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musical performance and the changing parameters of the machine combined
to achieve synesthetic effects.
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Musicolour was central to the subsequent de-
velopment of much of Pask's cybernetics, so I want to examine it at some
length here, historically, ontologically, aesthetically, and sociologically, in that
order.
The History of Musicolour
In the early 1950s, first at Cambridge and then at System Research, Gordon
and Elizabeth Pask and Robin McKinnon-Wood sought to turn Musicolour
into a commercial proposition, beginning in 1953 at the Pomegranate Club in
Cambridge—“an eclectically Dadaist organisation”—followed by “a bizarre
and eventful tour of the north country” and an eventual move to London (Pask
1971, 78). McKinnon-Wood (1993, 131) later reminisced, “I think my favourite
memory of MusiColour was the time we demonstrated the portable version
to Mr Billy Butlin [the proprietor of Butlin's holiday camps] in his office. . . .
Shortly after his arrival it exploded in a cloud of white smoke. . . . I switched
it back on again and it worked perfectly.” The first London performance was
at Bolton's Theatre and took a traditionally theatrical form. In a piece called
“Moon Music,” a musician played, Musicolour modulated the lights on a stage
set, and, to liven things up, marionettes danced on stage. The marionettes
were supposed to move in synchrony with the lights but instead dismem-
bered themselves over the audience (Pask 1971, 82-83). The next show was
at Valerie Hovenden's Theatre Club in the crypt of St. Anne's Church on Dean
Street. There, in a piece called “Nocturne,” attempts were made to link the
motions of a human dancer into Musicolour's input—“this proved techni-
cally difficult but the aesthetic possibilities are indisputable” (86). Then (86),
“since the system was costly to maintain and since the returns were modest,
the Musicolour enterprise fell into debt. We secured inexpensive premises
above the King's Arms in Tabernacle Street which is a curiously dingy part of
the City of London, often engulfed in a sort of beer-sodden mist. There, we set
up the system and tried to sell it in any possible way: at one extreme as a pure
art form, at the other as an attachment for juke boxes.” The story then passed
through Churchill's Club, where waiters “dropped cutlery into its entrails
[but] the audience reaction was favorable and Musicolour became a perma-
nent feature of the spectacle.” After that, Musicolour was used to drive the 120
kilowatt lights at the Mecca Locarno dance hall in Streatham, where, alas, “it
became clear that in large scale (and commercially viable) situations, it was
difficult or impossible to make genuine use of the system.”
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“Musicolour
