Filtering as Cultural Technique

Max/MSP, Supercollider, CSound, and other computer music languages operate on recorded or synthesized musical morphemes (hooks, beats, riffs, breaks and so on) by connecting the continuous, time-variable samples of vinyl and tape to discrete, quantized and synchronized digital samples, the unit of time-series signal processing computers. In other words, they link musical and operative media into a single creative tool, becoming musical incarnations of a vision of translatable communication in which flows can be infinitely converted, scaled, and repurposed.

Contemporary AI audio generative tools extend the range of manipulation of past data already core to digital signal processing routines. Between projects dedicated to explaining these new manipulations (such as DARPA's Explainable AI public-private partnership) and projects dedicated to critically assessing its linguistic and material infrastructures (from Jed Dobson's recent work on GPUs or Leif Weatherby's discussion of language machines to Pamela McCorduck or Joseph Weizenbaum's own concerns regarding artificial intelligence), an intermediate layer of mediation grounded in diagrammatic and mathematical thinking is here considered beyond its technical culture as an epistemic object: the electrical filter and its attendant metaphorical reaches.

This study interrogates this process of making meaning and creating within operations. It considers an uncanny and under-explored parallel between Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's definition of communication as "all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another" (1948, 3) with Lawrence Rabiner's 1980 remark that "if you think about it, everything is a filter." What, exactly, is the electrical filter? By historicizing the underlying logics which propelled the filter from material oddity at the beginning of the 20th century to a master concept of signal processing at the beginning of the 21st, this study clarifies the socio-epistemic process by which advances in hardware and software formed a feedback loop which increasingly seems to accelerate the production and consumption of information, from cultural to strategic.

Approach

This study is primarily historical. Working from foundational critiques of signals engineering as the shifting overlaps of socio-political forces and bodies (as found in some of the work of e.g. Mara Mills, Kirsten Haring or Lisa Nakamura), it investigates the way that a logic of "divide and conquer" was made pervasive across conceptualizations of modularity, problem solving, communication, control, and synthesis in the twentieth century. This process took many paths: educational, technical, material, and artistic, and therefore this study historicizes filtering in an interdisciplinary manner which considers political-economic hierarchies between code, circuitry, texts, performance or visual arts, and music. It considers the filter as both a cultural technique and an assemblage in the making of accelerating communication societies, where the very transition of information through filtering layers has been commodified.

Methods

More specifically, this history of the electronic filter as a core building block of synthesis widely construed is considered alongside various sites: archives of technical enterprises, such as Bell Laboratories, Western Electric, IBM, Philips, the Burr-Brown Corporation... Archival materials are considered alongside the publication, dissemination, and teaching of standard textbooks which sought to simplify heavily theoretical design operations into a bureaucracy of signal manipulation which could serve public and private enterprises. Here creative uses are evaluated as crystallization of fringe perspectives around these pragmatic uses as instances of what could happen when signal processing is considered alongside varying political-economic objectives. Interviews with artists, designers, and creatives are contrasted with quantitative analyses of the way filters became a ubiquitous topic of technical experts, while their language of diagrams and equations became artistic objects.

Working bibliography

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