Analogical Worlds
Trevor Pinch (2003), in Analog Days, draws attention to the ways synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla's "Buchla boxes"were engineered with a particular instantiation of the composing subject, the avant garde prototype of the "noisician," in mind. Buchla actually names a crucial component of his instrument "the source of uncertainty." Buchla's approach to engineering instruments harnessed the energy of uncertainty by taking frequencies beyond the range of hearing into account, and the instrument he devised rewards composers and performers who do the same. The so-called 'white noise' technique of flattening the power of an electronic signal across a selected bandwidth was of great importance to Buchla and the musicians who user-tested his technology. Research and experimentation with white noise principles has also rendered applications in diverse fields with diverse applications (gambling, precognitive remote perception (PRP), cryptography, polling, sensory depravation). Buchla and his colleagues devised simple "frequency shelving" techniques for leveraging amplified, electronic noise towards two main tendencies in our hearing. To human hearing, certain sounds are masked, or in other cases, more easily perceived, in an 'atmosphere' of white noise, even though, in isolation, fully-shelved sibilance sounds like steam escaping from a radiator. Pink noise is white noise that has been filtered to boost the lower frequencies (formally, it has equal energy per octave), and most biologists, physicists and economists would agree that pink noise is an ambient feature in most of the sublime systems that they study. However, rather than call his adaptations of noise science white or pink noise, which became the terms favored by most manufacturers of sonic electronics, Buchla, on his System 200 (introduced in 1969), named them the source of uncertainty, because he wanted to assert the importance of randomness and uncertainty in the compositional process (p. 46, emphasis added). Such naming and framing....
Musicians playing and performing in groups have always known the thrill of uncertainty. In improvisational music, spontaneously arising figures and refrains surprise the players themselves. And when these gestalt moments "catch" (a hook!) in real time...well, that's just a way of saying that the group begins to repeat the actions that comprised the hook moment. Through the players, disinhibiting signals suddenly boost/stutter/transduce in rhythm/harmony/unision: information! Value-added. The role of uncertainty in the social construction of the synthesizer, however, seems to respond to and elaborate on the advantages that jazz musicians first tapped in tape technology, in particular the ability to review and analyze complex group performances (Mingus, Davis, Coltrane). Musical practice in the 20th century seems to continuously carry mixtures of social and machine technologies into the future (New Orleans "riffs" the orchestra pit). In "Technology and Music Performance in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, " published in 1989 by The International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Jon Frederickson discusses metronome time vs. musical time, machines for "playing together" and the musical vector in the early emergence of what we call "social technologies." To define the latter, Frederickson relies on Peterson's The Industrial Order and Social Policy, where Peterson "distinguishes social and machine technology as follows: machine technology involves the processing of tools and machines, and social technology involves the skills and means of organizing people to get work done" (194). "Work" in information theory...
Frederickson argues that "social technology prepared the way for and was the stimulus for machine technology in musical artworlds," and this argument has since received supportive treatment in science studies and musicology. Composition with emergent and social technologies...
Explicating spontaneity, unraveling highly compressed sonic information, or harmonizing noise can alter a creative itinerary emerging from uncertainty, and the synthesizer doesn't necessarily or automatically take creative activity out of the collective social sphere. Although the option to "dwell in" uncertainty or to go further into an analytical study of it would seem, in theory, to lead to an "isolation" effect, but this inward turn and "available means" sustains attention on some of the more interesting connections between noise, computers, and creative practice today. High-fidelity review, subtle incremental control, and enhanced perception via technologies like tape and the synthesizer can also make room from more media in a process, but when the signal hits print, it need not become absorbed in critique. Consider the passage on swimming in "What is Called Thinking?"...connect to drift studies.
Furthermore, the role of amplitude, and shelving in beyond-hearing fq ranges....
analogies are like....
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