Cybernetics, Art and Creativity

Peter Cariani, a Harvard neuropsychology instructor, presented art as a form of "experiential engineering" that systematically shapes human perception and emotion. He identified three fundamental ways humans engage with sound: ecological listening that orients us in our environment, speech processing that enables communication, and the aesthetic or musical mode that engages our sense of beauty and wonder.

Cariani argued that the arts fulfill deep informational preferences by creating experiences of emotion, beauty, and wonder that cannot be reduced to purely functional or communicative purposes. His framework connected cybernetic principles of information processing and feedback to the creation and appreciation of art, suggesting that artistic practice involves the same fundamental dynamics of signal, noise, and meaning that Wiener identified in his theory of communication.