Designing Self-Playing Systems
Cybernetics remains one of the most relevant frameworks for understanding the modern world. At its core are feedback, adaptation, recursion, and control: the principles through which living systems maintain themselves, technical systems regulate behaviour, and complex environments evolve over time. These dynamics are not abstract. They underpin biological life, electronic media, computation, AI, and many of the social and material systems we inhabit every day.
This project treats cybernetics not simply as theory, but as something that can be heard. Instead of beginning with melody, harmony, or performance in the usual sense, the work begins with the design of a circuit: a set of relations between transformation, memory, resonance, and return. Once set in motion, the system does not merely reproduce an intention. It behaves. It develops its own tendencies, instabilities, and temporary equilibria. In that sense, it is less a performance than a self-playing ecology.
The compositional act therefore shifts. It lies not primarily in writing notes, but in constructing the conditions under which sound can organise itself. What matters is the architecture of feedback: what is allowed to circulate, what is damped, what remembers, what transforms, and what returns. Composition becomes the design of a living system whose output cannot be entirely predicted in advance.
And yet the process is not coldly technical. We do not begin with mathematics and force the ear to obey. We begin by listening, looking, and adjusting. The ear and the eye decide what feels alive; the maths comes later, as a way of understanding what the circuit has already revealed. This is part of the wager of the work: that cybernetic form is not only analytically powerful, but aesthetically rich — and that by listening to such systems, we may hear something fundamental about both living and artificial worlds.
Check the schematics and math functions at play