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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 20 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 into modern 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
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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 sciencefiction film Forbidden Planet, also notable for being the first fully electronic cinematic score. The Barrons built sound-producing electronic 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
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See Geof Bowker, "How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-1970." Social Studies of Science 23 (1993), 107-27.

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 his extension 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 of interpretation 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 and microaesthetics. 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 he called analytical aesthetics, in which aesthetic information [is] described in abstract (mathematical) terms. The second phase Bense called generative aesthetics, in deliberate (if
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Elisabeth Walther, Max Bense und die Kybernetik, Als Stuttgart Schule macht, 1999 <http://www.stuttgarterschule.de/bensekybernetik.htm> (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.

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 combined precisely with their planned construction. 7 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 and Allotropie 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 from conventional 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 frustrated with 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
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Bense, 333. Bense, 337. 8 Roland Kayn, Infra, Colosseum LP SM 1478.

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 a new 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 9 automatic (dead) and anthropoetic (living) systems

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 computerprogrammed 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, involves what 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 nonlinearity 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 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

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Roland Kayn, Simultan, Colosseum LP SM 1473. Roland Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte, Colosseum LP SM 1474.

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 worst deliberately 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:
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Kayn, Tektra. This 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.

[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 this network 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 14 from the beginning to the end.

The integrity of the cybernetic process 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 There is an affinity here,
Frans van Rossum, liner notes for Roland Kayn, Tektra, Barooni CD BAR 016. Van Rossum. 16 Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte. 17 See 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 implicit in 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 music to 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 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 quasievolutionary sentience. According to Kayn, the generative self-formation of cybernetic music should be reflected in the act of perception:
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. 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 interactions generated 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 mundi in 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 Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at thomaspatteson.com. 2010