michael (2007), Remake/Remodel: Becoming Roxy Music, London: DaCapo Press.

Bryars, Gavin (2017), in person interview with Simon Strange, Kings Cross Station, 11 November.

Byrne, David (2013), How Music Works, Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Cage, John (1961), Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press.

Charnley, James (2015), Creative License: From Leeds College of Art to Leeds Polytechnic 1963-1973, Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi (2013), Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, London: Harper.

Dayal, Geeta (2009), 331/3: Brian Eno’s Another Green World, London: Bloomsbury.

de Duve, Thierry (1994), ‘When form has become attitude—and beyond’, in Z. Kocur and S. Leung (eds), Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, pp. 19–31.

Diaz, Eva (2015), The Experimenters: Chance and Design at BMC, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ehrenzweig, Anton (1967), The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination, California: Weidenfield and Nicolson.

Eno, Brian (1996), A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary, London: Faber and Faber.

——— (2017), in person interview with Brian Eno, Notting Hill, 1 December.

Feldman, Morton (2000), Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Cambridge: Exact Change.

Filliou, Robert (1970), Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Berlin: Gebr Mann.

Frith, Simon and Horne, Howard (1987), Art into Pop, London: Routledge.

Hamilton, Richard (1982), Collected Words, London: Thames and Hudson.

Hegarty, Paul (2007), Noise / Music: A History, New York: Continuum.

Huyssen, Andreas (1984), ‘Mapping the postmodern’, New German Critique, 3:1, pp. 5–52.

Johnson, Steven (ed.) (2002), The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts, New York: Routledge.

Kostelanetz, Richard (2003), Conversing with Cage, London: Psychology Press.

Lambert, Nick (2017), ‘The cybernetic moment: Roy Ascott and the British cybernetic pioneers, 1955-65’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 42:1&2, pp. 42–53.

Langer, Clive (2018), video call interview with Simon Strange, Bristol, 15 February.

Llewellyn, Nigel, Williamson, Beth, Westley, Hester and Crippa, Elena (2015), The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now, London: Tate.

Madge, Charles and Weinberger, Barbara (1973), Art Students Observed, London: Faber and Faber.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Oxon: McGraw-Hill.

Morley, Paul (2004), Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, London: Bloomsbury.

Nyman, Michael (1999), Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parkinson, Tom and Smith, Gareth-Dylan (2015), ‘Towards an epistemology of authenticity in higher popular music education’, Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education, 14:1, pp. 93–127.

Pickering, Andrew (2002), ‘Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask’, Social Studies of Science, 32:3, pp. 413-437.

The Poetry Foundation (2017), ‘John Cage’ [Podcast], Spring, 2007, http://www.ubu.com/resources/podcast.html. Accessed 15 April 2018.

Prendergast, Mark (2003) Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby - the evolution of sound in the electronic age, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Reich, Steve (1968), Music as a Gradual Process, Oxford University Press. http://www.bussigel.com/systemsforplay/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Reich_Gradual-Process.pdf. Accessed 3 April 2018.

Reichardt, Jasia (ed.) (1968), Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts, special edition September, London: Studio International.

Romans, Mervyn (ed.) (2005), Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays, Bristol: Intellect Books.

Royal Academy of Arts (1968), 50 Years Bauhaus, Barbican, London: Royal Academy of Arts.

Sawyer, Keith (2012), Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation, Oxford University Press.

Scroates, Christopher (2013), Brian Eno: Visual Music, San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

Shanken, Edward (ed.) (2015), Documents of Contemporary Art: Systems, London: Whitechapel and MIT Press.

Sheppard, David (2008), On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno, London: Orion Books.

Smith, Gareth-Dylan, Moir, Zack, Brennan, Matt, Rambarran, Shara and Kirkman, Phil (2017), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Education, Oxon: Routledge.

Stearns, Matthew (2007), 331/3 Daydream Nation, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Steenstra, Sytze (2010), Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present, New York: Continuum.

Stoyanova, Minka (2017), ‘Reading makers from digital culture and society (DCS)’, in A. Richterich, K. Wenz, P. Abend, M. Fuchs and R. Reichert (eds), Making and Hacking, 3:1, pp. 73–94.

Stubbs, David (2009), Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen, Winchester: O Books.

Tamm, Eric (1995), Brian Eno: His music and the vertical colour of sound, Boston: Da Capo Press.

Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth (1917), On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tibbetts, Susan (2014), ‘Tom Hudson: A study of his vision for art education’, doctoral thesis, Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield.

Tickner, Lisa (2008), Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution, London: Francis Lincoln.

Wilcken, Hugo (2005), 331/3: Low, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Yeomans, Richard (1987), ‘The foundation course of Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton 1954-1966’, Ph.D. thesis, London: Institute of Education.

Simon Strange has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.