Considering the Composer’s Black Box: A Conversation with Ted Gordon

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but instead, it must be transformed from one form to another. One could posit a similar theory to apply to technological development. A great amount of literature has been produced expressing concern regarding the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the music world. Specifically, what the rapidly developing technology may mean for human composers, performers, and listeners. And while it may be tempting to view these concerns as a novelty, in reality, they strike at a core issue that has been around for far longer, that of musical agency; of how much power and control the artist retains or cedes to their instrument. As Ted Gordon, Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York, outlines in his fascinating book, The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America (University of California, 2025), these concerns date back to at least the emergence of synthesizers in the 1960s.

Most histories of the synthesizer follow a standard narrative of two parallel races to create the first usable modern synthesizer. One was the East Coast school, one led by Robert Moog, which focused on hardwired keyboards and a system that would seem more familiar to those who play more traditional Western instruments. The other, Don Buchla West Coast school, was far more experimental, relying on artists finding their own pathways through the use of patches.  The Composer’s Black Box goes beyond the switches, knobs, and oversimplified histories to reflect the deeper ideological diversity inherent in the thoughts that came about because of these new tools and how they related to the artist. Key to this is the view of the synthesizer as a metaphorical “black box,” a device for which the inner workings are left unknown.

The instruments’ inherent mystery leads to wildly divergent views on both their purpose and capabilities, undermining the narrative of two united forces of electronic creation. In reflecting this breadth of perspectives, Gordon focuses on five particular figures – Morton Subotnick, Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, and Sun Ra. Buchla first designed his instruments for composers Subotnick and Ramon Sender at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Subotnick’s request was specifically for a music easel, a tool through which composers could freely “paint” the sounds in their head with no concern for technical limitations. And while Buchla would ultimately make an instrument called the Music Easel, it was clear that the idealized goals of the composer were not practically feasible. There were too many variables and open questions for such to occur. At the opposite end, Sun Ra was the first to play a prototype MiniMoog. Both ideologically – he viewed the instrument as creating a world not of individualistic expression but of “harmonic brotherhoods” – and sonically, the man from Saturn rocketed the instrument to a space far more experimental than its creator could have envisioned.

The Composer’s Black Box is a compelling look at both the many questions that arose when synthesizers emerged and how those same inquiries – or dreams of a different form of artistic creation – continue today. A thoroughly researched work, the book is also highly readable despite its focus on a subject that could easily become overly technical. On February 4, 2026, as part of kicking off its annual MIXOLOGY series, Gordon will be at Roulette Intermedium as part of a panel discussion with bassist Luke Stewart and electronic musicians Marcia Bassett and Keith Fullerton Whitman to discuss his book. Following the discussion and a Q&A session, he will also perform on the Buchla Music Easel, joined by his panelists. We sat down with Gordon before the Roulette date to get a deeper look into The Composer’s Black Box.

PostGenre: What was your process for selecting the five artists to focus on in the book?

Ted Gordon: The book originally came about through an earlier dissertation project I had done about the San Francisco Tape Music Center. I began researching for that dissertation in 2014 and 2015. For it, I wanted to create an institutional history of the Center and follow all the different people who came in and out of the Center. I felt that most research focused a bit too much on what was legible in the world of institutional composition. It focused on composed works that could be seen as an encapsulation of the composer’s ideas at the time and how to preserve and reproduce them in the future.

While I researched at the Tape Music Center, I realized that there was a lot more going on ideologically and more radically than just certain sounds and how they can be organized in a composition. The people at the center were thinking about all the different dimensions of music beyond the sonic and the compositional. For instance, the social dimension of Ramón Sender’s work and the technical aspects, or [Don] Buchla’s work.

I was especially fascinated by Buchla’s instruments. The Composer’s Black Box started with Buchla and a tension I noticed between the way he talked about his instruments and the way Morton Subotnick talked about Buchla’s instruments. That difference is what became the kernel of this book project about cybernetics, in a broader sense, across America in the same time period.

PG: You get into it in the book, but what was that tension?

