A little while back a few images started appearing from the Buchla archives, seemingly promotional images of different modules. There’s a consistency to the images in terms their cold monochrome tone but more insterestingly they way that each module is accompanied by a hand at the controls of the module on display, reaching in from outside the frame of the shot. This a common trope in the visual presentation of modular music systems and can be seen in the various promotional images and demo videos produced by many contemporary module developers: a disembodied hand reaching into the frame from outside to set some process in action, to initiate a sequence or adjust a parameter.
Given that these images from the Buchla archives are not simply casual images but archival, catalogue or promotional materials its interesting to contrast these with contemporaneous and equally staged promotional images from the Moog archives, particularly in light of the comments made by Moog about the staging of these images. Promotional images for Moog synthesisers from the 1970s onwards show a common stance being adopted, a gesture encouraged by Moog, whereby one hand would be touching a traditional 12-tone keyboard and the other at the controls of the various modules in the system. The adoption of this stance was intended to indicate to those viewing the images the musicality of the Moog, it’s intended use, as without it “you could be tuning in Russia!” (Moog quoted in Pinch and Trocco, 1998, 17).
In contrast, in the above Buchla images there is no second hand at the keyboard and thereby none of the intent to signify musicality as it might be commonly recognized. Following Moog’s concerns for how synthesis equipment appeared to an unfamiliar public without a keyboard being present, in the Buchla images we are free to imagine that we might well be tuning in Russia, but more likely to some kind of cosmic and/or sonic absolute given the avant-garde and counter-cultural context in which Buchla undertook his work
In the Buchla images there is no intent to indicate that “you can play a tune on this thing,” but rather that this is an instrument designed for an altogether different approach to musical composition. So what approach to composition is suggested here? Buchla is quoted as wanting to ‘build an intentional electronic musical instrument (Buchla, quoted in Pinch and Trocco, 1998, 17), perhaps indicating a power of thought and a cerebral approach to sonorous production, in place of the more typically embodied and recognisably musical inclination of the Moog system. We might see the disembodied hand as akin to how Kaja Silverman (The Acoustic Mirror, 1988) described the disembodied voice in cinema, emanating from somewhere beyond the frame, as a source of power and control, setting parameters and prescribing the behaviour of a system and the signals it generates and controls.
In this sense, the hand reaching in to set the various dials or the synth module is a gesture perhaps indicating intent and control that brings to mind famous image of Le Corbusier’s pointing hand. This image has often been read as indicating a wider ideological disposition of modernist architecture which saw itself a possessing a power to expedite a utopian vision of society, to remedy its ills through exerting a regulatory influence over the behaviour of individuals dwelling in its carefully designed spaces. This regulatory and healing power is concomitant with Le Corbusier’s biological narrative of architecture as a production of organisms and and efficient circulatory systems (on these points see Paula Young Lee’s ‘Modern Architecture and the Ideology of Influence’ and Brandon LaBelle’s ‘Architecture of Noise’). Here we find architecture understood as a regulatory system, Le Corbusier’s hand at the controls. LaBelle develops his critique of Le Corbusier in sonorous terms, with the stable, rational, harmonic space produced through his architectural vision attempting to control, regulate, even cancel the noise without: that of the chaotic, messy street. Where this chaotic exterior is heard as the noisy clamor of competing, colliding differences, and the architectural interior a harmonic, rational space, this architectural system is one of difference minimisation, deviation counteraction and control, a first-order system in the language of cybernetics, further emphasised by the architect, author, creative visionary being positioned outside of the systems the create and over which they exert control, reaching in from outside (on deviation counteraction and amplification in relation to first and second order cybernetics respectively, see Maruyama 1963).
Moving back from Le Corbusier’s architectonic systems to modular synthesis systems, the hand at the controls, reaching in from outside, is a gesture expressing control or influence over or within the system. Yet, given the importance of modules such as the 265 and 266 Source of Uncertainty within the Buchla system, this control is less total hylomorphic prescription than a desire to influence that should be understood within the context of the logic of second order cybernetics that was prevalent at the time Buchla was developing his Music Box, a logic that locates the user or operator within a system governed less by regulation, control and the search for equilibrium than divergence amplification and positive feedback. In this context the disembodied hand at the controls might be taken less as expression of power as in Silverman’s disembodied voice or the manner that has been leveled critically at Le Corbusier, and more as an attempt to focus on the system—perhaps for marketing purposes as much as an oblique statement of compositional orientation—displacing the performer within it, rather than centralising the performer and their recognisable musicality, as was more common in the Moog images.
Rather than the expressive more highly legible control often identifiable in keyboard based systems, the hand at the controls in these Buchla images indicates an approach to sonorous production more akin to guidance, interaction, an attempt to influence the behaviour of the system without having total control over it. This is in keeping with the etymology of cybernetics indicating a helmsperson guiding a ship, steering and navigating. This might indicate the charting a following of a course, a teleological orientation not dissimilar from a more total sense of control, but this sense of guidance and navigation that comes from the etymology of cybernetics also establishes a link to the later digital systems based composition of John Bischoff who has described composing, performing and interacting with systems based approaches to music as exercising volition on water, exercising intent within unstable conditions or or in constant negotiation with a source of uncertainty:
The age-old magic of an acoustic sound being struck into being by a human agent is replaced by the surging potential of a waffling speaker. There is a different quality of volition inherent in electronic sound. Motion starts from the individual in the acoustic realm and is inherent in the environment in electronics. The difference is something like the difference between standing on land and floating on water.”
John Bischoff, ‘Software as Sculpture,’ 1991.
A transition from the Moog promo images to their contemporaneous Buchla counterparts can be read as a displacement of the performer—one hand at the keyboard and another at the controls—to a more decentralised than strictly disembodied hand at the controls operating within a dynamic system or a somewhat unpredictable environment, within which the musician is one element amongst many, rather than the image of individual and linear causality.