When I first described this project with synthesizers, I gave it the title ‘Synthesis’. I now realise that was a placeholder. There was a word missing. ‘Expanded Synthesis’ has the benefit of being more descriptive, more philosophical, and more poetic.
My work with synthesizers is about expanding the functioning of synth modules. I am expanding control voltages by plugging them in to kinetic sculptures, drawing machines and the pulses of a laser. I am expanding the idea of certain modules to produce sculptures and other installation elements that are analogous to the module’s functioning. This is expanded synthesis in a descriptive sense.
I am also thinking about how we might expand the analogical and metaphorical reach of the synthesizer. This relates to its philosophical and poetic dimensions, and to science.
Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
If you type ‘expanded synthesis’ into your search engine it will treat it as a synonym for ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’ (EES) an idea from evolutionary biology that suggests that we need to move beyond the gene-centric view of evolution, (i.e. the modern synthesis). Proponents of EES argue that there are many factors, beyond the fixing of genetic mutations, that are important to evolution.
One such factor is niche construction; critters changing their environment in a way that benefits them and their offspring. The beaver dam is as an example of this. The dam alters the beaver’s immediate environment in many ways that are beneficial to the beaver. A beaver can inherit a dam from its parents. This heritable alteration to the environment increases the fitness of the beaver’s progeny.
Other factors include how an organism responds to cues from its environment as it develops (developmental plasticity) and how it adapts to environmental or ecological change during its lifetime (phenotypic plasticity). These forms of plasticity can be mediated by changes in how genes are expressed. These changes in gene expression can themselves be passed on to the next generation through epigenetic markers. Proponents of the EES suggest that changes in gene expression can later lead to changes in the genes themselves.
There are several other factors cited by EES advocates, but I’ll just mention one because of its relevance to sound synthesis; modularity. This term can be used to describe modular relationships both within and between organisms. Symbiosis is a form of modularity. When two free living organisms are patched together and form a third entity, like the fungus and algae that make up a lichen, this goes beyond the Mendelian inheritance described in the modern synthesis, (or at least this is what proponents of the EES argue).
I like the poetic and philosophical resonance between ‘expanded synthesis’ and ‘extended synthesis’ because it is suggestive of generative and organismic approaches to patching a synthesizer. By working in this way, we can create patches that are analogous to living entities. These analogies could be quite close if the cycles of the synthesizer have some correspondence to the cycles and rhythms of life such as breath, heart rate, and other metabolic cycles. Patching feedback in various forms can make these analogies stronger.
However, I’m also aware that there is a debate among biologists as to whether an extended synthesis is really required. In this video philosopher and biologist Johannes Jaeger offers a nuanced perspective. He argues that we need to move beyond the gene-centrism of the modern synthesis and that it is important to study all the factors that proponents of the EES cite, but we simply don’t need a new synthesis. The main objection is to ‘synthesis’ as a unifying impulse. Jaeger argues that the factors that influence evolution beyond what is described in the modern synthesis don’t lend themselves to the creation of a unified theory.
I see this argument as being analogous to critiques of physicist’s attempts to come up with Grand Unified Theory (GUT). Professor of physics and astronomy Marcelo Gleiser is one such critic of GUT. He describes the universe as ‘gloriously messy’ and associates attempts to unify with monotheistic belief systems.
Local Messiness
I like the idea that such unifying theories are not possible, that there are local specificities that will always escape such attempts to unify. It seems obvious to me that there is much glory to be found in the specificities of local messiness.
So where does that leave us in the relation between ‘Expanded Synthesis’ as a title for this project and the argument for an ‘Extended Evolutionary Synthesis’. I reckon the proponents of EES need more synthesizer in their notion of synthesis.
The kind of sound synthesis that might be useful as an analogy for living entities and evolutionary processes isn’t about unifying. It is about creating networks of modulation that produce evolving intensities. When modules feed into and out of each other (cross-modulation) a small adjustment to one parameter can have consequences that cascade through a patch. Similarly, the instabilities inherent in electricity moving through circuits can be heightened by patching the system in certain ways.