TG: Subotnick saw synthesizers as a composer’s black box; a new instrument that could perfectly articulate internal subjective music. They would unleash internal creativity. At the time, of course, creating electronic music was difficult. It is still difficult, but it was much more so back then. It also took much more time to create electronic music because it was asynchronous; the music had to be taped, cut, and spliced. I was fascinated by the fact that Subotnick, without any technical knowledge, had a powerful fantasy of a new instrument that could perfectly articulate what was inside him through electronic technology and through cybernetic technology.

But that was in tension with what Buchla actually made, which is a system of interconnected modules that are extremely difficult to control as a human. You need to do a kind of dance of agency with it, going back and forth. It took Buchla thirteen months to make his first work with the Buchla Easel. There was definitely a learning curve to using the instrument.

On the other hand, I was also very interested in the fact that, at the same time Buchla was making the Easel for Morton Subotnick, he was also making systems for all kinds of people who wouldn’t identify themselves as composers but were interested in music. Another of his very early systems was made for a commune, the Anonymous Artists of America. He also made systems for [author] Ken Kesey. Buchla was interested in a broader musicality, but in a way that stands apart from Subbotnick’s vision.

PG: And that tension served as the origins for the book.

TG: That’s where I started the book. I was thinking about this period in time – 1964 through the 1970s. There’s so much mythology surrounding this period, as this primordial era of what we now call synthesizers. The discourse, at least as I read it from the 1980s onward, has generally been that during this time period, there were two patriarchs of synthesizers – Buchla and [Robert] Moog- and eventually made the same thing, a voltage-controlled modular synthesizer. The biggest difference under this narrative between the two is that Buchla was experimental, and Moog was oriented towards keyboard musicians.

As a historian, I have always been wary of that perspective. Not only because of the reification of these ideas of patriarchy, but also those of the lone genius inventor, and the replication of the technology in two separate places. It struck me that what Buchla and Moog did was completely separate and different from each other. I don’t think Moog really had an idea about what his instruments could be used for.

PG: Like Sun Ra.

TG: I had heard recordings of Sun Ra playing the Minimoog and knew that he was the first musician to play that instrument. But nothing had been written about that fact in either academic writing or journalism. There’s very little research and writing about Sun Ra and the Minimoog.

PG: Why do you feel that aspect of Sun Ra’s work is not more discussed? It seems important.

TG: There are a few reasons. One is anti-Black racism and discrimination. Another is that he used the Minimoog Model B prototype for a very short period of time. He used it from late 1970 to early 1972. That period of his work was largely overshadowed by his use of many other electronic musical instruments, like the eventual Minimoog Model D, then Farfisa organs, and later, the Crumar polyphonic synthesizer. By the 1980s, he used a Yamaha DX7.

But while he used the Minimoog Model B for only a very short while, I think that period of time was a crucial one. The way that he used the instrument then was unique compared to the other electronic keyboard instruments he used because the Model B was a prototype and not as reliable as the other instruments. He also used the Minimoog in a way that was totally not how people imagine people using Moog synthesizers. When people imagine Moog synthesizers, they often think of the paradigmatic example Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach (Columbia Masterworks, 1968). Which is to say complete masterful control of the instrument, laying it down track by track to create these amazing sonic masterpieces of these Bach masterworks. Sun Ra was doing something totally different with the instrument.

PG: Which stands in significant contrast to Subotnick’s perspective as well.

TG: With the book, I imagined there being two poles. The first would be the pole of Subotnick, imagining that with these new instruments could perfectly articulate himself and make compositions in a seamless way. The other pole would be Sun Ra, who, after reading his poetry and listening to his interviews from that period, I knew had the exact opposite ideology in mind or philosophy. He thought that these instruments would not articulate something legible within himself, but something profoundly illegible and irreducible. Something abstract and infinite.

And I saw the black box as perfectly articulating the self as a bounded subject that’s knowable and owned and by the self to moving towards the black box as perfectly or imperfectly articulating an internal self that is profoundly opaque, unknowable, and illegible yet doing it anyway. That’s how I chose the first and last chapters of the book.

PG: As far as the concept of the black box as applied to synthesizers, do you feel that element of mystery is part of why, early on, so many musicians were up in arms about the rise of electronic instruments? Perhaps if they more fully understood the instruments themselves, they would have been more receptive to their initial usage?

