Prestidigital Behemoth is a work for four-channel audio and voice. Constructed using Pure Data (and the Pd external timbreID, developed by William Brent), it consists of six modules which produce, modulate, and distort synthesized and pre-recorded sounds. In addition, live vocal input enters the same signal conduits and mingles with the digitally generated sound. This process questions the role of agency in musical creativity and perception, and attempts to peel apart the oft-assumed lamination of semantic and sonic experience in spoken poetry.

The mode of sound production used in the piece involves a great deal of feedback, both within modules and between them. Several parameters of a synthesized sound (such as amplitude, spectrum distribution, pitch, and noise) are identified as control vectors, which in turn have automated, algorithmic effects on other synthesized sounds. The net effect of this cause-and-effect interpenetration is a pseudo-organic self-organization, which produces causal dissonances with the vocal component.

The sonic qualities of vocal content have further direct effects. Using Brent’s timbreID algorithm, the patch continuously analyzes the voice signal, and has been trained to identify onsets (i.e. the beginnings of sounds or “attacks”) and to group them into seven categories, identifying each type of sound with a number. That number, then fed into a switchboard, activates or deactivates the generative modules. Often these onsets are the consonant sounds at the beginnings of words. This results in an environment where tempo and style of recitation directly inform the sonic contour of “nonvocal” as well as “vocal” components. As the piece continues, one of the modules continually ratchets up the quantity of processing speed needed to produce sound, eventually producing waves of cacophony and the breakdown of the ideal operation of the network.

The synthesized aspects of this process bear similarities to the historically pioneering work of tape-music experimentalists Louis and Bebe Barron. They designed their electronic sound-producing circuits to mimic information-feedback networks, which had been theorized for the first time as they were beginning their musical work in 1947‒48. As they experimented with the circuits recorded onto looped magnetic tape, they found the most interesting sounds emerging from the circuits as they overloaded and broke. The theory of these networked circuits proposed a homology with the nervous systems of living organisms—thus, when Louis and Bebe allowed the circuits themselves to “speak” in place of the composers or artists, they were making timely statements to their artistic community. The elaboration of the technique into fully realized musical works, which was encouraged in the experimental arts scene in Greenwich Village around 1950, continued with patronage from composer John Cage and was supported financially through film-score work including for the cult science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956). Systems theory, also called cybernetics, osmotically permeated the fine arts and music during this time, inviting technologically inflected human experience into broad conversations about humanity and its coexistence with the natural. What might be termed the cybernetic arts have flowered and thrived in the second half of the twentieth century, and Louis and Bebe Barron have a fair claim to seminal influence on the tenor of spiritual and intellectual generosity that characterizes the radical work in computer arts that would follow them in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Information science, the home of the above-mentioned feedback network theories, which came to fruition during the Second World War, may be considered the result of a broad-minded technical mentality. When systems theory and information science entered public intellectual life in the late 1940s, the multidisciplinary effort to found the new scientific discipline was driven by a peculiarly American brand of naïveté. Described by the newly coined term “cybernetics,” this multidisciplinary discursive community reflected a pragmatic willingness to improvise new modes of knowledge creation. (The motivations of this pragmatism also have clear resonance with our current anthropogenic disaster conditions.) The cyberneticists’ attitude of suspended judgment, which the US Department of Defense had incubated and afterwards allowed to thrive, newly freed from the looming cultural hegemony of Western Europe, was, if not crippled following the war, at least humbled. The study of this intellectual history can be understood as an apt modality of thought to bring to the working terminology in this Anthropocene Campus of “niche construction,” and the logic of abundance to which it subscribes.

The aesthetic focus on process in Prestidigital Behemoth is informed by the ways in which the Barrons produced aesthetic multiplicity out of the closed, “trivial” information circuit—the ways that they tapped into cyberneticists’ intellectual enthusiasm for new ways of knowing without succumbing to reductively empirical habits of mind. The importance of this perceptual openness may be encapsulated in Douglas Kahn’s recent use of the term transperception. Kahn points out that: “One problem with a technocratic desire for an engineered precision in matters of perception, aesthetics, and poetics is that the very ways in which the world could be more complexly experienced […] are crushed in the process.” What can we learn by making historical art new, and what problems remain after we retroactively construct our aesthetic experience back to (real or imagined) moments of origin?