While synthesis produces sound by patching together discrete modules, any sense of unity that emerges is dynamic, provisional, and specific to the patch. In this way the patch itself is analogous to a living entity that must be dealt with in its specificity. There is no useful theory of every patch. There are only principles that can help to guide how a particular system might be patched. Even then experimentation is key. The kind of complex patching that is analogous to living systems demands that we patch and listen to find out how the system is responding.
Synthesis in this context is about listening to, or observing, the specificities of the current system and how it is patched, a notion that is perhaps a more useful idea in evolutionary biology than the search for a unifying theory.
The idea that we can use the synthesizer in such a way that it takes on the qualities of a living entity is a common place. See this video from modular synth manufacturer Make Noise on cicadas and feedback as one example. The Lyra-8 Organismic Synthesizer is another example of a synth manufacturer making this connection. Soma Lab tells us that ‘“Organismic” means that LYRA uses some principles that lie in the base of living organisms.’ While details are scant, we can imagine how it might be true. Synthesizers lend themselves to this way of thinking because of the temporal correspondence between life’s rhythms, cycles and feedback loops and the rhythms and cycles and feedback that the synthesizer can produce.
Modulation
Modulation is central to sound synthesis. It might also be a useful concept in thinking about living systems. The kinds of complex modulation that synthesizers make possible can serve as a useful analogy or metaphor for systems in which many factors contribute to producing definable entities, as is the case with the evolution of living critters.
All the additional factors beyond the modern synthesis, such as plasticity, modularity, and niche construction, that proponents of the EES identify, can be thought of as modulators in the evolutionary synthesis that is a living critter. This is synthesis not as a unifying principle but as a set of modulating factors that must be figured out for each living thing. This goes right down to the level of individual clonal cells that share the same DNA but that respond differently to cues from their environment and are producing their own unique form of living synthesis.
Rather than looking for an overarching theory of evolution we can ask questions that get at local messiness that makes life so interesting. For any living entity we might ask, what are the significant modulating factors that shape how the critter is living and how it might evolve? Is it possible to say anything about the relative strengths of each of the sources of modulation?
Is it crazy for an artist to suggest that scientists might look to art for better conceptual models? Yes, it is. I have no illusions about influencing the thinking that evolutionary biologists do. I am more concerned with how I can expand my own thinking by working with sound synthesis to generate concepts, metaphors and analogies to help me understand living processes. These understandings might find their way back into creating sounds with a synthesizer. This kind of conceptual feedback loop is itself analogous to how we might work with feedback in a modular synthesizer.
The Red Queen
Important ideas in evolutionary thought come from Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland, the most famous of which is the Red Queen Hypothesis; the notion that an organism must continually evolve to maintain its place within a given ecosystem. Like the Red Queen organisms must run to stay in the same place. Appropriate metaphors and conceptual models from art can help science to define whole fields of inquiry (as is the case with the Red Queen), or study specific questions related to the local messiness. Synthesizers are a rich and relatively untapped source of analogies, metaphors and conceptual models that might be useful to our understanding of living systems. This is part of the philosophical and poetic dimensions of the title ‘Expanded Synthesis’.
The Thought Synthesizer
Biological entities and synthesizers share a number of more abstract traits. They are both somewhat unpredictable, complex and comprehensible at a certain level of abstraction, and yet there remain profound mysteries and uncertainties in their depths. This comparison needs a lot of unpacking but I’ll leave those details for another time and instead make another more general point.
There are modulation sources and destinations to be found in all the terms of a metaphor or analogy. When we compare biological systems to synthesizers their associated ideas and concepts cross-modulate in ways that can shift our understanding of both fields of practice. Patching concepts between different fields of knowledge like this is a way to practice and play the thought synthesizer:
By assembling modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesiser makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in contact with still other elements beyond sound matter. It unites disparate elements in the material, and transposes the parameters from one formula to another. The synthesiser, with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic judgement: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form and matter, Grund and territory. Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgement; it is like a thought synthesiser functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).
Giles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