TG: I don’t know if the black box element is necessarily a problem. Since the emergence of electricity as a topic of scientific conversation in Western discourse, people have been concerned or interested in the question of how it will relate to humans. In the Nineteenth Century, the concern was mostly a question of how it related to physical labor. Large corporations mostly tried to figure out how to leverage these new technologies to replace human labor. But going into the electronic era in the Twentieth Century, it became more of a question of electricity’s impact on the intellectual, creative, or now even with AI, cognitive labor.

That discourse is replicated every decade into the 1960s where it becomes easy to understand that the technology might replace musicians. But what’s interesting is not only the thought that the instrument could replace the musician, but that it would replace the composer as well. That is to say that the instrument, because it was in some sense, self-governing or self-operating, would replace something that the composer used to do.

PG: Which leads to a term you use, “ex-composition.”

TG: My term is less about the question of labor but instead about that of agency. It is about the question of consciousness and sensation in reaction to sensory phenomena in the world, or the reaction and interaction with sensory phenomena.I felt I needed to come up with this new term because there’s a huge discourse about post-humanism in the humanities. It’s been a huge topic of discussion since the 1990s and has a very robust scholarly discussion. I think it would be easy to say these composers’ black boxes are allowing the human activity of composition to become totally imbricated with these thinking machines, these cybernetic technologies. And in a sense, that was the fantasy that Subotnick had; that the black box would be an extension of your mind. It would extend the power of your mind to imagine sounds out loud.

But as anybody who’s ever played these instruments has experienced, there’s always a friction. The instrument never seamlessly serves as an extension of your mind. And that friction or tension is generative. It produces a lot of material, because you need to keep trying to get to your vision.

But the reason I turned to the term “ex-composition” was because I was reading all this discourse about psychedelics in the 1960s, when Buchla was working. Richard Alpert, you know, later known as Ram Dass, had been on the original team at Harvard doing research into psychedelics. He was really into the term ecstasis. The word is related to ecstasy but  goes back etymologically to its Greek roots and reflects the idea of being  able to stand outside of the self or beside oneself. He used that term to describe the psychedelic experience.

And it struck me that the concept is similar to what happens when a person uses or interacts with one of these early black box musical technologies. Agency is distributed. It’s not like the machine takes over and you just set the instrument and it runs. There’s an interaction that is emergent. There’s a co-production that happens in real time. It’s difficult to understand because of the complexity of the connections between humans and instruments. Synthesizers are not exactly computers. They’re not exactly musical instruments. They sit somewhere uncomfortably between those two things. But I think that creates a lot of possibilities for new kinds of interaction between humans and instruments. It makes a lot of amazing things happen. Fortunately, we can record those things and listen back even fifty years later to those interactions and think about them.

PG: Do you feel that the relationship between human and instrument has changed over those last fifty years or, in some cases, even longer, as synthesizers have become more mainstream and commonly used?

TG: I mean, the term black box is interesting because different cyberneticians interested in self-governing systems thought about it differently. For someone like Norbert Wiener, a black box was always something as yet unanalyzed. The implication is that the black box is always going to be ultimately analyzable and understandable. It is on the way to becoming what he would call a white box, something transparent and for which you understand the inputs and outputs and the behaviors in between. For others, like Ross Ashby, the black box was more fundamentally and epistemologically opaque. To him, it didn’t really matter whether you could understand the internal workings because all he cared about was behavior.

And we have moved into what was once a black box. Buchla’s system was conceptualized like an analog electronic computer. Buchla was always trying to make those computational systems more reliable, even as they could produce chaotic, nonlinear, and dynamical systems within them. As early as the 1970s, Buchla was incorporating minicomputers, microcomputers, and programming languages into his instruments. And by the 1980s, they were basically complex computers. Of course, we also saw the rise of computer music with various languages and large centers in that decade. And the development of MAX/MSP brought the ability to replicate modular functionality and also create stochastic, chaotic, complex, non-linear systems in a MAX patch.

The level of opacity of the black box does vary and fluctuate over time.But what I think has not gone away is the subjective experience of a human musician interacting with these instruments, either for the first time or even for the millionth time, and not fully knowing what the instrument will do. That aspect hasn’t really gone away. If anything, because of the huge explosion of the Eurorack format for hardware synthesizers – for which manufacturers have no standards in terms of labeling what their instruments do – over the last twenty years, I think that experience is more common than ever. You need to learn an entirely new environment every time you use a new module or something. You can even think about it as a black box approach to an instrument.

