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Figure 7.4.
musicolour display at churchill's club, london. 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), 86, fig. 32.
light show, with the aim of achieving a synesthetic combination of sounds
and light.
8
Materially, the music was converted into an electrical signal by
a microphone, and within Musicolour the signal passed through a set of fil-
ters, sensitive to different frequencies, the beat of the music, and so on, and
the output of the filters controlled different lights. You could imagine that the
highest-frequency filter energized a bank of red lights, the next-highest the
blues, and so on. Very simple, except for the fact that the internal param-
eters of Musicolour's circuitry were not constant. In analogy to biological
neurons, banks of lights would only be activated if the output from the rel-
evant filter exceeded a certain threshold value, and these thresholds varied
in time as charges built up on capacitors according to the development of
the performance and the prior behavior of the machine. In particular, Musi-
colour was designed to get bored (Pask 1971, 80). If the same musical trope
was repeated too often, the thresholds for the corresponding lighting pattern
would eventually shift upward and the machine would cease to respond, en-
couraging the performer to try something new. Eventually some sort of dy-
namic equilibrium might be reached in which the shifting patterns of the
