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lighting for shows in Cambridge and in London. Gordon had made friends
with Valerie and Feathers Hovenden, who ran a small club theatre in the crypt
of a church on Oxford Street.” In the same period Pask and McKinnon-Wood,
also a Cambridge undergraduate, formed a company called Sirenelle dedi-
cated to staging musical comedies. Both were fascinated with the technology
of such performances: “Gordon used to come back [to Cambridge] with bits
of Calliope organ, I would come back . . . with bits of bomb sight computer”
(McKinnon-Wood 1993, 129). From such pieces, the two men constructed a
succession of odd and interesting devices, running from a musical typewriter,
through a self-adapting metronome, and up to the so-called Musicolour ma-
chine. As we shall see, Pask continued his association with the theater, the
arts, and entertainment for the rest of his life.
7
What, then, of Pask's first sally into cybernetics, the theatrical lighting ma-
chine just mentioned? This was the contrivance called Musicolour, for which,
as his wife put it, “there were no precedents” (E. Pask n.d.): “Gordon had to
design all the circuits used in the machine without any outside assistance.
Figure 7.2: Musicolour logic diagram.
the original legend reads, “outline of a
typical musicolour system.
P
= Performer,
I
= instrument and microphone,
A
= in-
puts,
y
i
,
to visual display that specify the symbol to be selected,
B
= inputs,
x
i
,
to the visual display that determine the moment of selection,
PF
= property filter,
AV
= averager,
AT
= adaptive threshold device. memories hold values of (
y
i
). con-
trol instructions for adjusting the sequence of operation are not shown. internal
feedback loops in the adaptive threshold devices are not shown.” source: g. Pask,
“a comment, a case history and a Plan,” in J. reichardt (ed.),
Cybernetics, Art,
and Ideas
(greenwich, ct: New york graphics society, 1971), 79, fig. 26.