PG: Of course, one could argue there is also sometimes a black box element to acoustic instrument performance as well.

TG: There are definitely musicians who approach acoustic instruments as if they were black boxes, through their use of extended technique and modulation and augmentation of their instruments, both in real time and electronically. But that approach, I would say, is only intellectually possible because of this technoscientific phenomenon of cybernetics and information theory that happened in the 1960s. I think there’s a direct line from that phenomenon to that kind of approach to acoustic instruments as well.

PG: Of course, Artificial Intelligence also comes out of that research into cybernetics. But, compared to the synthesizer, even further removed the human from the music-making process. And it seems that if you listen to AI music today, there is often a coldness or eeriness to it, perhaps due to the even further removed role of humans.

TG: Yes, machine learning, generative AI, all of that comes out of the same technoscientific milieu as information theory and cybernetics in the 1940s and 50s. There were plenty of composers and technologists –  who aren’t in this book – who were into that in the 1950s and 60s. If you listen to Lejaren Hiller’s ‘Illiac Suite’ (1957) or other computer-generated compositions, they were created with machine intelligence, if you want to call it that.

There was an elaborate set of rules, and the computer would generate a random set of notes or chords and, through algorithms, filter those randomly generated values and spit out a score. And people had the same criticism of those scores back then, as you mentioned, that there was something machinic. Something inhuman. Some ineffable element that was missing in the music. But, I don’t know. Some people said the same thing about [Morton Subotnick’s] Silver Apples of the Moon (Nonesuch, 1967). I think maybe some of it may simply be the sonic dimension of the inharmonic sounds and the very strange sounds produced by these electronic instruments, because they have no corollary in acoustic instrumentation.

But I feel like that for the people I wrote about in The Composer’s Black Box, the question of what is human was an important question that they negotiated, renegotiated, and reevaluated constantly. There wasn’t some static image of what a human was. They all knew that the concept of the human was changing from the 1960s onward. And we are seeing that happen at a rapidly advancing pace today. I think it’s important when approaching that discourse of human versus machine to think very carefully about what we mean when we say humans. And that especially comes out in the chapter about Sun Ra, though it is also a topic that has been discussed at length and masterfully by scholars like Alexander Weheliye and many others.

PG: In between the poles of Subotnick and Sun Ra, you incorporate a few other composers to analyze as well. One is Alvin Lucier.

TG: I chose Lucier because I had long been wary of those easy reads of works like Music for Solo Performer, which is the piece where he put Electroencephalography electrodes on his head and amplified the signals from it to create sound waves with speaker cones that would resonate percussion instruments. It’s very easy to read that piece and think you are listening to the sound of a brainwave or something. However, when I looked at his archive, which had been recently made available at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, I saw several of his sketches and works that had been later withdrawn from his catalog. It struck me that he was also grappling with the ambiguity of what these new electronic technologies could do and would do for someone who wanted to make music. Another middle ground between those two poles of Subotnick and Sun Ra.

PG: Of course, the idea of controlling musical instruments with your mind increasingly seems to be a scientific reality on the near horizon.

TG: Right. Direct cognitive control of electronic systems is an idea that has been around for a very long time. That is the origin of Alvin Lucier’s “Music for Solo Performer.” For it, the researcher borrowed electroencephalogram equipment from Edmond Dewan, who had been working on a project that would do two things.

One was a system that would allow a helicopter pilot or an airplane pilot to eject themselves, using only the power of their thoughts, from an airplane if they were physically incapacitated. It would scan the brain in a certain place, and if brainwave activity met a certain criteria, it would activate the circuit that would eject the pilot from the airplane.

The other system Dewan was working on was a generalized electronic and cognitive model of the mind using different frequency domains. He imagined that cognition could be generalized and mapped to different frequency components in different places of the mind, which would correspond to different thought processes and physical processes. That’s the basic premise of neuroscience, especially cognitive science.

So, the promises of these technologies are old. They’re long-lived fantasies and ideas. Pauline Oliveros, for one, very intentionally tried to leverage those ideas to make what she developed and called the AUMI, the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument. She would take biometrics from retinal eye movements and use them to control electronic instruments.

