Musicolour.art

The better you play, the more colorful it gets. The left bar shows how good your music sounds. Supports MIDI devices such as electric keyboards

—

This work represents a digitally inspired re-interpretation of Gordon Pask’s 1953 Musicolour machine. Pask was fascinated by the concept of conversation. Specifically, the conversation between humans and machines that was starting to emerge around the time when the potential of the computer had begun to be felt by those building it. Cybernetics can be perhaps be described as an open club of those who, almost 80 years ago, could see the future take an almost certain shape, assuming some universal insights about systems. Pask branched Cybernetics into his own theory, called Conversation Theory. In doing so, he understood feedback as a very special property of intelligent systems, and the concept of intelligence at large.