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Here, though, I want to explore another intersection of cybernetics and
the arts. If flicker was a distinctive and paradoxical contribution to the visual
arts, biofeedback in turn fed into the New Music of the 1960s, usually as-
sociated with names like John Cage and David Tudor.
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The idea was simple
enough. In a basic brainwave biofeedback setup, a light comes on when the
subject's alpha output, say, exceeds some level, and by focusing on keeping
the light lit, subjects somehow learn to boost their alpha level at will. To go
from this setup to music, all that was required was to substitute sound for the
visual element of the feedback circuit. The difficulty was, in the first instance,
that alpha frequencies are below the range of hearing, and one solution, used
from time to time, was to record brain activity to tape and then play it back in
speeded-up form, thus making it audible. The drawback to such a solution was
that it blocked the possibility of any real-time feedback coupling between per-
former and performance, and the first recognized EEG music event followed
a different route. First performed live in 1965, Alvin Lucier's
Music for Solo
Performer
fed the EEG readout directly into loudpeakers whenever the alpha
rhythms were above the threshold, generating an audible output by putting
the speakers next to or in contact with “gongs, timpani, bass drums, anything
that loudspeakers could vibrate sympathetically” (Lucier 1995, 50)—even a
metal dustbin (fig. 3.15).
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Several points are worth noting about this style of alpha music. Most evi-
dently, like feedback-controlled flicker, it brings us face to face with a form
of decentering of the self into a technosocial apparatus. Any given perfor-
mance of
Music for Solo Performer
was not the work of a solo performer: it
was the work of a human plus EEG electrodes, amplifiers and signal analyz-
ers, switches, loudspeakers, and sound generating devices of all sorts. Sec-
ond, even with extensive biofeedback training, in such a setup the performer
does not exercise absolute control over the performance. From one angle, the
sounds themselves are what enable the performer to tune into the generation
of alpha waves—that is the principle of biofeedback. Nevertheless, “although
theoretically it [the alpha rhythm] is a continual pattern of ten hertz, it never
comes out that way because it stops when your eyelids flutter or you visualise
a little and it tends to drift down a bit if you get bored or sleepy” (Lucier
1995, 58). One has the sense, then, of a reciprocal and open-ended interplay
between the performer and the performance, with each both stimulating and
interfering with the other—a kind of reciprocal steersmanship, in the sense
discussed in chapter 2. We can go into this further in chapter 6, on Brian Eno's
music, and chapter 7, on Pask's cybernetic aesthetics, but I want to suggest
here that biofeedback music can stand as another and very nice example of