PG: Is that how Pauline Oliveros became part of the book?

TG: Well, she became a part of the book more because I saw her as occupying a middle ground between the two poles of Subotnick and Sun Ra. Especially with her thoughts about the fluidity and ability of the self to be transformed through encounters with technology. I thought that would be a nice middle point between Subotnick and Ra.

But, back to cognitive control of musical instruments, there are at least two paths that the technology can follow. One is the vulgar Elon Musk style based on a very simplistic idea that we’ll get a brain implant which will allow us to seamlessly integrate ourselves with technology. The Neuralink is a generalization of that promise. That approach leaves up in the air  how the technology will actually be operationalized.

The other path is one for which the AUMI is a good example. The technology not only uses electronic biometric signals to control something but also as part of a cybernetic, circuit; a network of circuits that are self-controlling, self-governing, involve feedback – both positive and negative. They have all kinds of cybernetic flows of signal agency that can create something bigger or more interesting than just direct actuation of a discrete thing, circuit, or action.

There are many different ways to operationalize these very broad ideas of our brain as an electrical system. We can observe those electrical signals, turn them into electronic information, have that information be transmitted to another domain, and then have that information control some elements in that other domain. That’s a very general way of thinking about human bodies, brains, and the outside world. However,the way it is operationalized is very crucial. It’s very important for musicians to think very carefully about that and not get sucked up in the generalized, unspecified promises that big corporations want to make to us.

PG: As a musician, do you feel your research for the book has shaped your own performance in some material way?

TG:Well, to be honest, my performance practice with Buchla instruments emerged from the book, not vice versa. Before I started researching Buchla, I had no experience with electronic musical instruments. But I knew that if I wanted to write about and understand the human-instrument interaction, I had to spend a lot of time with the instrument and live with one. So I saved up to buy a Buchla Music Easel. As a graduate student, I received stipend checks a couple of times a year. I foolishly spent an entire stipend check on a Buchla Music Easel. I had to eat oatmeal and lentils for three months because of it.

However, that was the origin of my own creative career or musical career with electronic musical instruments. And my performance has definitely evolved and changed as I have done more research on and spent more time with the instruments. But one of the things that keeps performance interesting is that every time I power on the Buchla instrument, I honestly never fully know what will come out of it. For a lot of people, that’s a huge red flag. That’s also why Buchla instruments do not show up on commercially released music. The most famous thing ever recorded with a Buchla is probably the theme song to Reading Rainbow from the 1980s. However, generally, they can’t perform composed music reliably. You can’t put a score in front of the instrument and set out to produce those set pitches and exact rhythms precisely.

But what they can do is allow people to have a radical exploration of what is possible between human and instrument. It also allows for a renegotiation in a sensory dimension. It’s not a question of getting what you want with these instruments. It’s a question of exploring what happens when you interact with the instrument in real time. Because of that, most of my own musical encounters with the instrument are improvised and pretty ephemeral.

PG: Does that make collaboration with other musicians, for instance, your upcoming performance at Roulette, more difficult?

TG: In a sense, it actually makes collaboration easier because my own approach to the instrument is almost strictly improvisatory. That makes collaborating great and fun because not only am I improvising with my instrument, and my instrument is improvising with me. The instrument also forces you to listen very attentively. It forces you to pay very close attention to your body, your bodily movements, and what sonic effects they have in real time. I think that call to attention that these black box instruments necessitates a keen sense of listening and awareness, and precision at all times when you’re performing. So for me, it makes collaborations much richer. In fact, I rarely do solo performances.

And deeper communication does form the more you work with someone. Marcia Bassett and I have been playing together with the same instrument, or similar instruments, for five or six years now. I think we have come to an understanding of each other’s vocabularies. We often also use other instruments besides the Buchla boxes, but processed through the Buchla in some way or another. So, our communication  has become richer over time, even while the black box element of surprise still remains.

‘The Composer’s Black Box’ is out now on University of California Press. It can be purchased directly from the publisher. Ted Gordon’s performance as part of the annual Mixology Festival will take place at Roulette on February 4, 2026. More information is available on Roulette’s website. You can learn more about Ted Gordon on his website.