STAF FORD BEER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 306

from the oscillator to the filter, and then use the filter output to control the
same oscillator again. . . . You get a kind of squiging effect. It feeds back on it-
self in interesting ways, because you can make some very complicated circles
through the synthesiser” (quoted in Pinch and Trocco 2002, 294). Here we
find the familiar cybernetic notion of a feedback loop, not, however, as that
which enables control of some variable (as in a thermostat), but as that which
makes a system's behavior impenetrable to the user. 75 We can think about such
systems further in the next chapter, but for now the point to note is that analog
synthesizers were thus inescapably objects of exploration by their users, who
had to find out what configuration would produce a desirable musical effect. 76
“The resulting music was an exchange . . . between person and machine, both
contributing to the final results. This may be why analog synthesists can read-
ily recount feelings of love for their synthesisers” (Pinch and Trocco 2002,
177). In this sense, then, one can see a continuity between Eno's work with
Roxy and his later work: even with Roxy Music, Eno was riding the dynamics
of a generative system—the synthesizer—which he could not fully control.
What he learned from Beer was to make this cybernetic insight explicit and
the center of his future musical development.
Second, I want to emphasize that with Eno's interest in cellular automata
and complex systems we are back in the territory already covered at the end of
chapter 4, on Ashby's cybernetics, with systems that stage open-ended becom-
ings rather than adaptation per se. Indeed, when Eno remarks of It's Gonna
Rain that “you are getting a huge amount of material and experience from a
very, very simple starting point” (Eno 1996b, 3) he is singing the anthem of
Stephen Wolfram's “New Kind of Science.” In this sense, it would seem more
appropriate to associate Eno with a line of cybernetic filiation going back to
Ashby than with Beer—though historically he found inspiration in Brain of the
Firm rather than Design for a Brain . We could also recall in this connection that
no algorithmic system, in mathematics or in generative music, ever becomes
in a fully open-ended fashion: each step in the evolution of such systems is
rigidly chained to the one before. Nevertheless, as both Eno and Wolfram have
stressed in their own ways, the evolution of these systems can be unpredict-
able even to one who knows the rules: one just has to set the system in motion
and see what it does. For all practical purposes, then, such systems can the-
matize for us and stage an ontology of becoming, which is what Eno's notion
of riding the system's dynamics implies. 77
Third, we should note that Eno's ambient music sounds very different from
the music we are used to in the West—rock, classical, whatever. In terms sim-
ply of content or substance it is clear, for instance, that three notes repeating