Reclaiming Technology

Abstract

In the transition from World War II to the Cold War, military innovations were domesticated and repurposed for civilian, scientific, and cultural advancement. Information theory is one such discourse—birthed from Shannon’s wartime cryptography work at Bell Labs—that burgeoned outward in a series of connected, interdisciplinary spirals in the 1950s. The WDR studio was a locale where wartime “technology” (defined broadly to include ideas) was reclaimed for cultural gain. After the initial experiments of the early 1950s, composers found themselves hemmed in by technological limits and unhappy with the serial, pointillist music they had so far made. Enter Meyer-Eppler, a former Nazi communications researcher turned phonetics scientist and electronic music expert, whose information-theoretic teachings helped composers solve their problems in several ways: to understand when their music had been too information dense; to incorporate gestures, approximations, and perceptible shapes; and to circumvent the technological limitations of the studio. The core concepts of information theory—perception, sampling and continuity, and probability—became the foundation for much mid-1950’s music from a range of composers in the studio and beyond. Working cooperatively, scientists, technicians, and composers participated in a process of culturally reclaiming information theory from its wartime origin, making it the conceptual foundation for 1950’s avant-garde music.