I came across Gordon Pask’s Musicolour when scanning over a write up of a talk held at the IxDA Interaction 08 conference organized by the Savannah College of Art and Design. The area discussed addressed the incorporation and utilization of boredom in installation based environments. Gordon Pask specifically was interested in exploring the psychological conditions revolving around learning and conversation. Diving into cybernetics, he developed the Musicolour machine which explored synesthesia, the interaction of music and light. Here is a basic synopsis of how the machine works:

“The work held a “conversation” with the performer. The musician would respond to visual queues, the machine in turn would build an understanding of what the musician was playing, and, when it detects that the musician is repeating a same sequence too often, the system would “get bored” and challenge the musician to find new ways to re-engage the system.”

This work is one of the first exploring and even perhaps capitalizing on the human induced phenomena of boredom and its placement in architectural settings. New theories on architecture’s responsibility to its occupants held that new technological advancements could permit structures to be more perceptive to inhabitant’s needs. There has definitely been a drive to make devices more adept at sensing and accommodating user’s needs, but I was surprised to find this theory in architecture’s field.

Oh yeah, Pask built his machine in 1954.